Bumper sticker stupidity
I'm still trying to work out the bumper stickers I saw on one car this afternoon as I was driving home from school. The first one said "Your child is an honor student, mine is in the Marine Corps." If you really think about it, that is not a great advertisement for the Marines: "The few, the proud, the C students..."?
The other one made even less sense: "My son fought in Iraq so yours can party in college." I'm still trying to work out the logic of that one. My first guess was:
A. Some kind of "we fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here" message. As in, "If our troops weren't in Iraq, by now the Iraqis would have attacked America and totally destroyed our way of life, thus preventing your kid from having the normal growing-up-and-going-to-college experience."
Of course, the above statement is preposterous. So I came up with a second interpretation, namely:
B. "If we didn't have brave volunteer soldiers like my kid, the government would reinstate the draft to fight the war and your kid would be drafted."
I think it's been shown pretty conclusively through official statements in the last few years that there is no way in heck that the administration would reinstate the draft and have to deal with the public relations nightmare of forcing people to go fight in an incredibly unpopular war. Which leads me to my final parsing:
C. "Because our military is an all-volunteer outfit, the basically unaffected civilian population can generally shrug off military actions as 'what they signed up for,' thus relieving themselves of having to worry about the morality or usefulness of such actions, which allows them to go on with their carefree daily lives and permits the government to carry on its warmongering as it sees fit with relatively little public outcry."
Finally, a true statement - but not, I suspect, what the driver intended.
The other one made even less sense: "My son fought in Iraq so yours can party in college." I'm still trying to work out the logic of that one. My first guess was:
A. Some kind of "we fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here" message. As in, "If our troops weren't in Iraq, by now the Iraqis would have attacked America and totally destroyed our way of life, thus preventing your kid from having the normal growing-up-and-going-to-college experience."
Of course, the above statement is preposterous. So I came up with a second interpretation, namely:
B. "If we didn't have brave volunteer soldiers like my kid, the government would reinstate the draft to fight the war and your kid would be drafted."
I think it's been shown pretty conclusively through official statements in the last few years that there is no way in heck that the administration would reinstate the draft and have to deal with the public relations nightmare of forcing people to go fight in an incredibly unpopular war. Which leads me to my final parsing:
C. "Because our military is an all-volunteer outfit, the basically unaffected civilian population can generally shrug off military actions as 'what they signed up for,' thus relieving themselves of having to worry about the morality or usefulness of such actions, which allows them to go on with their carefree daily lives and permits the government to carry on its warmongering as it sees fit with relatively little public outcry."
Finally, a true statement - but not, I suspect, what the driver intended.
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