Options on the Flat Earth

One of the biggest crimes of the neo feudal society we're redeveloping is the way it severely limits the options of young people.

Control is so much easier when we're channeled.

Nowhere is that clearer than in the military and its' glorification.

Our society offers young men only two badges of masculine success: money or violence, or preferably--as the title of 50 Cent's new movie Get Rich or Die Tryin' suggests--some combination of both. No wonder then that a young man with limited prospects would seek a shortcut to manhood in the military. It becomes almost inevitable when even failing in college isn't one of the options on the table...

The antiwar left's well-founded argument about the connection between class and military recruiting does not acknowledge the other, equally compelling reason why young men sucuumb to the military's allure. These boys enlist for the same reason their peers join street gangs: for the heady cocktail of violence, intense camraderie and sexual aggression that makes them feel like a man. From a poor inner city kid's point of view, there isn't that much difference between becoming a jarhead or a gang member; it's a matter of ducking bullets in the Sunni Triangle or in your backyard. More importantly, fighting in Iraq may actually be the safer option...

In rewriting Swofford's memoir as a "coming of age" story, Mendes instead reiterates the Hollywood fantasy of war as a male rite of passage. The intimate relationship between masculinity and violence runs deep in our culture, and war is merely one of its many manifestations. There is nothing more dangerous than an insecure nineteen-year old with a gun, be it on the battlefield or the streets of Oakland. The more important question then is whether we can imagine a world that offers him a different path to manhood.

It's a requisite of Empire.

A place for every man, and every man in his place.