I join you in saying WTF kind of way is that to treat some bullets? OK, now I'm off to drink diet coke, watch Buffy, and eat chocolate covered hazelnuts (there are 181 calories per serving and "about" five servings in this measly bag? fuck.) well, how many calories are in a half a bottle of vodka (checks internet) 780! and that's without mixers! i still come out ahead. and honestly, if you're not allowed to mope around eating chocolate in rehab I don't know when you are.
Mmmm. Hazelnuts.
I have very fond memories of wandering around Florence in college and finding out that hazelnut brittle (whatever you call it in Italian) was street food there.
And seriously, you can eat a lot of chocolate for the caloric price of booze. Actually, have they got a weight room? You could treat rehab as a prison-equivalent and get all inappropriately muscular. And tatoos!
I've already got tattoos. one of them actually done in jailhouse approved style, with an ordinary needle wrapped in thread and embedded in a toothbrush handle. I think we made the ink out of soot or something? poor judgment all around. but you could probably have guessed that already.
Maybe sticking to the manicure is the best idea, then. And the hazelnuts. Mmmm. Hazelnuts.
Why does everyone the NYT publishes sound the same? They all write in the sort of sing-songy cadence that 13 year-olds use for *IMPORTANT* diary entries.
I don't believe "Miss Sophia" about the ammo, or about the Rosebud conversation. It sounds like "poetic" hyperbole to me. Oh, and SCMTim, the reason they all sound the same is that they've been writer-workshopped to death.
but surely that can't be a sensible way to treat ammunition. After all, do bullets even work after they've been through the wash?
It is not wildly unsafe, but I would not treat ammunition that way. And no, washing can't be good for it. The problem is that it may not be obvious that it was washed, creating the very dangerous possibility of loading a magazine with bulets which will not fire.
On the larger point of the article, it is obvious why people of such wildly different political views might not be a great match, but the heart loves who the heart loves, and such things can work if you let them.
This stuff is Penthouse Letters for the Westchester set.
there's nothing wrong with a liberal woman falling in love with a guy in the military.
Indeed.
You can have a wonderful relationship with someone you disagree wilth about all kinds of things.
True, but not all military guys are reactionaries (and it's not that unusual to find Democrats--who are these wives she's hanging out with?).
In other words, I think 8 gets it exactly right: I'm starting to think all this shit is made up or farmed out to writers with the directions: "This week's cliche: hippie chick marries Rambo."
Absent-minded guys who forget where their bullets are and strew them around like Hansel and Gretel's breadcrumbs? That's who's defending us?
not all military guys are reactionaries (and it's not that unusual to find Democrats--who are these wives she's hanging out with?).
Also true. Maybe the military has changed a lot in the 12 years since I retired, but the part of the article where the author was outed as a Democrat in front of other military wives did not ring at all true to me. More Republicans than Democrats in the military--I imagine so--but people being shocked that someone was a Democrat--hard to believe.
not all military guys are reactionaries
I think that her stereotypical presentation of herself is worse, actually. There's no progression, except: "Like, oh my God, I was so intolerant in my liberalism!"
Especially not nowadays. I'm willing to bet that more and more military folks are Not Happy With the Administration.
For one, he made me laugh. When I agonized over a dog's death, he said: "Babe, your rucksack's heavy enough. You don't need to add to it." If I spilled a glass of water in bed, he'd shout in his mock drill-sergeant voice, "You're screwing up, Troop!"
I think this is real. Nobody is that much of a cock in fiction.
I think the guy comes off better than she does.
True, at least he's not writing tripe for the NYT.
Then again, he's deployed and they have a (little?) kid. She's probably desperate for any work she can do that's compatible with 24/7 motherhood. Potboilers, here we come!
silver [...] gold [...] orange [...] bronze tips.
Evidently he was redeployed to the Trojan War.
I find them at the bottom of the washing machine, next to the pile of mail in our front hall or mixed in a heap of change.
He's emptying his pockets. Maybe he forget to sometimes.
After all, do bullets even work after they've been through the wash?
Depends on the bullet, how well its made, etc. Water in the powder: bad. However, that's not the problem. She's doing the laundry and if she knows he forgets, or even if he doesn't forget, she really ought to do a better job of checking his pockets, since a washing machine with a hole in it probably won't work as well as a regular one. (No, a round probably wouldn't go off, but consider how a zip gun is made.)
I think that her stereotypical presentation of herself is worse, actually.
She sounds like a small child. Maybe the problem isn't the Kerry sticker; it's the nude love-ins on the front lawn! Hrmm. They sent him to the War College tho, so he's a Colonel. His salary probably ain't half-bad, and yer ossifer & ossifer wife types are way more politicized than yer regular military schmoes.
ash
['I'm guessing when she comes back, they'll be lots of suitors protesters & hippie dudes eating out of the fridge.']
re: 11
I don't know about the US military but certainly when my father was in the British Army (late 60s) he describes a fairly mixed bag of political viewpoints among his fellow soldiers -- certainly not a heavily right-wing bunch. He describes a lot of the officers as having been fairly left-wing. Of the anti-Stalinist/anti-Soviet left, yes, but by no means reactionary right-wing caricatures.
I'd imagine, given the number of college-educated reservists in the current US military system that an attempt to portray the US military as uniformly composed of right-wing 'Rethuglicans' can't be anying other than a gross caricature.
Evidently he was redeployed to the Trojan War.
Wouldn't the bullets have reservoir tips, then?
She's doing the laundry and if she knows he forgets, or even if he doesn't forget, she really ought to do a better job of checking his pockets, since a washing machine with a hole in it probably won't work as well as a regular one.
Not to be a humorless feminst, but they are his bullets, he should take responsiblity for them. His wife is not responsible for stopping his idiocy (although a good slap upside his head each time she finds them in the washing machine would not hurt).
ossifer & ossifer wife types are way more politicized than yer regular military schmoes.
Maybe more likely to be Republicans, but unless it has changed a lot since I retired, partisan politics is not a major topic of conversation because you can get in trouble for on-duty partisan activities, particularly those directed toward subordinates.
re: 18
I think that the officer corps in the U.S. Army probably is more Republican than Democrat. And many people, regardless of party, tend toward social conservatives--when I served, many of my fellow soldiers viewed me as a liberal. But you certainly find lots of Democrats--particularly of the moderate/conservative variety--in the military.
It sounds so made up. Here's my pretend soljer. Oh, how he leaves his bullets in his pockets and shouts army discipline while we make love!
Break me a fucking give. West Point grads, im limited e, are a lot like Ivy grads, smart, elite, intense but they are more likely to be conservative.
Tia writes stuff that would make better "modern love" pieces than this. But do the rest of you? Eh? I think along with this running critique there should also be a competition among you for the best replacement modern love piece.
many of my fellow soldiers viewed me as a liberal.
Given this:
it is obvious why people of such wildly different political views might not be a great match, but the heart loves who the heart loves, and such things can work if you let themI view you as fucking liberal, you free-love hippie. Shouldn't you be at an audition for a revival of Hair?
Volunteering to go first ac? I bet you could write a good one.
What I want is a Modern Love story that's entitled, "And Now It Itches."
Volunteering to go first ac? I bet you could write a good one.
Does no one remember that the last time, or last time but one or two or three, the Modern Love segments came up here, I said we should all collaborate on a piss-taking submission and then submit it? Does no one remember at all?
re: 20
FWIW, I'm pretty sure the UK officer class (and the enlisted class for that matter) skews quite a bit to the left of the US equivalent since the UK as a whole skews further left.
FWIW, I'm pretty sure the UK officer class (and the enlisted class for that matter) skews quite a bit to the left of the US equivalent since the UK as a whole skews further left.
Makes sense.
As an example of how it is the norm not to discuss politics in the US Army, I spent almost a year and a half working with a British lance missle regiment and I do not remember ever talking politics with the British officers or soldiers with whom I worked.
I think that this is fictionalised, but it is more likely that she is talking up her own left-wing credentials than anything else. People who went to stereotypical left wing universities often believe that the politics goes into their DNA and makes them intrinsically countercultural for their whole lives; on two occasions I have had to remind investment bankers who went to King's Cambridge that they were, in fact, investment bankers.
26: w-lfs-n, you should put together a submission. It should be written from the perspective of one of Hirshman's down-market husbands (e.g., a philosphy professor). If at all possible, begin with "I never thought it could happen to me...."
It could gold, I tell ya. GOLD!
there should also be a competition among you for the best replacement modern love piece.
What, and have it made fun of by smartasses on teh interwebs? No thanks.
re: 29
Yeah. I also have a fair number of friends and acquaintances who believe themselves to be 'working-class' despite, for example, being brought up in 2 or 3-car households where their parents owned their 4-bedroom home, owned their own business and were degree educated professionals (lawyers, chartered accountants), etc. It's a fairly common phenomenon, I suspect.
All in all, I'd rather my countrymen and women were liberal investment bankers and working-class lawyers than conservative blue-collar workers.
There's no progression, except: "Like, oh my God, I was so intolerant in my liberalism!"
Isn't this the same as last week? "omigod, like I was so intolerant in my feminism!"?
Next week it'll be "Omigod, I was so intolerant in my class rage! but you know what? Rich people are really nice!"
re: 33
That presumes of course that being blue-collar is associated with conservatism.
35:
No, it just presumes that being conservative and being working class are not mutually exclusive.
politics goes into their DNA and makes them intrinsically countercultural for their whole lives; on two occasions I have had to remind investment bankers who went to King's Cambridge that they were, in fact, investment bankers.
King's was countercultural in the 1600s.
re: 36
Never said they were mutually exclusive.
Of course a lot of media commentators do tend to talk as if working-class and conservative were fairly co-extensive.* This is played by both sides of the political fence. Conservatives denouncing liberals as elites, some liberals co-opting snobbery in their arguments against conservativism, etc.
* not accusing anyone here.
It means that a lot of blue collar workers in this country vote Republican because the R's are the party of "family values" while the D's are the party of "liberal elites," completely notwithstanding the reality of way that respective R and D platforms actually affect the working class.
Obviously, being British, I wasn't specifically referring to whether working class people vote Republican since that would be a pretty wierd/impossible thing for the working class people I know to do. ;)
But I do take the point, the UK and the US are quite different and what tends to go along with being working class here and what tends to go along with working class there might be quite different.
I tend to associate "family values" voters with suburbinites, not blue collar workers.
The problem with 33, one of the problems, is that it would result in a country with no folk or otherwise grassroots music. Depending on your reading "conservative", that is.
On second thought, there seemed to be an implied disjunction in 33, "either liberal professionals, or conservative working class", which I suppose was not actually there. ne'ermind.
I'm totally calling BS on that letter. At the very least, it was doctored pretty heavily to protect the writer's anonymity.
Bullets in the laundry? My mother would have shoved one up each of my father's nostrils to teach him to empty his pockets.
My father, by the way, is ex-military and a registered Dem who voted Kerry in '04. I'm so glad he's not online, though, and has no idea what Google is or who I am as Pants, anyway, because he would kill me for talking about his politics.
I think that the stereotype of the blue-collar Republican is to a considerable degree a self-serving Republican cliche. A lot of social conservatives are prosperous exurbanites, perhaps most of them, and for a lot of them their social conservativism is limited to heterosexual screwing around -- queer-baiting gives them cover for having good time, as long as they avoid abominations of the buttfucking sort. (I have more than one friend who has successfully cruised Christian groups).
Socially-liberal / fiscally conservative investment bankers ruined the Democratic Party, as far as I'm concerned. (And don't get me started on Log Cabin Republicans.)
My niece (NG, enlisted) said the the apolitical atmosphere in the military was in the context of a general rightwing consensus which you didn't dare challenge, and she's center-right herself. A lot of the message troops get about the military's mission is deeply right-wing.
re: 43
That was my point. That there was an implied (and possibly unintentional) disjunction and I didn't buy the disjunction.
The alleged 'conservatism' of the working-class -- at least in the UK -- is complex.
Middle-class 'liberals' will comfort themselves with the notion, for example, that they are less racist than the working class when, in fact, members of the working classes are i) more likely to live in mixed-race areas, ii) more likely to work in mixed-race working environments, iii)more likely to have friends of other races and iv) massively (and the figures on this are particularly dramatic) more likely to have a spouse from another racial background.
Ditto a lot of gender issues. Working class men, in studies done on this, are more rather than less likely to share childcare duties with their partners and more rather than less likely to shoulder a larger share of the home 'burden' -- cooking and cleaning, more rather than less likely to have a partner who earns more than they do, and so on.
On a lot of issues, members of the working classes are actually more rather than less 'liberal' than their working class counterparts.
On other issues, support for the death penalty and law and order in general, on the other hand, my understanding is that polls typically report that the working classes slant much more 'conservative'.
Crap, I meant to write:
"On a lot of issues, members of the working classes are actually more rather than less 'liberal' than their middle class counterparts."
A big problem with doing cross-pond comparisons like this is that it's very difficult to define "working class" in America.
Is it possible "bullets" was misreported from bullet shells? I know nothing from arms, but one thing instantly popped into my mind when I read this: an anecdote in a talk on the neurology of war. Apparently a military study once found soldiers putting their spent bullet shells in their pockets on the battlefield, even though it was time-consuming, because that was how they had always done it while training, and when the heartrate gets to battle levels you find yourself only doing preprogrammed actions. If you asked them about it later they wouldn't remember doing it. (There were other juicy anecdotes, like one guy, with a huge amount of practice in disarming routines, successfully disarming a robber and then handing the gun back.)
So anyway, maybe this is the careless shooter's equivalent of coins in the wash.
A round might make it through the washer, but only if the fit between the bullet and shell is tight enough to keep the powder dry. I sure as hell wouldn't want to risk it though.
But, this story is totally BS. Why the hell would anyone carry loose rounds like this? The only time I've ever carried loose rounds in my pocket is when out with my friends as a teenager shooting birds or rabbits out in the desert. Sometimes we'd throw a handful of extra .22's in our pockets when we were hiking around. But never, ever have I seen someone do this with a large round like 9mm. Live rounds are heavy. A pocketful of 9mm would be awkward.
#50
The author is pretty clearly describing live rounds, not spent shells.
34 -- Next week's Modern Love will be bylined, J. Drymala.
Don't we need to find him a nice rich girl first?
26: OK, so here's my idea -- and having never read the Modern Love column outside of this venue, I think I am an ideal blank slate on which to start the scribbling.
Are Modern Love columns ever written by boys? Or only girls? Because if they are ever written by boys, I was thinking an excellent column could be written by Charles Werner, child of wealthy liberal Manhattan parents, went to Horace Mann or some similar, thence to say Brown or alternately Bard (well probably not Bard, but some school that would be at the top of Charles' b-list when he did not get into Brown) where he hung out with hippies and majored in psychology. Graduated and though about going back for a social work degree when he was snapped up by a high-powered woman, maybe a lawyer but more likely a financier, who was attracted by his cute body and (it does not say this because he is the narrator) low IQ and lack of ambition, she marries him after a whirlwind courtship, they have a kid and at the point the article is written, maybe the kid is 2 or 3, possibly another on the way, Chuck is 1/2 sincerely digging his role of househusband, 1/2 in denial about it.
54: The issue has already been raised. We are awaiting w-lfs-n's acceptance. And with "w-lfs-n," we have a long running psuedonym that appears to be a real name. Also, if he's willing to acknowledge being the preeminent cock theorist of our time, that would be a nice touch.
Does "Charles Werner" fit that character? I made it up sort of on the fly, basically I was hoping for something that was not obviously Jewish or WASP. Is Werner a reasonably common or not-unheard-of surname among wealthy liberal Manhattanites? Now that I think of it I was probably influenced by Matt Weiner's name.
46: I know all this. But most of the blue-collar / pink-collar folks I know are pretty damn conservative, and it pisses me off.
Now that I think of it I was probably influenced by Matt Weiner's name.
No commentary on Weiner intended, I'm sure.
59 -- not at all. Just had his name floating 'round my consciousness is all.
re: 58
Yeah, and of course, you mentioned 'family-values' conservatism which is a force in the US but entirely absent from the UK so most of the working class people I know aren't conservative at all in that sense.
Break me a fucking give. West Point grads, im limited e, are a lot like Ivy grads, smart, elite, intense but they are more likely to be conservative.
yep. in fact, their profs GO to ivy league universities...funded specially by the military, and they have 3 yrs to get their phds before going back to teach at West Point. they have different academic goals so it's funny having them in classes, which i did in the past...none i met ever liked theory, or understood it well, but were good historical researchers in their fields and generally a LOT kinder and more collegial than other grad students who weren't actively one's friend already.
also, very entertaining when one in particular brought his 11 children of various ages to the dept. end of the year party and you just saw all these little redheads bobbing around at knee height in all directions...dear god...
What was I doing with someone who consorts with people who kill petite 20-year-old protesters?
That sounds like an aesthetic objection to me.
There's a dude in my dept from west point who is, in fact, getting his PhD in some ridiculously short period of time and who will return to west point to teach. He's a really nice guy. Pretty liberal too. Into Wittgenstein, IIRC.
Eleven children???? Jesus h. christ.
Do you have contact information for your friend Werner? His story sounds intriguing.
My own direct experience of the politics of military people is pre-volunteer era, so I don't know for sure. I keep hearing anecdotal evidence of liberals in the armed forces, albeit usually in junior grades.
But when the subject comes up, the opinion expressed by Lucian Truscott, in reply to Mark Kleiman's relief that a Coast Guard Admiral had been appointed to oversee parts of Katrina relief, on this subject should not be neglected:
http://www.samefacts.com/archives/military_meritocracy_/2005/09/politics_and_professionalism_in_the_modern_military.php