Today's Military

William Deresiewicz has written an essay, "Solitude and Leadership", that is taught at West Point. It's possible that he may really know something about the military that is not general knowledge. But all you need to appreciate his essay, "An Empty Regard", in today's NY Times is general knowledge and an awareness of how this nation treats its military in the 21st century, i.e., just about every soldier has become a 'hero' and every general the smartest military man that has come down the pike. Deresiewicz does a good job of explaining how we came to this position and questioning why. His final paragraph is worth repeating:

“America needs heroes,” it is sometimes said, a phrase that’s often uttered in a wistful tone, almost cooingly, as if we were talking about a lonely child. But do we really “need heroes”? We need leaders, who marshal us to the muddle. We need role models, who show us how to deal with it. But what we really need are citizens, who refuse to infantilize themselves with talk of heroes and put their shoulders to the public wheel instead. The political scientist Jonathan Weiler sees the cult of the uniform as a kind of citizenship-by-proxy. Soldiers and cops and firefighters, he argues, embody a notion of public service to which the rest of us are now no more than spectators. What we really need, in other words, is a swift kick in the pants.