Given the hostility that some on his side have taken to displaying against the military these days, it was good to read the words of liberal blogger, New York Times guest columnist and Army brat Robert Wright today (“Times Select,” i.e., pay subscription only – feh). Wright makes a interesting admission:
The part of San Francisco I lived in was the Presidio, which was then a military base. I was 12, and my father was an Army officer. I remember my family once driving toward the Presidio’s Lombard Street gate past tens of thousands of protesters who seemed to think my father was part of a very bad outfit.
I was sure they were wrong, and I still am. In fact, the whole, larger stereotype — that the military is a right-wing institution, best viewed with skepticism if not cynicism by the left — is way off. Growing up in, or at least amid, the Army helped make me a liberal — not because I reacted against my environment, but because I absorbed its values. If all of America were more like the Army, it would be a better country.
People think of the Army as hierarchical, but compared with the private sector it’s a bastion of egalitarianism.
Yes, the Army’s “blue-collar workers” — privates, corporals, sergeants — defer to its “white-collar workers,” the officers. That happens in corporations, too. But on an Army base you don’t send the white-collar kids to good public schools and the blue-collar kids to bad public schools.
I had friends from the Army’s biggest minority constituencies, blacks and Hispanics. Among soldiers, too, exposure to diversity, along with the practical need to live with it, could be benign. My father grew up in Texas in the 1920s, amid common use of the n-word, and I never heard him use it.
Which brings us to social mobility. My father was the son of a sharecropper, and he dropped out of high school after both of his parents and most of his siblings had died of various diseases. He lacked the polish to impress, say, a Morgan Stanley recruiter, but during World War II, the Army gave him a chance.
That meant better health care than his parents had gotten, thanks to socialized medicine.
I will leave it to the better qualified to sing the paeans of the military’s socialized medical scheme – my own experience has been marked by some pretty large excursions around an otherwise acceptable mean – but it’s interesting to analyze the other things that Wright lables as liberal military values.
First, he points out that the children of officers and enlisted attend the same schools, which is true as far as his experience may have been – schools on base – but is not necessarily as true for those living off base. Higher paid executives – officers, in this case – are probably more likely to live in more expensive neighborhoods which have higher local property taxes. These taxes, along with state general education funds, lottery proceeds (if any) and federal augments fuel the school systems. Much of the federal largesse is compensatorily targeted at otherwise disfavored school districts: Earlier this decade, California got approximately $2 billion in Title I money, mostly for poor and disadvantaged students.
Since each state’s per pupil spending is uniform within school districts (although it can vary across school districts within states due to locality taxes) the differences in educational experience – between “good” schools and “bad” ones inside districts cannot be plausibly blamed on state spending. Nevertheless, the usual progressive solution is to throw money at place more resources against the problem – essentially hoping that by paying more for the same input, output quality might rise. Many on the right think that absent fundamental reform, this would instead be a waste of resources if not actually counter-productive.
A study quoted here actually shows an inverse relationship between per pupil spending and school performance and goes on to cite a leading education economist, Stanford University Prof. Eric Hanushek, who says that, “there is little systematic relationship between school resources and student performance.” The point, says Hanushek, is that “how money is spent is much more important than how much is spent.” In fact, the if per pupil funding were the sine qua non of educational excellence, then the District of Columbia – which spends nearly twice the national average on their students – would be producing world beaters.
Which may be true, but I haven’t heard it said.
The principal differentiation between good students (and good schools) and the bad is parents who care about their childrens’ educations. Until government can find a way to make them care, everyone already knows what real educational reform will entail: School choice and performance pay linked to teacher standards. But both of these are anathema to the teachers’ unions – steadfast soldiers in the progressive ranks – and so they’ll go un-tested while we enforce the statist vision of thoroughgoing and pervasive mediocrity.
It’s also strange to hear a liberal adulate the military notion of diversity, since so much of what passes for progressive thought on race these days seems mired within the toxic swamps of identity politics and social preferences – an environment decidedly offensive to the military’s vision of a color-blind meritocracy that celebrates diversity with the ranks of an undifferentiated whole: Soldiers may be black, or white or brown, but they are all of them green.
The military does offer a degree of social mobility, but I would argue that the difference is in degree but not kind to American society as a whole: I suppose that you could label as a safety net the fact that each of us is paid according to the work that we perform, without regard to gender, race or creed. But our pay system is also ruthlessly performance-based – it’s always up or out – and if we have at each stage a comfortable financial floor, it’s also true that the ceiling hangs quite a bit lower over our heads than it does in the corporate world. I kind of like the fact that an innovator, like Google’s Larry Page, can be worth upwards of $16 billion by the age of 33 – our culture rewards success, and success rewards us right back.
A respect for individual rights, a contempt for interest groups with their divisiveness, a parsimonious government, a color-blind society, the celebration of success: These are all things that we once embraced as fundamental American values – classical liberal values – and that the military embraces still. If Wright is rediscovering virtue in a place that stubbornly refused to shift from it, he can scarcely blame conservativism for having moved the measuring stick.
But if Wright’s curious embrace of the military’s “liberal” culture shocks the reader up front, he will be nodding with familiarity at the vitriol at the close:
As a reward for his devotion (to his soldiers), General Shinseki was disparaged by Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Rumsfeld wanted to show how cheap war can be, and now our soldiers are paying the price. I wish some people on the left had a deeper respect for the military, but lately the left isn’t where the most consequential disrespect has come from.
The crowning indignity was Abu Ghraib, an outrage that was initiated by civilians high in the Bush administration and has stained the U.S. military’s hard-earned honor, strengthening stereotypes that I know are wrong.
It all comes back to partisan politics again, and this time the military plays the foil: Neo-con boogeymen, and the bloody sheet of Abu Ghraib. Strategic misjudgements made by dedicated public servants are not mistakes revealed in hindsight, but instead are wilfull demonstrations of moral blindness. And if that were not enough, the contemptible actions of a few mouth breathing examples of uniformed moral turpitude were not simply the result of a bad apples dramatically souring an entire barrel, but actually policy initiatives dictated by shadowy “administration civilians.”
How can one simultaneously believe both things? It’s easy: You must only believe that you are on the side of angels, while your political opposition embodies pure evil.
Pity for Mr. Wright. He was so close.
The US Army will never forgive GEN Shinseki… not for anything so minor as politics or such.
Goodness no. We’ll never forgive him for foisting this @$#@$ stupid beret off on us all.
Brilliant. ‘scuse my military venacular but I believe Mr. Wright had just had his a$$ handed to him.
As for GEN Shinseki, he was/is a great soldier and an outstanding officer. And he was right. But that is a different story. The beret thing is argueable particularly when you can’t get everyone to wear it without looking like they have a cow flap on their head.
I, being me, will take two different points from this read:
The point, says Hanushek, is that ?
I, being me, will take two different points from this read:
The point, says Hanushek, is that “how money is spent is much more important than how much is spent.”
The same might be said about healthcare.
“It’s easy: You must only believe that you are on the side of angels, while your political opposition embodies pure evil.”
To which I can only add a resounding “Amen, brother!”
Uch – My eyes just glazed over about half way through… The California school system failed us big time. I really don’t care anymore about the parents or teachers. We were left out to dry and had to first, put the kids in private school where your checkbook talked and then, move all the way across the country where things were relatively normal. If you don’t get that by now Lex, you never will.
Public schools are wrecked. Why, and by who, doesn’t matter to me. Not anymore. I convinced my daughter and son-in-law to send my grandson to private school. A very good, very tough private school. He’ll be ready to graduate high school by the time he finishes 9th grade. He is being challenged at every turn, and this school, unlike public school, says “yes, you can learn this, no, we won’t accept that you are just 12 years old, and we will shove material at you at a rate commensurate with your ability to grasp it.”
And yes, my wife and I help. Both financially, and with homework, as he is schooled 3 days a week, and homeschooled two days, with homework for the weekend. Being a Christian school, they firmly believe that old adage, “idle hands are the Devil’s workshop”.
That’s the way parents should go. Fire the public schools often enough, raise pluperfect hell with your legislatures for wasting your tax dollars. Maybe one day our public schools will return control of the school boards back to the parents of the children that attend them. I suggest breaking the school districts into very small ones, and require by law that parents become involved.
Then again, I don’t know beans…but I do know my grandson will be ready for college two years earlier than his public school friends.
It took me a few minutes to read and post to the comments rather than the article, but I have to respectfuly disagree. Having grown up in the public school system that was definately “in the hood”, I found the education to be acceptable. I was challenged with quaterly papers covering 3 different disciplines, fine arts, literature and history. Had access to both A.P and I.B courses and could engage in a myriad of after school activities. All of this as there were numerous shootings, drug dealers, fights etc… The problem, as I understood, was never the schools. They did the best with what was sent them. The problem were the homes these children originated from. I’ll give two examples. My friend AJ grew up in what seemed like Beirut with a single mom who had Sickle Cell. He walked through chalk outlines and police tape to get to school, but he always made it. Eventually he graduated from college and now works for a defense company in N.C. Conversely, my friend SP was in a two parent home skipped school all the time and began to deal drugs. It was not until his cousin was killed that he stopped. The difference was where they originated because it was the same school system.
Also, for those who think their kids are safe in private school, we went to the religious schools to meet girls andsold drugs to the private school kids. So, problems abound everywhere. You all are just on top of your game when it comes to your kids.
That our public schools, in general, are in crisis – I will not argue. That we apply too broad a brush in tarring the institution as whole, repeatedly, I will assert.
I cannot talk to or for the California PS system, nor even for all of VA. (I would note, parenthetically, that there is a “stellar” example nearby of a school system in a death spiral and it, sadly, resides in our Nation’s capitol). I can, though for the school system our children have been in these past few years.
Ours is not a particularly rich or ethnically monotone area – in fact, this county has 51% of its population identified as minorities – Black, Asian, Central and South American and yes, a fair percentage are probably illegal as well. Compared to our wealthier neighbors to the north (Fairfax and Loudon) the median income is lower and in our school’s catchment area, median income ranks towards the southern end of the middle 1/3. At the HS our youngest attends, 14% are on subsidized meal programs.
Yet this school is a success story – I’ve detailed the metrics and the whys/wherefores elsewhere; and it is not just a paper tiger. I have seen the teachers, administration and student body from both sides of the fence – parent/ volunteer and teacher. What I see from all three groups gives me hope for the future of public education in this country.
My intention is not to criticize those who seek private education – that is their right and privilege, and there is a long and honored tradition in this nation for private (institutional and home-based) education. I am saying it is not *the* solution as some would have us believe.
Remember, there are those who may be unable to avail themselves of that option, especially those with disabilities, who may end up being served only by the public system. We, the body public, owe them access to something more than a glorified incarceration during their school years – as seems to be the case across the Potomac.
- SJS
CAPT Lex,
The difference between the stereotypical liberal perception of the military and its hierarchical society is that I loved my Men as if they were my own children. Tough love was sometimes required. I cared infinitely more deeply about them and their families than my company today cares for me, even when I am one of their highest producers.
And that was part of the Navy culture. My Men were not pawns in a world chess game, their bodies destined to be used up in some “misbegotten war of aggression”, and their capabilities were not there for show. They were professional warriors who wanted nothing more than to do their jobs well and be appreciated for the sacrifices they made on behalf of their country, respected in the bars and churches of the USA.
I know whence my loyalties lie. It is not to those who would never use the shiny instruments of war because they are evil or wrong. My loyalty lies with the Men and Women who polish and maintain those instruments for a pittance and with the dedication and pride of knowing they have completed a job well done at the end of each day. They hope that those instruments will never HAVE to be used for more than parades, but they wield them proficiently with deadly serious intensity at every occasion in training and in operations in defense of the country.
Whether they attended public schools or private, were geniuses or morons, they worked hard to defend their country. And in the inimitable way the military has of leveling the playing field, they succeeded in impressing upon me the conviction that black or white, red or brown, Christian or atheist, they all were worthy and noble professionals who gave more than they got, and continually did their duty no matter the opponent or the task.
Most of us citizens aren’t worth their spit.
God bless each and every one of them.
Subsunk
I’m not so sure Mr Wright missed the mark, as he simply chose a poor example to close with. He’s on the mark about Rumsfeld and wrong about Abu Graib-insofar as he makes it out to be an organized policy of the administration, rather than a failure of leadership within the Army.
However, as you probably can guess, I can agree with him that the idea of the military as a monolithic conservative, Republican institution is a myth. Particularly so in institutions that encourage independent thought ( or used to), which was one of the hallmarks of the US Navy.
As for the schools-his analogy still works overseas. That CONUS based schooling is different is , as you point out a function of economics, and municpal government policy-not anything of the military’s doing.
His real point is that the overlying prinicpal is correct and the military actually does a better job of rewarding performance than the civilian world-performance means more than dollars, or should.
Sometimes you have to let art flow over you and not look in so much detail at the brush strokes.
Web Reconnaissance for 04/04/2007…
A short recon of what?ǂ
Web Reconnaissance for 04/04/2007…
A short recon of whats out there that might draw your attention….
Subsunk, thank you.
And all you “men” who are as he.
sincerely,
doorkeeper