It takes a nation of millions to hold us back.
Jared’s story illustrates a growing national problem as the military faces increasing pressure to hit recruiting targets during an unpopular war.
Tracking by the Pentagon shows that complaints about recruiting improprieties are on pace to approach record highs set in 2003 and 2004. The active Army and the Reserve missed recruiting targets last year, and reports of recruiting abuses continue from across the country.
A family in Ohio reported that its mentally ill son was signed up, despite rules banning such enlistments and the fact that records about his illness were readily available.
In Houston, a recruiter warned a potential enlistee that if he backed out of a meeting he would be arrested.
And in Colorado, a high school student working undercover told recruiters he had dropped out and had a drug problem. The recruiter told the boy to fake a diploma and buy a product to help him beat a drug test.
Violations such as these forced the Army to halt recruiting for a day last May so recruiters could be retrained and reminded of the job’s ethical requirements.
The Portland Army Recruiting Battalion Headquarters opened its investigation into Jared’s case last week after his parents called The Oregonian and the newspaper began asking questions about his enlistment.
He’s an autistic 18-year-old who didn’t even know a war was going on in Iraq.
“When Jared first started talking about joining the Army, I thought, ‘Well, that isn’t going to happen,’ “ said Paul Guinther, Jared’s father. “I told my wife not to worry about it. They’re not going to take anybody in the service who’s autistic.”
But they did. Last month, Jared came home with papers showing that he not only had enlisted, but also had signed up for the Army’s most dangerous job: cavalry scout. He is scheduled to leave for basic training Aug. 16.
Officials are now investigating whether recruiters at the U.S. Army Recruiting Station in Southeast Portland improperly concealed Jared’s disability, which should have made him ineligible for service.
He won’t be going, thanks to the Oregonian.
On Tuesday, a reporter visited the U.S. Army Recruiting Station at the Eastport Plaza Shopping Center, where Velasco said he had not been told about Jared’s autism.
“Cpl. Ansley is Guinther’s recruiter,” he said. “I was unaware of any type of autism or anything like that.”
Velasco initially denied knowing Jared but later said he’d spent a lot of time mentoring him because Jared was going to become a cavalry scout. The job entails “engaging the enemy with anti-armor weapons and scout vehicles,” according to an Army recruiting Web site.
After he had spoken for a few moments, Velasco suddenly grabbed the reporter’s tape recorder and tried to tear out the tape, stopping only after the reporter threatened to call the police.
With the Guinthers’ permission, The Oregonian faxed Jared’s medical records to the U.S. Army Recruiting Battalion commander, Lt. Col. David Carlton in Portland, who on Wednesday ordered the investigation.
The Guinthers said that on Tuesday evening, Cpl. Ansley showed up at their door. They said Ansley stated that he would probably lose his job and face dishonorable discharge unless they could stop the newspaper’s story.
Our armed forces are cold-calling schoolkids with leads from No Child Left Behind red tape and county fair honeypots, under such ferocious pressure to put boots on the ground that Corporal Ansley’s put his career in the shitter for one more dubious checkmark in his ledger. —Yes, I’m asking for sympathy for this particular devil. After all, the consensus among the few who still support this war is that we aren’t fighting hard enough. 110% just won’t cut it, goddammit!
Can you even begin to imagine what it felt like, to realize what he’d done? Realize the line he’d crossed? Feel it go so searingly wrong that he tried to wrestle the tape out of the reporter’s recorder?
(Perhaps I have it wrong. Perhaps it was with a profound sense of entitlement that he went to the Guinthers’ door, cap in hand, to beg for his career; extremism in the defense, and all that, and why should I lose my job over your kid’s decision? —Perhaps. But I do try to see the best in people, when I can.)
—Meanwhile? Recruiting’s up up up for the Fighting Keebees. Not even two weeks, and they’ve got 300 recruits and counting!
Soar, you mighty chickenhawk. Soar.
Neither the first word nor the last on profanity, disputation, anger, and civility for bloggers.
The Dragonlord held the blade up, and said, “I was given this weapon of my father, you know.” He studied its length critically. “It is called Reason, because my father always believed in the power of reasoned argument. And yours?”
“From my mother. She found it in the armory when I was very young, and it is one of the last weapons made by Ruthkor and Daughters before their business failed. It is the style my father has always preferred: light and quick, to strike like a snake. I call it Wit’s End.”
“Wit’s End? Why?”
“Well, for much the same reason that yours is Reason.”
Piro turned it in his hand, observing the blade—slender but strong, and the elegant curve of the bell guard. Then he turned to Kytraan and said, “May Reason triumph.”
“It always does, at the end of the day,” said Kytraan, smiling. “And as for you, well, you will always have a resort when you are at your wit’s end.”
“Indeed,” said Piro with a smile, as they waited for the assault to commence.
—Steven Brust, The Viscount of Adrilankha
Things you did not know you knew.
No matter who you are, you (yes, you; even you) are a better writer than Tom Cruise.
Or is it the other way round?
Richard Thompson is the Eddie Campbell of pop music.
Futurama Battlestar.
How could you not share something like this?
(Oh, there’s more.)
Making people laugh is the lowest form of comedy.
Kids these days, they have it so easy. Why, Michael O’Donoghue had to mock My Lai and savage Laraine Newman and make the Mormon Tabernacle choir scream in agony and die of a massive cerebral hemorrhage, obscure and half-remembered, to soldier through the sort of shocked silences Stephen Colbert got just by standing up in front of the president and the press and telling the fucking truth. —What does it mean that it isn’t our journalists anymore but our comedians who afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted? Pretty much what it always has, I guess. At least someone’s making an effort.
What do Philip K. Dick, priestly ephebophilia, Knopf, and Gay Talese’s 50 pairs of hand-lasted shoes have in common?
They’re John Crowley’s suggested interests for Thomas Disch’s brand-new LiveJournal.
First, they win. Then we attack them. Then we laugh at them. Then we ignore them…
My sweet suffering Christ, they’re playing the role of the unjustly oppressed right to the bitter hilt. That right there above, ladies and gentlemen, is an attempt by the supporters of preemptive war, the apologists for torture, the real men who go to Caracas, to reclaim the word “chickenhawk.” Maybe white boy can’t say “nigga,” but that is finally once and for all okay: he can now bellow “My Yellaphant!” with pride.
(Cap’n Ed even went the “Webster’s defines ‘chickenhawk’ as” route:
When we looked into it, it turns out that the chicken hawk is a pretty impressive predator. It’s the largest of its family. This species vigorously defends its territory, getting even more aggressive when the conditions get harshest. It adapts to all climates. Most impressively, it feeds on chickens, mice, and rats.
Make of that what you will.
(Well. I can make a hat, or a brooch, or a pterodactyl, or a mighty fascist-looking eagle displayed on a field of gules, you eliminationist twerp.)
A twinkling merriment behind it all.
“Funerals,” the Operacycle; “Gonna Miss You,” Hub Moore and the Great Outdoors; “Tear in Your Hand,” Tori Amos; “Bhangra Fever,” MIDIval PunditZ; “Turning the Pearl,” Jeff Harrington; “Myth,” k.d. lang; “The President,” Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians; “I Want to be a Sideman,” Dave Frishberg; “Dizzy,” Siouxsie and the Banshees; “Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya,” Ella Fitzgerald.
The problem with Manicheanism.
In a world with Abercrombie & Fitch, American Apparel must necessarily represent the force of good, and I’m not sure how I feel about that.
Oh, Paarfi.
On the subject of returning, to which we just made reference in the previous sentence…
—Steven Brust, The Viscount of Adrilankha
“‘He rose from the chair upon which he was sitting.’ Well, which other chair should he have risen from, if not from that upon which he was sitting?” —And why did it take me so long to get back to these books? Teeth!
A new broom sweeps clean.
They say I worry too much. Do I worry too much? I’m worrying too much, aren’t I.
Saucy ganders.
The opening salvo (if ever it had an opening):
(Some little context, by way of the script:
)
The recent escalation:
The perhaps inevitable but nonetheless (nonethemore?) welcome riposte:
And then—
Don’t mind me.
You know. Distracted. Reading. Painting shelves. Pushing a reel mower through a month’s worth of shin-high grass. That sort of thing.
I thought I’d gone mad for a while there and was imagining we’re now a country that sanctions torture and secret imprisonment without trial and monarchial, even theocratic power vested in a deeply unpopular ruler and preemptive war and the use of nuclear weapons, but then I got better.
I know what you want; your magpies have come.
“And She Was,” Talking Heads; “Cory’s Song,” Kid Creole and the Coconuts; “Green Finch and Linnet Bird,” Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street; “Appalachian Spring (As at first, slowly),” Leonard Bernstein, the New York Philharmonic; “Come to Daddy (Little Lord Faulteroy mix),” Aphex Twin; “Gateway,” the Seatbelts; “Yes, Anastasia,” Tori Amos; “The Natural World,” Robin Holcomb; “Lute Score,” Momus; “Broken Arm,” the Weird Weeds.
That woman.
Yes, she’s a horrible, soulless monster. Yes, her latest “book” is an insult to millennia of literate endeavor. But my God, do you have to keep posting those photos of her in your blogs? —Every time you say her name, you feed the dead light in her eyes, and Baby Jesus is forced to strangle another frolicking kitten. (Also, the man-hands jokes, and the bits about the Adam’s apple? Not getting funnier every time you tell them. Hate to be brutal, but.)
Something to keep in mind (Jupiter drops).
It’s maybe, what, fifteen blocks from our house to Salon Bédé? We usually walk it. And if I am for whatever reason walking by myself, I take my iPod. I take my iPod whenever I’m walking anywhere. It’s nice to have on the bus—that and a book and you’ve got your isolation bubble firmly in place (you and maybe half of everybody else)—but when I’m walking, I can hear it better. When I’m walking, I’m not doing anything else.
Last night, around about 42nd, something, I don’t remember what, but let’s say it was “Cyberbird” for the sake of argument, it fluttered to a stop, and then that rising ghostly hum-chord began, and crawling up out of it that unearthly backwards guitar, and maybe it was because it was a chilly night and I’d only grabbed a light jacket, but you know how Robert Graves goes on about poetry and the shaving mirror and the hairs on your chin? It was like that, only all the way down to my toes, and I stood there hanging between one step and the next until he began to sing, and it’s not the first time that’s ever happened.
And yet it isn’t the song, is it? Just? I’d play it for you, and you’d say maybe that was nice, or huh, but you wouldn’t hang there, unstuck from the moment-to-moment. (Unless.) —It’s everything I’ve put into the song, everything that unfolds when I hear it begin to play, a key only I can use for a lock only I’d want to open. —It’s all so very, very big. Without the song, where would I put it?
Here’s an alternate take on “Ubiquity is the abyss”; a polished remix of the earlier rough demo track. “Songs are fascist immigrants,” says Momus, elsewhere; “conquistadors who’ve come, inevitably, to slay indigenous sound wherever they find it.” —Well, yes. But not just slay. And not just sound.
