"All-Male Military Draft Ruled Unconstitutional" - intemperate doggerel

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

“All-Male Military Draft Ruled Unconstitutional”

Because nothing says democracy more

Than sending off the daughters of the poor

To die for Raytheon and General Dynamics

And for the President, whose manly sons
Shoot animals dead with their great big guns

But when the the bullets, bombs, and shells are raining
Those brave lads won’t be found in basic training

Since when it comes to the generals’ slaughter
They’ll send to her death your little daughter

And when the generalissimos yell “Go!”
Our Merovingian Congress won’t say “No”

They fight the wars with perks and private jets
As do their beribboned flag-rank house pets

And so our daughters are the harvest yield
That must forever rot in some foreign field 1

As for our leaders’ daughters, don’t be so hard -
Someone’s got to sun-bathe in Harvard Yard







1 cf. “The Soldier,” Rupert Brooke

Sending Your Daughter to War

Mack Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Sending Your Daughter to War

A covy of Merovingians in court dress sat around in the White House last month and decided that sending young women into combat is a good idea.

Well, if Betty, Veronica, and Barbie can kill and die in this nation’s undeclared wars (cf. The Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 8), we might as well go ahead and send in the children, too. 

After all, the nasty young man who shot schoolchildren in Connecticut, the nasty old man who, as of this writing, is holding a five-year-old hostage, the actions of Cardinal Mahony, the inaction of absentee sperm-donors, and the assembly-line murder of children under the Goebbels-esque euphemism of freedom-of-choice make abundantly clear that in this nation children are disposable.

No less a national figure than Rahm Emanuel, currently the mayor of Chicago, where they know something about disposing of children, said last week that children are “our greatest resource.”

Resource. 

Mr. Emanuel presumably loves his own children, but to him and to our national government your children are nothing more than a resource, like a bunker full of coal, a grain elevator full of corn, a tank farm full of oil.

The idea of humans as a resource is nothing new to Mr. Emanuel; in 2006 he advocated compulsory service for young people.  Compulsory.  The President proposed the same idea in 2008. 

Women have served in combat, but as an accident of their roles as physicians, nurses, corpsmen, pilots, and drivers; now they are to be assigned to combat by intent.

Women are often smaller than men, and children definitely are, so they would be, logistically, far more economical in combat.  They eat less, so feeding them would be cheaper, and the generalissimos can stuff more of ‘em into helicopters and trucks to get them to the fighting where they would make smaller targets.  Smaller blankets, smaller uniforms, smaller body armor, smaller bandages, smaller body-bags.  Their little guns would require less steel and plastic, so, hey, let’s Go Green, eh. 

More women and children can be flung into a medevac helicopter when they’re wounded, and more of their little corpses can be loaded onto a transport for fuel-efficient shipping to Andrews Air Force Base where really important people can pretend to be sad when the tiny, flag-covered caskets (note to budget office – smaller flags) are offloaded.

So you think this nation will never send children into combat?  Really?  But what is an 18-year-old girl?

When teenaged girls are shipped off to war, where will the grown men be?  Some will log-in on conservative websites acting all John Wayne while tippy-tapping their support of the little-bitty troopettes, and others will be shooting skeet or doing something with groundhogs.

Who would have thought that Anne Boleyn’s father would be our national guy role model?

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What Did You Do in the War, Mummy?

Mack Hall

Last week Harry Patch, the last British veteran of the Western Front, died at 111. Even at his age he was lucky not to have been conscripted for the current Afghan campaign.

In 2006 a 75-year-old retired American Army surgeon, Colonel William Bernhard, was reactivated – drafted – and sent to Afghanistan. Once upon a time it was the elderly who sent the young to die in far-away wars; now the young are sending the elderly instead. For the elderly, of course, this means they get to go to two or three wars in their lifetimes while the youthful presidents and prime ministers who send them avoid unpleasantness altogether.

Of all the world’s leaders, possibly two have served in uniform. The Pope was drafted into the Wehrmacht when he was sixteen, and the Queen volunteered as an ATS driver when she was the same age. She got her hands dirty and had to take cover in air raids, joining, as Bill Mauldin said, the club of them what has been shot at.

Some delicate souls in our time claim PTSD from having a bad day at the office.

Unfortunately, politicians with clean hands (if not hearts) still want to send other folks and other folks’ children to the wars. Well, I’ve got a solution for that: the next time anyone wants to have a war, the politicians and their kids, young and old, go first. Using Dr. Bernhard, the Pope, and Queen Elizabeth as precedents, the top age will be 75 and the bottom age will be 16.
"But…but…I’m in a wheelchair!" protests white-haired Senator Gloriosous.

"Not a problem, Private Gloriosous," replies Sergeant Rock, "We built ya a ramp to the turret of this here armored car. Yer a machine-gunner now. The war -- sorry, I meant nation-building -- you voted for is right down the street. Get with it."

"Oooooooooooooh! I want to be an officer in a pretty uniform and go to officers’ clubs and dances," coos Congressman Warprofit’s daughter Heather-Misty-Shannon-La’Shan’qua-Dawn.
"Wrong, Private Warprofit," replies Corporal Hardbutt. "You’ve got street patrol in two hours. Right now you’ve got KP. Your pa can help you. Wash all these mess trays."

"But…but…I’m a college graduate! I have an Honors BA in Community Activism with a minor in Serbo-Hungarian Literature!"

"Oh, sorry, Private Warprofit. I didn’t know. Here, I’ll show you and your pa how to wash dishes…"

"I don’t want to go to a beastly war!" pleads Poncy Tworbt, president of the Sidwell Friends School Chess Club. "I don’t wanna! I’m, like, y’know, an intellectual, and, like, stuff! I’m an artist! And a guitarist! I’m forming a band! I’m sensitive. I’m only 16! I just got my first Mercedes-Benz for my birthday! I’m special! Mummy tells me I’m special!"

"Yeah, Seaman Tworbt?" replies CPO Brasso, a career Navy man with his right forefinger locked in a perpetual curve from carrying a coffee cup for 30 years. "Well, yer mummy’s a Congressman, so yer goin’. Ya play chess, ya say? Great, here’s your swab and bucket. Get this boat deck squared away; we got night patrol up a little river they say used to flow from Eden. Sure hot now, in lots of ways. You might live through it. Now get busy."

The President goes too; the commander-in-chief can command from behind some sandbags in 115-degree heat. You think it’s a good war, boss? How good?

In the meantime, each investor in companies with military contracts will receive a private’s pay for the duration of the war.

But what about the ordinary citizens, the folks who have no power to declare a war? Oh, they can go to the wars if they want to: the kid at the feed store, the guy climbing the cracking unit, the lineman, the nurse, the storekeeper, the doctor. Sure, if they want to go. But they don’t have to.

Next time we have a war, the uberklasse can lead us from the front.

Dan Rather Wants Our Children

Mack Hall

Like Rasputin’s bloated corpse bobbing up among the ice floes of the Nevka River, Dan Rather has surfaced again.

On the occasion of his latest apparition he wants our children.

In an article syndicated by Hearst, Rather, the famous documents expert, coyly asks if it would not be in the best interests of unity that all young people be conscripted into the military or into some sort of vague “national service.”

Conscription. Press gangs. The draft. Forced labor. Hitler Youth. Young Pioneers. The concept that a human is completely at the disposal of the State is a European idea, not an American one. America has occasionally violated the spirit of its own Constitution and impressed people into the military: the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and, inexcusably, for some 28 years following 1945. Even so, during World War II the draft was more of a management tool than a bludgeon: “Wait your turn; we’ll tell you when we need you.”

But even in a national emergency, conscription is never a good idea.

Conscription is an unconstitutional wrong forced upon the young and the poor by the old and the rich. A child of Congress or of Wall Street is no more likely to be found in a recruit barracks than is a copy of The Federalist Papers.

But Dan Rather wants the government to herd our children and grandchildren into barracks and labor camps. For what reason? To sing Woody Guthrie songs or perhaps The Internationale before huge images of Ted Kennedy? To be required to chant Dear Leader’s recent assertion that America is now a Muslim nation? To dig canals by hand? To be posted to the streets of Chicago to hand out A.C.O.R.N. propaganda?

The toadious Dan Rather subscribes to a benign but incomplete concept of Old Army Buddies – that people of different backgrounds drafted into the Army got to know each other better, and so made a better America.

Well, maybe, but that’s a specious argument that could be made of concentration camps, too. If a stuffy Belgian banker and an ‘umble Dutch janitor share a good conversation together while breaking rocks for a road project, that conversation is not a good argument for the existence of concentration camps.

Am I comparing conscription to concentration camps? Yes, to a not-very-limited extent. When people are forcibly removed from their homes and occupations and put behind the wire into a situation of regimentation with a system of punishments for not adapting to the new order, they have been deprived of the whole basis of the Declaration of Independence, the God-given right of self-determination.

I know lots of fine young people who are off to the military this summer. We can be immensely proud of them because they choose to do so. Another young man of my acquaintance spent the first week after his high school graduation helping teach Vacation Bible School; after that he’s going to work until college in the autumn. Work is probably his choice, but then I know his mom and dad; they’re not into letting their kids loaf around as house guests. And yet another young man brought me my fast-cholesterol at the drive-in the other evening. Good for them. They don’t even know who Dan Rather is; I don’t expect that they would want him or any other old flatulent ideologue ordering them into the camps for the good of the State.

Our recent presidents have been doing a czar thing – energy czars, car czars, and now a salary czar. What next, a children’s-camp czar? We don’t want no stinking czars. We don’t want our children seized by the State, either.

If Dan Rather likes internment camps so much, let him build himself a barbed-wire fence, sentence himself behind it, stand himself to attention two or three times a day, and count himself.

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