Jul
24
2008
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The Great Revision |
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Written by JD Johannes
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Thursday, 24 July 2008 |
As you go about your business the next few days, count how many times you see this .
Or a similar sticker, decal, magnet or pin .
Then try to find even one bumper sticker, decal, magnet or pin boasting that a man successfully avoided conscription during the war in Vietnam.
As Instapundit reader Peter Ingemi notes, there is a revision underway.
This revision will track events on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. And when the end of the long war is finally reached, there will be even more revision.
Years from now, men of a certain age will be asked what they did during the War.
What will the diarists at Kos and DU and other sites say?
Will they say that they bravely opposed the war through anonymous digital scribblings? Will they still stand by their digital rants?
Doubtful.
But nearly every young man and woman who deployed--even those who spent their entire 15 months on a mega base working in an airconditioned office--will wear their service. Maybe not conspicuosly, but they will not hide it.
In Shakespeare's Henry V, the King declares that those who did not fight "will hold their manhood's cheap."
And therein lies the source of the Great Revision.
Maybe in another time humans would "hold their manhood's cheap." But in the post-modern era, that would be tantamount to self-esteem suicide.
Years from now, no one will be brandishing bumper stickers declaring their courageous opposition to 'George Bush's War.' The cars with 'Bush Lied, People Died' stickers will have long been recycled and the phrase will be a footnote in history books.
But there will be plenty of these stickers .
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