A thousand years ago when I was about to begin my military career, a wise old retired Marine colonel, a veteran of the carnage at Tarawa, gave me some advice. Paraphrased here, he said:

So you want to be a career soldier? Good for you. But remember that the longer you stay in uniform, the less you will really understand about the country you protect. Democracy is the antithesis of the military life; it’s chaotic, dishonest, disorganized, and at the same time glorious, exhilarating and free — which you are not.

After a while, if you stay in, you’ll be tempted to say, “Look, you civilians, we’ve got a better way. We’re better organized. We’re patriotic, and we know what it is to sacrifice. Be like us.” And you’ll be dead wrong, son. If you’re a career soldier, you may defend democracy, but you won’t understand it or be part of it. What’s more, you’ll always be a stranger to your own society. That’s the sacrifice you’ll be making.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that old colonel in the aftermath of White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s remarkable press conference the other day over the president’s call to the widow of an Army soldier killed in Niger. There’s been a lot of commentary about the general’s attitude toward civilians who hadn’t sacrificed — who weren’t of the “one percent” who had — and it seems to me that most of it misses the point. Masha Gessen’s New Yorker article, “John Kelly and the Language of the Military Coup,” comes close, given President Donald Trump’s tendency to hire retired generals who complement his own authoritarian leanings. Certainly we need to be alert for the next three years — having at Trump’s elbow a retired general who disdains civilians should raise some concerns.

Source: An Old Colonel Looks at General Kelly – Foreign Policy

My home in rural Michigan is apparently somewhere in the northeastern quadrant of a vast rectangular expanse called “Trump’s America,” a one-of-a-kind admission-free zoo teeming with strange untamed beasts, exotic flora, and a handful of mostly thankless wardens.

Since last November, we have had any number of scientifically minded visitors. The Atlantic recently reported on the “safari” efforts of five researchers from Third Way, the centrist liberal think tank responsible for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign platform. Before that there was Mark Zuckerberg, who this summer reminded himself there are such things as non-driverless cars while looking at bratwursts as if they were glowing polyps surgically removed from the corpse of the titular monster in The Thing. HuffPo even sent a busload of experts to visit 23 of our cities.

Source: Trump voters are not animals to be studied by elitists on ‘safari’

It was the hippies who drove Nancy Hale over the edge. She had spent three days listening respectfully to the real people of Middle America, and finally she couldn’t take it any longer.

She turned off the tape recorder and took several deep breaths, leaning back in the passenger seat of the rented GMC Yukon. The sun had just come out from behind a mass of clouds, casting a gleam on the rain-soaked parking lot in rural Wisconsin.

Hale, who is 65 and lives in San Francisco, is a career activist who got her start protesting nuclear plants and nuclear testing in the 1970s. In 2005, she was one of the founders of Third Way, a center-left think tank, and it was in that capacity that she and four colleagues had journeyed from both coasts to the town of Viroqua, Wisconsin, as part of a post-election listening tour. They had come on a well-meaning mission: to better understand their fellow Americans, whose political behavior in the last election had left them confused and distressed.The trip was predicated on the optimistic notion that if Americans would only listen to each other, they would find more that united than divided them. This notion—the idea that, beyond our polarized politics, lies a middle, or third, path on which most can come together in agreement—is Third Way’s raison d’etre. It is premised on the idea that partisanship is bad, consensus is good, and that most Americans would like to meet in the middle.

But these are not uncontested assumptions. And, three days into their safari in flyover country, the researchers were hearing some things that disturbed them greatly—sentiments that threatened their beliefs to the very core.

Source: On Safari in Trump’s America – The Atlantic

Despicable.

Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL) on Tuesday spoke with CNN’s Don Lemon about the phone call between Donald Trump and the widow of U.S. Army Sgt. La David Johnson, explaining she “was gonna curse” the president out after hearing his remarks.

Wilson was with Johnson’s widow  just before the soldier’s remains arrived at Miami International Airport, ABC 10 reports. That’s when Trump called the pregnant mother of two and told her that her husband “knew what he signed up for.”

“We were in the car together, in the limousine headed to meet the body at the airport,” Wilson told Lemon. “So I heard what he said because the phone was on speaker.”

“This is a young, young woman, who has two children, who is six months pregnant with a third child,” Wilson said. “She has just lost her husband. She was just told that he cannot have an open casket funeral, which gives her all kinds of nightmares how his body must look, how his face must look. And this is what the president of the United States says to her?”

Source: ‘I was gonna curse him out’: Rep. Wilson describes hearing Trump’s phone call with widow of fallen soldier