Areas of Unrest

QOTD: "You will get more with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone." - Al Capone

Reading: Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield

Listening to: nothing

Decluttering accomplishments: threw out a bunch of magazines

23 March 2003 - Poetry and Military Culture

I'm still sort of spring feverish. That, combined with a fairly hectic week, kept me from the mid-week update I'd contemplated.

The first thing that made the week hectic was going to see Irish storyteller Batt Burns at National Geographic on Monday night. He was at his best telling traditional stories. The one literary story he told worked well enough, but was still somehow less satisfying. He also recited several poems, including a few by William Butler Yeats. Which reminds me to mention that I recently stumbled across a recording of Yeats reciting "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." This is one of my favorite poems and Yeats more or less chanted it, which I found startling. Burns focused on the love poems Yeats wrote to Maud Gonne, and those have never been quite as interesting to me.

I mention this mostly because it reminded me that I used to read poetry a lot and I don't really read much poetry at all nowadays, except for odds and ends I stumble across in newspapers. A lot of this is that, for me, poetry often needs to be read aloud, and I do a lot of my reading in public places (e.g. the metro) where that wouldn't be suitable. But there's really nothing stopping me from reading poetry at home and it would be nice to dig out my old favorites - Yeats and Dylan Thomas and W. H. Auden, for example.

Incidentally, I was quite glad for the metro on Monday, as National Geographic is downtown and the city was completely gridlocked. The problem with driving a tractor into the pond in Constitution Gardens as a protest method (as was done by a North Carolina tobacco farmer, in case somebody missed the news) is that screwing up traffic tends to bias people against your cause, regardless of its merits. I also have to admit to surprise that the whole thing ended peacefully. In Los Angeles, the police would, inevitably, have found a way to screw it all up.

The bigger news is, of course, the war. I'm not likely to change anybody's mind about it, so will just note that I'm somewhat surprised to feel hawkish. I still want it to be over quickly, though I don't entirely expect that.

It does, however, give me an excuse to note that military culture has become more distant from civilian culture since we have an all-volunteer force. I'd guess that the majority of Air Force officers I know are from military families. If nothing else, that makes them comfortable with the ritual aspects of Air Force life. (And, I have to admit, I enjoy the ceremony - I've often thought that it would be great to have promotion ceremonies in the civilian business world, for example.) But I'm not sure it makes for good decision making on either side (military or civilian) to have such different expectations. My biggest concern with respect to the Iraq war is whether leadership who've never seen actions will really listen well to the generals who are in the thick of things. That's also a far better - and far less cynical - reason to revive the draft. Even a brief stint of national service would cross-pollinate the cultures, for the betterment of both.