The Nation Magazine features a blog called TomDispatch several times a week. The blog is written by journalist, author and teacher Tom Engelhardt and usually devotes itself to the political issues of the day, as does The Nation itself. Yesterday he featured an article written by a retired Air Force colonel named William Astore which looks at the persistence of the popularity of the military in American culture, and the penchant toward militarism that it engenders. If, like me, you’re a bit used to the liberal editorial voice of The Nation, reading this piece written from the perspective of a career military officer will prove illuminating and insightful. He’s not the usual axe-grinding, nonsense-spewing rabid conservative you might expect. His analysis is coherent and worth paying attention to: while we on the liberal side tend to dismiss the significance of the armed forces as a societal institution, we would be well-served to have a better grasp of its positive strengths and its relationship to working-class America. There is room, he suggests, for finding some acceptance and even admiration of the military. Such acceptance might be the best way to defuse the more negative aspects of militarism, not to mention the political in-roads being made by extreme right-wing ideologies and fundamentalist Christians.
