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.Three years ago vandals defaced his son’s gravestone.“I don’t speak,” he says.“I show people war.I show them the caskets they are not allowed to see.If people don’t see what war does, they don’t feel it.If they don’t feel it they don’t care.”Military recruiters, who often have offices in high schools, prey on young men like Alex, who was first approached when he was sixteen.They cater to their insecurities, their dreams, and their economic deprivation.They promise them what the larger society denies them.Those of Latino descent and from divorced families, as Alex was, are especially vulnerable.Alex’s brother Brian was approached by the military, which suggested that if he enlisted he could receive $60,000 in signing bonuses and more than $27,000 in payments for higher education.The proposed Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, or DREAM, is designed to give undocumented young people a chance at citizenship provided they attend college—not usually an option for poor, often poorly educated and undocumented Latino youths who are prohibited from receiving Pell Grants—for at least two years, or enlist and serve in the military.The military helped author the pending act and is lobbying for it.Twelve percent of Army enlistees are Hispanic, and this percentage is expected to double by 2020 if the current rate of recruitment continues.And once they are recruited, these young men and women are trained to be killers, sent to wars that should never be fought, and returned back to their families often traumatized and broken and sometimes dead.Alex told Carlos in their last conversation there was heavy fighting in Najaf.Alex usually asked his father not to “forget” him, but now, increasingly in the final days of his life, another word was taking the place of forget.It was forgive.He felt his father should not forgive him for what he was doing in Iraq.He told his father, “Dad, I hope you are proud of what I’m doing.Don’t forgive me, Dad.” The sentence bewildered his father.“Oh my God, how can I forgive you?.I love you, you’re my son, very proud, you’re my son.”“I thought, when he died, ‘My God, he has killed somebody,’” Carlos says quietly as he readied for an antiwar march organized by Veterans for Peace.“He feels guilty.If he returned home his mind would be destroyed.His heart would be torn apart.It is not normal to kill.How can they do this? How can they take our children?”NotesINTRODUCTION1 George Orwell, “Why I Write,” in George Orwell: An Age Like This, 1920–1940, ed.Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Boston: David R.Godine, 2000), 6.2 George Orwell, “Wells Hitler and the World State,” in All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays (New York: Mariner Books, 2009), 150.POLITICS1 Sheldon J.Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), 58.2 Kieslowski.See www.facets.org/decalogue/synopsis.html.3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, Part I: The Proposition, and Its Sense (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 370.4 Naomi Klein, No Space, No Choice, No Jobs, No Logo (New York: Macmillan, 2002), 124.5 Benjamin DeMott, “Junk Politics: A Voter’s Guide to the Post-literate Election,” Harper’s Magazine (November 2003), 36.6 Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922), ix.7 Warren I.Susman, “‘Personality’ and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture,” in New Directions in American Intellectual History, ed.John Higham and Paul K.Conkin (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1979), 220.8 Howard Schneider, “Obama to Speak at Campus Where Political Freedoms Are Few,” Washington Post, June 3, 2009, www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2009/06/02/AR2009060203697.html.9 Luke Mitchell, “We Still Torture: The New Evidence from Guantánamo,” Harper’s, July 2009, www.harpers.org/archive/2009/07/0082566.10 Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public: A Sequel to Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1925), 37–38.11 Komunyakaa, conversation with author.(See The Death of the Liberal Class.)12 Houston A.Baker, Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 72.13 Martin Luther King, Jr., Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr.(New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 562.14 Ralph Nader, interview, by phone from Connecticut, August 8, 2009.15 Allen Dobson, et al.“How a New ‘Public Plan’ Could Affect Hospitals’ Finances and Private Insurance Premiums,” Health Affairs 28.6 (November 2009): 1013–1024.16 Paul Kane, “Lawmakers Reveal Health-Care Investment,” Washington Post, June 13, 2009, www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2009/06/12/AR2009061204075.html.17 Erich Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 84.18 Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass on Slavery and the Civil War: Selections from His Writings, ed.Philip Sheldon Foner (New York: Dover, 2003), 42.19 John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (New York: Vintage, 1993), 30–31.20 See Christian J.Peters, et al.“Testing a complete-diet model for estimating the land resource requirements of food consumption and agricultural carrying capacity: The New York state example,” Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems 22:2 (2007): 145–153; Christian J.Peters, et al.“Mapping potential foodsheds in New York State: A spatial model for evaluating the capacity to localize food production,” Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems 24.1 (2009): 72–84.21 Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1996), 108.22 Ibid [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]