The General Who Received 2 Medals Of Honor And Exposed The Dark Wall Street Underside Of Warfare

 

"TASK AND PURPOSE" By Joe Plenzler

"Those who served during the invasion and occupation of Iraq or any of the bewildering two decades in Afghanistan will see many parallels of wars sold to the American public based on false information and the minimization of the many strategic failures of senior political and military leaders."

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"The Medal of Honor, our nation’s most prestigious military accolade, has been awarded 3,530 times to 3,510 American servicemen and one servicewoman. Nineteen of the recipients have the distinction of having been awarded it twice. Of those 19, two were Marines: Dan Daly and Smedley Butler. 

While Butler is known to most Marines for this rare achievement, he is better known outside of the military community for his late-in-life epiphany that during his 33 years of Marine Corps service, he and his men fought, killed, bled, and died more to shore up the profits of Wall Street than to defend the United States from foreign invaders. 

“During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket,” Butler later said of his time in the Marine Corps in a book he wrote titled “War Is A Racket.” “I was rewarded with honors, medals, and promotions. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents.”

Jonathan M. Katz’s new book, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire follows the career of Butler from his posh early upbringing as the son of a powerful U.S. Congressman and member of a prominent Philadelphia Quaker family, and takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of his many military exploits around the world. 

(Original Caption) Frederick, MD.: Maj. Gen. John A. Lejeune, head of the Marine Corps, calls on Gen. Butler in camp at Frederick, Md.

It’s understandable for those of us who were taught in history classes that America is not an imperialist country to be taken aback by the book’s title mentioning empire.  I once thought the same. But as Katz travels in the footsteps of Butler, from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to Shanghai, China and back, he illuminates how the Corps had been used in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries to make de facto colonies out of the Philippines, Nicaragua, Panama, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas, American Samoa and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He also does a masterful job detailing our 1914 invasion of Mexico and the 1900 and 1927 occupations of China.

Smedley Butler was the Gen. Jim Mattis of his day – straight-talking, accomplished, and beloved by his troops. He was known nationally by his many nicknames: “The Fighting Hell-Devil Marine,” “Old Gimlet Eye,” “The Leatherneck’s Friend,” and “The Fighting Quaker.” 

Unlike what one might glean from official U.S. Marine Corps history classes given at boot camp and Quantico’s officer candidate school, however, Katz provides a sober look at Butler. He describes a young man, who at 16 years of age, lied to join the Corps at the start of the Spanish American War, eager to prove his manliness to his Congressman father and doting mother. He describes a young officer who led his entire battalion straight into an ambush and then returned to base burning Filipino houses along the way home. 

(Original Caption) Tientsin, China: Photo shows General Smedley Butler (marked with X), commander of American forces in China, at the edge of the foreign concessions in Tientsin watching the disturbances which marked the exit of the Northern troops and the arrival of Marshall Feng Yu-Msiang’s men. Undated photograph. (Photo by George Rinhart/Corbis via Getty Images)

He tells of how a traveling Japanese tattoo artist gave 2nd Lt. Butler a gigantic Eagle, Globe, and Anchor (the classic Marine Corps signifier) chest tattoo – which immediately got infected, relegating him to 3 days of limited duty – and how soon after, Butler and company found themselves in Northern China attacking the city of Tianjin where Butler got shot in the right thigh. Katz also tells the story of how the Marines looted the city of a lode of silver bullion with an estimated value of $11 million in today’s dollars – which was quickly sold to a J.P. Morgan representative in Shanghai; and how Butler, who turned 19 on that campaign, was promoted to the rank of captain, contracted typhoid fever, and returned to San Francisco as a 98-pound ghost.

Beyond the fascinating and familiar portrait of Butler, Katz also excels at depicting the domestic and international politics of the Banana War era and how the United States government and large corporations worked hand in hand to create a string of U.S. outposts around the world and overthrow indigenous governments for the purposes of seizing land, controlling exports, and enriching shareholders.

From Panama to Honduras, Nicaragua to Haiti, Katz reveals how the Marine Corps was used to provide muscle as Wall Street financial institutions and U.S. corporations imposed their will where they invested – rigging elections, violently stamping out dissent, installing dictators, and training and militarizing police forces to keep them in power. He also details Butler’s navigation as a Northerner and a Quaker through the cultural climate of the Corps, which was led mainly by Southern-born officers inculcated with white supremacist world views. 

One of the book’s most interesting aspects is how Katz shows how U.S. policy and our frequent military interventions in the late 1800s and early 1900s created many of the problems still present in Mexico, Central America, and many Caribbean countries.

Katz also captures the evolution of Butler’s thinking as he left active duty, and how he spent his final decade on Earth working to restrain and dial back the same military forces that he had personally helped unleash upon the world. As fascism engulfed Europe, Butler sought to atone for his past transgressions and engaged in anti-war, anti-imperialist, and anti-fascist efforts. Katz covers Butler’s advocacy in 1932 on the behalf of the impoverished World War I veterans of the Bonus Army before they were driven from Washington, D.C. with tear gas, by tanks, and at bayonet point by Army troops led by Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Katz also tells the story of how Butler was recruited in 1934 by agents of Wall Street financiers to lead 500,000 American Legionnaires in a coup to overthrow the Government of the United States and install a fascist dictatorship. 

He goes on to detail Butler’s 1935 blistering condemnation of corporate greed and war profiteering in his book War is a Racket fully 26 years before President Eisenhower warned of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. In this sense, Butler was a man way ahead of his time. 

Those who served during the invasion and occupation of Iraq or any of the bewildering two decades in Afghanistan will see many parallels of wars sold to the American public based on false information and the minimization of the many strategic failures of senior political and military leaders. Katz’s realism may shock many readers, but they would be well served to join him in pulling back the curtain, tipping over the jugs of institutional Kool-Aid, and taking a long, cold hard look in the proverbial mirror. Like watching a train wreck in slow motion, this is a raw historical perspective that will both fascinate and unsettle."

The wild story of Marine legend Smedley Butler that you won’t hear at boot camp

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Joe Plenzler is a communication consultant, leadership coach, and backcountry expert. He joined the Marine Corps and became an infantry officer. During that time he attended the Marine Corps’ Mountain Warfare and Jungle Warfare Schools and the NATO Allied Officer Winter Warfare Course in Norway. He also served in Iraq and Afghanistan and finished his military career as the spokesman, press secretary, and staff group director for the 34th, 35th, and 36th Commandants of the Marine Corps.

Joe holds a B.S. in Architecture from The Ohio State University, a M.A. in Mass Communication and Media Studies from San Diego State University, and Certificates in Organizational Consulting & Change Leadership, Facilitation, and Coaching (currently enrolled) from Georgetown University.

Medal of Honor Recipient Who Recently Died Spoke Of Our Greatest Enemy

 

Col. Puckett was the last living Medal of Honor recipient from the Korean War and Passed Away April 9, 2024

Ralph Puckett, Army Ranger legend and Medal of Honor recipient, dies at 97

"TASK AND PURPOSE" By Matt White And David Roza

"He fought Chinese soldiers in the Korean War, North Vietnamese troops in Vietnam, and he fought a long recovery from the wounds he suffered in Korea. But the Army Ranger said America’s greatest battle is not with a foreign adversary, but with itself.

“We have divided ourselves into tribes,” he told reporters on the press call. “Our enemies outside our country are aiding and abetting the dissension within our ranks. They’re watching with satisfaction as they see us destroying ourselves.”

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“While we have many enemies of this country today who want to see us fall, there’s no greater enemy in my opinion than ourselves,” Puckett said during a phone call with reporters on Thursday, the day before he received the Medal of Honor from President Joe Biden. 

The award recognized Puckett’s “extraordinary heroism” during a battle near Unsan, Korea, in November 1950. A lieutenant at the time commanding the Eighth Army Ranger Company, which consisted of 51 Army Rangers and nine Korean soldiers, Puckett held off an overwhelming force of Chinese soldiers before eventually being forced to retreat. Having been seriously wounded, he told his soldiers to leave him behind, but was ultimately dragged to safety.

Puckett was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross after the battle and offered a medical discharge, which he refused. Instead, he recovered and went on to receive a second Distinguished Service Cross, two Silver Stars for valor, five Purple Hearts, and two Bronze Star Medals with the “V” device for valor. He fought in Vietnam, retired in 1971, and has since become a living legend and mentor within the Army Ranger community.

“He feared no man, he feared no situation and he feared no enemy,” said retired Army Gen. John Walter Hendrix in the Army’s official profile of Puckett. “Clearly a unique, courageous soldier in combat and even more importantly, in my opinion, Col. Puckett was an ultimate infantry leader.”

The 94-year-old Puckett was praised by both President Biden and South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in during his award ceremony at the White House where Biden called him “a true American hero.” But the day prior, the Ranger had a warning for his fellow Americans.

Puckett pinned some of the blame on lawmakers in Congress, who he said have “put their self-interest ahead of their sworn oath” to protect democracy.

The former soldier did not point fingers at any politicians he felt were responsible for choosing self-interest over oath. However, earlier in the call, Puckett expressed his and his wife Jeannie’s faith in President Biden.

“She [Jeannie] expresses it best, she expresses exactly the way I felt about the President when he spoke to me,” Puckett said when recalling Biden’s call telling him he would receive the Medal of Honor. “’This is a man that’s leading our country. I think I can depend on him. So could you.’”

During the award ceremony, Biden also highlighted Puckett’s role as a commander in the early years after the military was desegregated in 1948.

“In an Army that had only recently been integrated, his team included Black, Latino, and Asian American members,” Biden said. “As my mother would say, ‘God love you, man.’”

When the military was considering opening all combat positions to women in 2015, Puckett looked forward to seeing women meet the Ranger standards, saying “I want to see them do it,” Biden recalled.

Whether these anecdotes reflect Puckett’s political views is unclear. However, the Ranger was vocal in his endorsement of one President in particular: George Washington, who the Ranger called “his favorite American.” Specifically, Puckett referred to the grim frozen days of Valley Forge, where Washington and his men weathered through the snowy forests to emerge ready to fight the British for American independence in the Revolutionary War.

“He was amazing, he never gave up. When things were the toughest, George Washington was there,” Puckett said. “He gave everything that he had to train and to lead his soldiers and to fight for freedom. George Washington is my favorite hero, because of the man that he was, the true soldier and leader that he was, and all he did for our country.”

But it wasn’t just Washington who rallied in Valley Forge that winter of 1777 to 1778. It was the common farmers-turned-soldiers under him. Those soldiers stuck with the general and with the cause through the snow and disease to fight, playing just as big a role as the famous founding fathers did in creating this country, Puckett said. 

Now, we have a responsibility to carry on that tradition. Just as Abraham Lincoln once said “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” so too must we “come together and fight together as a United States of America,” Puckett said.

“Our country was not created to be the States of America, but rather we were named the United States of America,” he said. “It’s my hope that all Americans will come to think about that and adapt that to their own thought process, to their own belief system.

“Our country depends on you, me, what you do every day and how you live,” Puckett added. “Without you, we will not be able to maintain our freedom. It depends on us.”

Beyond The 'Broken Veteran'

 

Image: Veterans Transition Resource Center

“WAR ON THE ROCKS” By Rebecca Burgess

“The broken veteran narrative, unintentionally fueled by the tone of veteran legislation, certainly contributes to the real difficulties today’s veterans face in transitioning into civilian life.

The unexplored historical relationship between public perception, legislation, and veteran identity suggests that reframing veteran legislation and strengthening civilian identity may be the Joint Action Plan today’s veterans need to thrive after their  service.”

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“America does have a “veteran problem,” but perhaps not the one we’ve concentrated our popular attention on. Nor is today’s version unique to the 21st century.  Throughout U.S. history, war generations have emphasized either the challenge veterans can pose to social stability, or the challenge commercial society can pose to the disabled veteran. Legislative solutions have been framed accordingly: The particular tone of veteran legislation has historically emphasized the disadvantages, if not “brokenness,” of veterans.

In parallel, veterans have developed their own unique sense of identity. “Veteranness” has mutated from a personality trait before the Civil War to a comprehensive sense of self with its own marketing brand in the post-9/11 All Volunteer Force age.

In 1944, sociologist Willard Waller was anticipating the re-civilianizing of the nearly 16 million American servicemen of World War II, many of whom would soon be in university classrooms like his at Columbia.

As long as America had had veterans, Waller pointed out in “The Veteran Comes Back,” it has had had some type of “veteran problem.” That stood to some reason:

Our kind of democratic society is probably worse fitted than any other for handling veterans. An autocracy, caring nothing for its human materials, can use up a man and throw him away. A socialistic society that takes from each according to his abilities and gives to each according to his needs can use up a man and then care for him the rest of his life. But a democracy, a competitive democracy like ours, that cares about human values but expects every man to look out for himself, uses up a man and returns him to the competitive process, then belatedly recognizes the injustice of his procedure and makes lavish gestures of atonement in his direction.

The sociologist wasn’t praising nondemocratic forms of rule. He was highlighting how the principles around which the experiment of American democracy was organized — liberty and equality, personal responsibility, private property, and limited government — exist in some legitimate tension with how such a government ought properly to acknowledge and repay individuals who have defended it.

Waller believed the real questions about veterans resuming their civilian way of life were bound up with the psychology of the soldier. Returning the soldier to civilian life in the modern world, he argued, had to start with understanding the veteran’s attitudes against the backdrop of industrial warfare, mass conscription, and a cog-in-the-machine mentality. “We must learn what it is … to be, for a time, expendable, and then to be expendable no more.” What happens, he wondered, when the “expendable one” returns from facing death?

George Washington had puzzled over a similar difficulty. The commander of the Continental Army felt intuitively that veterans needed to maintain a sense of self after military service. In his Farewell Orders to the Armies of the United States, Washington recommended that veterans funnel their energies as soon as possible into active pursuits, and “prove themselves not less virtuous and useful as Citizens, than they [were] persevering and victorious as soldiers.”

Washington’s insight was that soldiers cannot simply remain ex-soldiers once their period of service is fulfilled. He knew that soldiers “walk the weird wall at the edge of civilization,” as Reed Robert Bonnadona puts it: The people who have historically been the staunchest defenders of their societies have also sometimes posed the greatest threat to it. From this juxtaposition Washington formed his idea that the citizen-turned-soldier could — and must — turn back into the citizen again.

For Washington, ex-soldiers’ veteran status was only one (temporary) part of their American identity. This was a crucial plank of his argument that the new nation could have a professional army without endangering the liberties of citizens. Alexis de Tocqueville gave the more explicit explanation several decades later, when he showed why the American soldier displays “a faithful image of the nation.” Most democratic citizens would rather reserve their passions and ambitions for civilian life than for martial grandeur, he wrote, because they think of military service as at most a passing obligation, not an identity. “They bow to their military duties, but their souls remain attached to the interests and desires they were filled with in civil life.”

In the era of Washington and Tocqueville, American veterans were not an alien faction different from society at large. Since then, however, the end of each subsequent conflict has spurred the public to think of ex-soldiers as a discrete group with certain special claims on society’s gratitude. The War of 1812 cemented the outcome of the Revolution and gave Americans a renewed sense of their independence. The public’s attention turned to appreciate the role of the Continental Army. The aging of the surviving soldiers and some public romanticizing of their persons as archetypes of national character, led to a public movement in favor of pensions for the neglected “suffering soldier.” The “suffering soldier” became such a powerful public trope that even though the Senate invoked 40 years of accepted republican principle about pension establishments being aristocratic and corruption-prone, President James Monroe signed the Revolutionary War Pension Act in 1818.  The legislation fused the idea of a service pension to the concept of public assistance for the aged poor, laying the groundwork for how the system of American military service-related benefits would evolve.

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the changing face of industrialized society, technologies of war, and beliefs about the role of government have expanded each generation’s understanding of its debt to soldiers. The early practice of granting only disability pensions to war veterans grew to include professional or vocational training after World War I, to college tuition assistance and low-interest home loans after World War II.  Finally, these benefits were expanded to all who have served in uniform, whether during war or peacetime. At the same time, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs expanded the paradigm of government’s obligations to all citizens. Nevertheless, today, there are those who would extend the above-mentioned benefits even to soldiers with an “Other Than Honorable” discharge — reflecting how much veteran identity has come to be wedded to a legal status premised on the perceived cost of service. The pension/benefits narrative has corralled anyone who has worn a uniform into a unique category of society in the eyes of the public.

The way veterans have responded to their evolving status has both reflected and informed national attitudes. Largely because of the sheer numbers involved in the Civil War and, especially, in World War I, soldiers who had survived these massive conflicts, protracted campaigns, and deadlier weapons began to think of themselves more narrowly — as survivors of epic experiences who would forever have more in common with those who had seen such killing fields than with civilians who had not. John A. Casey charts this transformation in “New Men,” showing that whereas former soldiers and civilians alike once viewed military service more as an episode in a man’s life and a set of acquired skills that all could appreciate, in the post-bellum era both groups began to view service as a transformative experience that produced a new identity, one civilians couldn’t interpret.

Historians and military scholars debate exactly how different the Civil War was from prior conflicts. Casey argues that “it is the changed rhythm of war more than anything that marks it as different.” While more traditional set-piece battles marked the early campaigns of the war, the last two years witnessed nearly continuous fighting. Soldiers had no time to conceptualize what they had lived through or to recuperate. This “changed them in ways they never completely understood. All that was certain was they could not fully return to their antebellum sense of identity … They had been baptized by war and born again as new men.”

For Casey, the Civil War was when veterans and civilians changed their conception of war from an event to a liminal experience transforming the warfighter’s consciousness, analogous to religious conversion. It was Civil War veteran Oliver Wendell Holmes who likened combat to being “touched by fire,” like the Apostles. The postbellum trail of fiction and nonfiction writings authored by veterans illustrate this mindset. William Tecumseh Sherman’s “Memoirs,” Sam Watkins’s “Company Aytch,” and Ambrose Bierce’s stories all evince a struggle to find coherence in the traumatic events the authors experienced, a struggle to show the “real” war, and a sense of the inadequacy of their portrayal to make the uninitiated civilian reader “get it.”

Civil War veterans such John William De Forest (“Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty”), and Winslow Homer (“The Empty Sleeve at Newport”) also showed this literary and artistic consciousness at work. Lanier’s protagonist, Confederate veteran Phil Sterling, is a number rather than a name, his identity shattered by incarceration in a prisoner-of-war camp. Once released, the love of friends and family enables Sterling to recover his name and identity, but his combat experiences prevent him from feeling “at home.” Spectators of the same war, but not participants in it, Sterling’s loved ones cannot truly understand him.

“War literature” as a unique field of academic study is generally considered to have originated in the wake of the Civil War, Casey writes. These ex-soldiers presented wartime memories as something they alone could discuss, forging the path for how the Ernest Hemingways and other, more familiar “Lost Generation” soldier-poets of World War I wrote about war and the fighting man, establishing a now-defined genre.

Buttressing such artistic expressions, robust veterans’ associations, helped cement a national concept of “the veteran.” The Grand Army of the Republic provided a blueprint for the multiplicity of veterans associations, like the American Legion, that emerged after World War I in America and then in nearly every other country that had participated in the Great War. The visible, concrete image of the invalid veteran sans leg or arm played a significant role in transforming the concept of veteran into an enduring identity. Especially in France and America, these national associations helped solidify the public concept of the veteran as having unique needs necessitating specialized care and deserving of government support.

Cultural elements and political events played a tangible role here. Andrew J. Huebner reminds us in “The Warrior Image” that war correspondents and photography, while relevant from the Mexican War to the Civil War, swelled during WWI, though much of the imagery was censored from the public view until after the Armistice. The rise of newspaper publishing put images and accounts of struggling veterans in anybody’s hand. Meanwhile, the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars held public rallies advocating for veterans’ benefits and encouraged the attenuate Bonus March, making the political presence of veterans impossible to ignore. Internationally, the Conférence Internationale des Associations de Mutilés et Anciens Combattants aimed to unite all veterans and “war invalids” of the Great War, including from former enemy countries Germany, Austria, and Bulgaria. In 1922, it boasted over 10 million members. And while many states struggled to respond to their invalid veterans, they often supplied them with free or discounted railway travel, enabling them to attend far-flung veteran rallies and reunions. The image of the permanently changed veteran was literally on the move.

It was this newer understanding of the veteran as a psychological identity, earned in the crucible of war, that Waller had in mind in 1944 when he asked what happens when “the expendable one returns.” Like Washington, Waller thought a transition back into the civilian community was both possible and essential, but he believed that post-service education would be key. Education, he argued, would give the soldier the mental tools with which to make sense of his warfighting experience juxtaposed against his perception of the civilian’s perspective.

Although Waller didn’t live to witness the effects of the 1944 GI Bill — the “Serviceman’s Readjustment Act” — the bill supported Waller’s theory and is widely considered to be one of the most successful pieces of legislation in American history (so successful that Great Society programs were patterned off it). Through its education and vocational training assistance and small business loans, the GI Bill helped millions of ex-soldiers bridge their war experience back to the civilian sector, to the net enrichment of their families and civil society. The absence of a public discussion of a postwar “veteran problem,” in comparison to the post-World War I and Civil War eras, reflects the success of the legislation.

In the decades since World War II, society has moved well past Washington and Waller’s viewpoints about post-service identity. Thanks to the cultural conflicts of the Vietnam era, the rise of identity politics, the medicalization of behavior, and the valorization of victimhood, in the era of the professionalized All-Volunteer Force, veterans are viewed as a “tribe apart.” Their increasingly medicalized image is linked to the relatively new field of neuropsychiatry. After Vietnam, Hollywood helped promulgate a perception of veterans as “walking time bombs.” This view was reinforced by  front-page stories in the New York Times proclaiming veterans to be “psychiatric casualties of war.”

In the late 1970s and 1980s, an extreme version of this diagnosis was crowned with scientific gravitas when a group of activist-psychiatrists led by the prominent Robert Jay Lifton testified that the veteran “returns as a tainted intruder … likely to seek continuing outlets for a pattern of violence to which they have become habituated.” Popular culture painted soldiers as “baby killers.” Within a generation, ex-soldiers in the public consciousness went from needing education to needing to be “rehumaniz[ed],” as Lifton put it.

Since 9/11, society has largely softened that extreme characterization of veterans. Instead of killers or victims, veterans are seen as victims, heroes, or victim-heroes. But that narrative stands in its own need of rehumanization — the modern-day perception of veterans needs to be brought down from mythologized heroes on a pedestal to the real world of public servants, adventure seekers, and bill payers who volunteer for military service. And yet, despite a fair amount of literature supporting this point, the narrative does not change much.

One reason for this is clear, and has to do with the historical originals of the concept of veteran identity. Legislation for veterans has traditionally been premised on a pension/benefits model that assumed that war — and now that any military service — adversely costs the soldier. Today’s identity-driven politics is particularly conducive to this narrative, as many in society seek to identify rights and bring about public policy outcomes specific to discrete, often historically underrepresented groups. And U.S. soldiers certainly qualify: Less than one percent of a nation’s population volunteers for active duty service. American soldiers become even intellectually underrepresented when the majority of their peers don’t know anything about them.

A second reason for the continued valorization of veterans follows from this last: Americans may have lost the robust sense of citizenship that previous generations relied on to make civilian life vibrant enough for veterans to embrace it. In the All-Volunteer Force era, perhaps it’s the civilian majority with its loose sense of civic connectedness that makes it difficult for veterans to subsume a veteran identity within the generalized civilian one. When Washington argued for former soldiers to think of themselves as fully civilian-citizens with a set of acquired military skills, many Americans felt a sense of patriotism and civic identity that shaped the calendar of their yearly activities. Missouri painter George Caleb Bingham may have over-eulogized this civic engagement in “Stump Speaking” and “County Election;” nevertheless, that strong sense seems to have weakened considerably since the 19th century. Today’s America no longer shares that identity, as suggested by factors from low voter turnout, “Man on the Street”-style public confessions of civic and historical ignorance, disinterest in civic education, to the “bowling alone” culture decried by Harvard’s Robert Putnam. In Putnam’s view, the comparably steep membership losses since the 1960s among trade unions, professional associations, chapter-based voluntary membership federations, and community groups documents “the erosion of America’s social connectedness and community involvement.” This is to say nothing of the 2016 election, whose after-action report notes the role that a hollowed-out sense of citizenship thanks to globalization played in the electoral returns.

To that first generation of Americans, citizenship wasn’t a passive label, but an active way of life. Jefferson relayed the sense of this understanding in his comment that citizenship is composed of the civic knowledge of rights, duties, and how to judge individuals worthy of public office; the practice of sound civic habits; and importantly, an informed attachment to the American regime and principles of the Constitution.

America’s political class today doesn’t exactly articulate this. As that California teacher’s rant shows, angry citizens are present in all layers of society. But we have little corresponding understanding of a robust citizenship animated by an informed attachment to American laws, principles and institutions, and the need for each generation to perpetuate them. It may not be possible — or preferable given the dynamics of today’s professional All-Volunteer Force — to return entirely to Washington’s designation of the veteran as simply the citizen. But it is both possible and pressing to return to that robust sense of citizenship that enabled citizens to be soldiers, and soldiers citizens.”

Rebecca Burgess manages the Program on American Citizenship at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on veterans and their role in civil society and politics. She is the author of “Second Service: Military Veterans and Public Office.”

Beyond the ‘Broken Veteran’: A History of America’s Relationship With Its Ex-Soldiers

Are Americans Truly Independent?

THE BRANCH UPON WHICH WE SIT 

By Ken Larson 

Technology has permitted marvelous advances and opportunities in communication and convenience. 

It has also impacted independent thought and created concerns with respect to privacy and transparency in government. Our focus has shifted recently to sophisticated forms of government technological control that may be both legal and illegal, and are being challenged in our court systems.

Mass marketing and communications have created expectations beyond reality in venues from romance web sites to building wealth.  They have also confused us about our government functions, our elected representatives and where they are taking us.

We have grown used to the convenience of viewing the world through media sound bites, opinionated, biased, news and insincere, short sighted, money driven politicians, who are financed by loosely controlled contributors and influenced by lobbying firms that spend enormous amounts of money made available by the wealthy to impact our opinions.

We have become less competitive in the global economy, as a concentration of wealth has shifted to a very few and our corporations evolve operations outside the country, taking the resulting tax relief, profits, investments and resources with them. 

THE CONUNDRUM

Consider simpler times a few years past. Trust was necessary in many venues as a means of survival on a day-to-day basis. We relied on others extensively for our well-being from our local store to our banker, from the policeman to the politician. And we knew them all better, we could reach out and touch them and we were not viewing them in sound bites and web sites, nor were we being bombarded with multiple forms of input to digest about them.

Americans have very little trust in the current era.  We see a negative, idealistically bound, bloated government, growing like a money- eating beast and putting generations in hock with unwarranted incursions into foreign countries and a focus on big corporations and big business. 

THE CHALLENGE

The key to our true independence is in becoming involved as individuals, taking flight on wings that grow strong by exercising our intellect, our shared opinions and our participation in government.  We must research a personal perspective based on our personal values and take time in the fast pace our culture demands to communicate with those we elect to government – before and after the election.

Trust is hard to establish in the modern era.  We see very little true statesmanship in the good people we send to Washington, who promptly become ground up in the huge machine there in order to survive.  That machine must change and the people we send to change it must share that objective with us. 

HOW STRONG ARE OUR WINGS?

Communications and expectations are two vital elements in measuring trust.
To an extraordinary extent, the age in which we live is requiring us to redefine trust and the degree to which communication and expectations contribute to it.  To become truly independent, we must become much more sophisticated ourselves in the manner with which we view all this input and sift it in a meaningful way to have true trust.

To a very large degree this is a personal responsibility. We must become involved, make prudent judgments and think for ourselves, then communicate our expectations to those who represent us.

If we do not, we run a high risk of tyranny and that fact is inescapable. 

Our constitutional republic is at war with our unbalanced capitalistic economic system. 

Written over 200 years ago , the constitution is now being shred by opportunistic forces  using  technology and communication to pierce freedom weakness seams in the document that the founders did not anticipate or imagine. 

 

Through the struggles of our times  the bedrock democratic ideal behind that document can only be saved by the people of this country themselves.

Ken Larson