The Tease of Things I Don't Need

Hey, maybe they're
the Bush constituency?
(or You don't have
to be crazy, but it helps)

Some military commanders in charge of troops and troop deployment these days are reportedly taking a page from Patton's book in refusing to acknowledge mental and emotional problems in the troops beyond having them prescribed antidepressants.

The usual Catch-22-ish observation comes first to mind. Anyone who doesn't want to be in combat is sane, and anyone who may be nuts in a way that has them wanting to be in combat is at least nominally doing his job, so his status isn't coming up for review unless he does something so outrageous that it starts eliciting complaints from fellow troops.

Also, though, it shows us once more that there's a pharmaceutical reflex mentality in place in our culture. Children start to act up, get 'em on Ritalin. Someone sanely goes into a state of depression in response to being sent thousands of miles from home on a dangerous, fool's mission - holding the Bush Administration's foreign policy's conceptually diseased dick up - and they prescribe some sort of mood modifiers.

They realize that if they allow people to get out of combat based on this all they'll have left are the highly committed and parochially-minded - those who've either swallowed the lies behind the mission whole, or are of that idealized military mindset that The Mission is all, a sort of axiomatic point that is beyond question, from which all else proceeds with supreme confidence - and those either mentally deficient and unable to recognize what they're doing or mentally ill enough to want to be there as part of an occupation force.

There's seldom any clear, palpable enemy, no clear end to the mission. They're being told to stay there without any believable end point for their tour of duty so that they can be in a situation where they have to choose between treating people as fellow human beings and risk leaving themselves open to being killed, or remaining aloof as a heavily-armed occupying force who, in the process of looking for "insurgents" can't help but alienate a large chunk of the Iranian people. While being given busy work they're largely there as an armed presence, and consequyently, whether moving or standing around, they realize they're live targets.

Also, this puts me in mind of the "go" and "no-go" pill mentality already in place in some sections of the military.

Oh, yeah. We're jolly green giants, walking the Earth.