MAGAZINE COLUMN
The Military vs. America
by Seth Rogovoy(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., July 19, 1997 ) -- For the vast majority of us, there is no regular contact with members of the Armed Forces. Since the Vietnam War and the end of the draft, the American military has grown increasingly isolated from the rest of society -- some fear, too isolated.
Atlantic Monthly
That isolation is unhealthy, suggests Thomas E. Ricks in "The Widening Gap Between the Military and Society," in the July issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Whereas the U.S. armed forces have in the past enjoyed varying degrees of interaction with civilian society -- indeed, whereas in the past the armed forces were a PART of civilian society -- they are now in large part a world unto themselves. They now comprise a separate, professional caste with its own culture, outlook and beliefs.This, says Ricks -- the Wall Street Journal's Pentagon reporter -- is a recipe for disaster. He offers statistics that spell out the huge gulf between the political leanings of civilians and those in the military. Just the fact that those in the military HAVE strong political leanings is in itself a new phenomenon, and a troubling one at that. Ricks quotes an army major who surveyed Marine officers and concluded that there is "the potential for a serious problem in civil- military relations" given the rightward, ideological tilt of those in the military.
Ricks also quotes from articles written in military publications, such as the Marine Corps Gazette, that show a growing sense among servicemen that with the Cold War over, the greatest battle facing the armed forces is for the hearts and minds of Americans, and that the military should be used as the advance guard in a cultural battle. Chilling reading for a hot summer day.
Granta
What with scandal-revealing memoirs all the rage, it comes as a great pleasure and relief to read the carefully measured, literary reminiscences of writers like Paul Auster and Doris Lessing in the summer issue of Granta, the world's greatest literary quarterly -- nay, the world's greatest literary magazine, period.Auster's piece, "The Money Chronicles," an excerpt from his upcoming memoir, "Hand to Mouth," recounts episodes from his late twenties and early thirties, when financial pressures weighed heavy on him and kept him "in a never-ending state of panic."
To relieve the pressure, Auster did things like sign up for a stint on an oil-tanker, where -- pardon the expression -- he found himself more than a bit like a fish out of water.
He also lived in Paris for awhile, where he fell in with the mysterious Madame and Monsieur X -- characters right out of a Paul Auster novel -- working on shady screenplays for them and getting sucked into their emotional vortex.
He also succumbed to the all-American obsession with get-rich-quick schemes, which in his case took the shape of inventing and attempting to sell a card game based on baseball. Fortunately he never got past first base, and instead became a successful writer.
Lessing's "The Roads of London" details the travails of the South African native living as a single mother and aspiring writer in London in the 1950s. An excerpt from "Walking in the Shade," her upcoming autobiography, her story, while rooted in its strongly drawn time and place, is resonant with contemporary nuances.
The volume also includes the true-life tale of Brian MacKinnon, a Scotsman who, finding himself a medical school dropout in his early thirties, reinvented himself as Brandon Lee, a Canadian secondary school student. As Lee, he made it into medical school again, living a life of a complete lie, until his story inevitably unravelled in a most public, tabloid fashion. And Joyce Carol Oates contributes "Lover," a work of J.G. Ballard, "Crash"-like fantasy. In all, great summer reading.
***
In the July issue of Commentary, James Q. Wilson comes to the defense of the automobile in "Cars and Their Enemies." Although Wilson doesn't use the term, he seems to believe that car-haters are a bunch of urban elitists who look down on suburbanites for whom the automobile is a critical element of their circulatory system....In "A More Gated Union" in the July 7 issue of The Weekly Standard, John J. Dilulio Jr. offers the interesting thesis that crime is going down nationally not due to any lack of resourcefulness on the part of criminals, but because the number of potential crime [9]victims[7] has dropped dramatically. Dilulio points to the rise in popularity of "common-interest developments," or CIDs -- including "condos, coops, gated communities, elderly-only villages" -- among those specifically intent on fleeing high-crime areas....
The Readings section of the July issue of Harper's Magazine includes a short memoir by screenwriter and Simon's Rock College alumnus Ethan Coen ("Fargo," "Miller's Crossing") about his grandmother and her penchant for oddball tall tales. Apparently Coen and his brother Joel, with whom he collaborates, inherited their grandmother's eccentric narrative sensibility, as anyone familiar with their work can attest....
[This review originally ran in the Berkshire Eagle on July 19, 1997. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1997. All rights reserved.]
Seth Rogovoy
rogovoy@berkshire.net
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