Ike '56
Wednesday May 16, 2007
Reader Rob, a high school teacher, sent in this link to a four-minute Eisenhower campaign commercial from 1956. It's really something to watch it today, with its constant appeals to peace, and to grasp that a Republican president was appealing to the public to vote for him as a more certain guarantor of keeping America out of war. One reason the old general could do this was that an enormous number of American men (and, by extension, their families) had lived through the horrors of World War II and Korea, and knew how precious peace was. I wonder how different our politics would be if a draft had caused a large number of Americans to have to serve in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan, instead of our volunteer army.
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Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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Simon's history primer is equal parts visionary verbiage and partisan pique; If only HaloScan would allow me to publish the partisan pique parts in red, so they could be distinguished clearly from the visionary verbiage.... :) Seriously, though, Rawlins: Aside from the extreme case of World War II (where we were directly attacked by a major military power), when in U.S. history has a wartime draft NOT been deeply unpopular?
Somehow, I doubt Ike was advocating the "stick our heads in the sand" approach to international threats that is essentially being pushed by "antiwar" advocates these days.
Proof again that perception (or prejudice) is seldom fact. Prejudice, properly meant, is never meant to be a fact, only a probability. And by the way, a ton of Hispanics are certainly a high percentage of our servicepersons. They're slightly overrepresented in the casualties.
Where (and I am a good old fashioned centrist Liberal here) would one get the idea that this 'volunteer' army and its dead and dying is primarily black and poor? Blacks are overrepresented in the military. That's true. The problem is that a lot of people simply assume that this overrepresentation will translate into combat death ratios. It doesn't, and that's because minorities tend to favor military careers that give them technical training that can be used on the outside.
Whites, OTOH, tend to go for combat jobs in greater numbers than other ethnicities, expecting to go to college once they get out. I did something similar. Instead of going into a more useful avionics field, I selected a job on a combat transport as a cargo loadmaster. Not much use in the civilian world, but lots of fun and travel.
They don't turn out Republican Presidents like they used to. That's for sure!
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