Ask Your Physician if Rage is Right for You

It’s been a long day and I have neither time nor energy to tell you tonight of the good old days when Rush was fun to listen to.

But I can relate that I tuned in today en route to campus and El Rushbo was angry from the word “go.” I couldn’t stay focused on the content of his broadcast, although I did manage to learn that “environmental wackos” are the true culprits in the California wildfires, and that “act of God” is the California liberals’ only form of acknowledgment that God exists.

Instead I found myself pondering his tone, which was one of continuous, sputtering, indignant rage. I wondered how anyone could endure listening to such a tone for three solid hours.

I tried a thought experiment. We’ve all had the experience of being treated badly, telling a friend about it, and hearing them get angry on our behalf. “That stinks! Of all the nerve! How dare that bastard say such a thing to you! What a complete asshole! I’d like to give them a piece of my mind!”

I know it can feel good when someone becomes indignant for my sake. It’s a straightforward, unadorned validation that I actually matter.

But suppose my friend was still erupting with righteous fury an hour later? Would it still feel good?

I mean, past a certain point, isn’t it painful to be in the presence of an angry tone of voice, even if it isn’t directed at you—even, indeed, if it’s an angry tone enlisted on your behalf?

I couldn’t imagine being comfortable around a devoted friend who maintained such a tone, much less choosing to tune in specifically to hear it.

And yet millions of people not only *can* imagine it, they regularly make it part of their day.

The Birth of Modern Talk Radio

I spoke before about the crisis on the AM dial: the way in which its audience, interested mainly in popular music, forsook AM radio for the better quality reception offered by FM. AM stations urgently needed a new format that would grab listeners. It found one in the form of talk radio.

Talk radio was nothing new. There was “The Larry King Show,” for example, which hit the airwaves in 1978 and rapidly acquired a wide following, including my father, who was often still wide awake after the TV stations had signed off for the evening. “The Larry King Show” suited him perfectly because it aired from midnight to 5:30 a.m. He’d listen to it in the dark until he finally dozed off.

King’s epitomized what was then the most common talk show format, which he did better than anyone else. During the first hour of the program he’d interview a guest—frequently the author of some recent arresting book—and do so in an affable style based upon genuine curiosity. Convinced that King was really interested in getting to know them, guests were often utterly disarmed and therefore more candid than they might otherwise have been. This knack was a key to King’s success—a knack he eventually carried to television once cable news entered the scene.

After the first hour, King continued the interview for two more hours but invited callers to participate, which they did in droves. At 3 a.m. he excused the guest and engaged directly with callers for the rest of the show, usually signing off with a brief, middle-of-the-road political commentary.

My father liked King because he made good company. He also said that he usually learned something from the show, and he appreciated that.

“The Larry King Show” (which ultimately reached 500 markets) offered one model of an effective talk show format. But the one that ultimately proved most relevant to conservative talk radio was an offshoot of the durable “Morning Zoo” format which dominated the air waves as listeners got ready for their day and hit the road for the weekday commute. The Morning Zoo was (and remains) a hybrid between talk and music. DJs would spin the occasional platter but they spent a lot of air time cracking wise with each other, pulling various stunts—the surprise prank call to some bewildered soul was a source of cheap, reliable fun—and in general affecting a zany atmosphere with an irreverent style of humor.

This gave rise to the “shock jock,” who jettisoned the music and pushed the Morning Zoo format as hard as it would go. Unlike King, shock jocks thrived on controversy and tested the limits of what they could get away with short of costing a radio station its license. The master of this format was Howard Stern, who honed his craft locally starting in 1975—moving several times to stronger markets—and took “The Howard Stern Show” nationwide in 1986. In tandem with sidekick Robin Quivers, Stern eventually reached an audience of 20 million listeners—and incidentally cost his station licensees $2.5 million in fines from the Federal Communications Commission.

Then there was Don Imus, another shock jock whose “Imus in the Morning” premiered in 1968 and acquired a nationwide audience during its 36 years on the radio (plus another 11 on cable TV). While abjuring Stern’s lusty embrace of being a thorough-going asshole, Imus had a crusty style and was an inveterate contrarian. He eventually shifted to an emphasis on news and politics—but not before the appearance of the main savior of AM radio: the redoubtable Rush Limbaugh, El Rushbo, founder of the EIB (Excellence in Broadcasting) Network for Advanced Conservative Studies, with half his brain tied behind his back just to make it fair.

Rush will dominate the next several installments of this effort to comprehend conservative media, but don’t lose track of his progenitors: King, Stern, and Imus. They knew how to entertain listeners day after day, for hours on end. Limbaugh took their genius and transferred it to politics.

Tune In for Crisis on Your AM Dial

If you bought a car in the 1950’s, 60’s, or 70’s, this is what your radio would look like.

It’s the point of departure for understanding the rise of conservative talk radio, and I’m realizing with horror that if I were to give a lecture on the subject to my undergraduates, I’d have to spend five minutes explaining how this thing worked.

But the key thing is that you’re looking at an AM radio, and AM radio basically sucks, at least if you want to listen to music. The Beatles, Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin, Elton John—90 percent of the time we got our first introduction to their music via the monaural speaker of an AM car radio. It was cool but only because we didn’t know any better: you’d put up with the static and the mediocre sound quality and save the quality listening experience for your record player at home.

If you were at home you could also listen on FM, whose sound quality was a lot better, had very little static, and could broadcast in stereo. But for reasons I don’t really understand FM didn’t work well in automobiles. In most makes and models they weren’t a standard accessory even if you could get one.

But eventually—the early 1980s or thereabouts—FM radio became common in automobiles. Given a choice between listening to music in AM or FM there was no contest. It was FM, hands down. No static at all, as the Steely Dan song put it.

That left a lot of AM radio stations high and dry. They had to figure out a way to stay alive. Some of them didn’t. Others limped along, often in an Easy Listening format. It was sad. But AM could still do one thing as competently as FM: it could broadcast a human voice. And that’s how talk radio became a staple on the AM dial. Not conservative talk radio—that’s not yet part of the story. But without the eclipse of AM by FM in American automobiles the story doesn’t begin.

Caught in the Cross Fire: A Visit to Lynndie England's Hometown

The following is a re-printed post I published twelve years ago, back when this blog was in its infancy and entitled Interrogating the Project of Military History.  The post was originally entitled "Drive-by Journalism," but since Rush Limbaugh long ago adopted "the drive-bys" as an epithet for mainstream media journalists, I felt obliged to change it.  This is one instance, though, when the term seems entirely appropriate.


June 7 [2004] - The Society for Military History had its annual meeting on May 20-23 in Bethesda, Maryland.  The Iraq war hung heavily over the whole affair, partly because the war hangs heavily over the whole country, but mostly because the conference organizers looked deliberately toward the strategic policy-making community.  Bethesda, after all, is cheek by jowl next to Washington, DC.

Between one thing and another, I had not attended an SMH meeting since 1997.  I went this year strictly out of a sense of professional obligation.  I wasn't looking forward to it.  (I wound up having a far better experience than I expected, but that's for a future entry.)

Consequently I took my sweet time getting there, stopping off at the National Road/Zane Grey Museum in eastern Ohio, then at a nearby antique store.  I stuck with the Interstate until I reached Washington, Pennsylvania, at which point I decided I'd take US 40--the old National Road--down to Fort Necessity National Battlefield.  I'd never been there before.  It's the most poorly-chosen military position I have ever seen.  I had read about it, but jeez.  You look at it--a tiny stockade in a marshy meadow, too close to the woods and with a constricted field of fire--and you can't believe the guy who selected it wound up winning the war for American independence.

I didn't think beforehand about the route I'd take after visiting Fort Necessity, but it turns out that US 40 dumps you onto I-68 a few miles west of Cumberland, Maryland, which, it suddenly occurred to me, was only a few miles from Fort Ashby, West Virginia, home town of Lynndie England.  These days everybody knows Pvt. England by sight if not by name:  she's the female MP pointing at the genitals of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib with one hand while giving a "thumbs up" with the other.  Even after a day of dawdling down the highway, I was in no hurry to reach Bethesda, so I found the exit to West Virginia's State Route 28 and drove the thirteen miles to Fort Ashby, population 1354. [1380 per the 2010 census]

The community, about a mile square, spreads out from the single major intersection--Washington Street and Green Street-- which sports a solitary traffic light.  It has a gas station, a convenience store, a Dairy Queen clone, but no McDonald's (whether a town has a McDonald's is my rough-and-ready way of determining if it's a real town or merely a wide spot in the road).  After the prisoner abuse story broke in late April, a flurry of journalists showed up to evaluate Fort Ashby on the theory this would tell us something about Lynndie England, who had immediately become the poster child for all things nasty at Abu Ghraib.  Since the easy thing was to portray Fort Ashby as if it were so far removed from civilization that its residents had to pipe in daylight, that's the way the media tended to portray it.  And yes, there are a few double-wide trailers and maybe the odd junker on blocks in the front yard.  Mostly, though, the houses looked like this one:

The house looks remarkably like the split-levels in my own subdivision, except that the shrubs are better pruned. 

My plan was to find a diner or, preferably, a bar where I could nurse a drink while eavesdropping on the local conversation.  Initially I was disappointed:  nothing suitable caught my eye.  I was about to leave Fort Ashby when I belatedly realized that at the southwest corner of the main intersection stood a ramshackle building that looked as if it might be a bar and--yep--turned out to be just that.  According to a newspaper article I found this morning on LEXIS-NEXIS, the place is called the Corner Club Saloon.  But since almost nothing in the article resembled anything I saw, I give no assurances the name is correct.
I was wearing Dockers, a button-down shirt, and a sport jacket:  much too dressed up for the Corner Club Saloon.  But nobody called me a dude, challenged me to explain what I was doing there, or offered to rearrange my face.  Instead the bartender served me one of those low-carb Michelob Ultras and said, in response to my question, that yes, he sold quite a few of them.  The guys to my right continued to shoot pool.  The women to my left continued an urgent discussion of something that very obviously had nothing at all to do with Iraq, Abu Ghraib, or Lynndie England.

As the minutes ticked by and I reflected with each new sip that $1.75 spent on a Michelob Ultra was $1.75 utterly wasted, I hoped against hope that a) the television above the bar from which CNN Headline News silently flickered would yield an image of the prisoner abuse scandal and, ideally, Lynndie England; and b) somebody in the bar would see it and comment on it.  No such luck.  But there was something homey and comfortable about the Corner Club Saloon.  After a while I didn't give a hoot about my original mission.  Instead I got another beer, looked over the menu, and ordered some chicken tenders for supper.

About the time that the chicken tenders arrived, the woman at my left turned to me and asked, in a neighborly sort of way that was neither challenge nor come-on, who I was.  It was just her way of including me in the group.  I gave her my name and said I was passing through on my way to Washington, DC.  We must have chatted for five or ten minutes before she asked, inevitably, what had brought me to Fort Ashby.  Any story I made up would sound so obviously made up as to be insulting, so I said, "Well, to tell you the truth, it was originally because I knew this was Lynndie England's hometown.  But I don't want to speak of rope in the house of the hanged, so we don't need to talk about that."

It turned out that my new friend, whom I'll call Kitty, did in fact want to talk about that--or, more precisely, about the town's recent experience with the media.  In fact, she wanted everyone within earshot to talk about it.  "Hey, do you know why he's here?  It's that Lynndie England story."




The men in the bar didn't immediately pick up on this subject, but the women did, especially Kitty and the Corner Club Saloon's other bartender, whose name was Colleen Kesner.  Colleen was married to the first bartender, Randall, and together they had owned the Corner Club Saloon for not quite a year.  Kitty wavered between wanting to talk to me and wondering if I was another reporter "out to do a number on us."  (A friend of Kitty's even patted me down in a joking-but-serious way, and there was brief consternation when she mistook my cell phone for a tape recorder.)  Colleen, on the other hand, gave me the benefit of the doubt and accepted me cordially on my own terms.

Although Lynndie England is far and away Fort Ashby's most famous persona, Colleen was more or less thrust into the role of Fort Ashby's civilian face, thanks largely to the efforts of a reporter named Sharon Churcher.  I have now read a number of press accounts of life in Fort Ashby and while they all lean far too heavily on the Appalachia stereotype--Fort Ashby is, in fact, a near-suburb of Cumberland and its population includes doctors, attorneys, dentists and accountants--only Churcher decided to engage in wholesale character assassination.

Here's the article Churcher wrote.  It was published originally in a New York tabloid, as I understand; this is the article as reprinted in the Sydney, Australia, Daily Telegraph on May 7:

Good ol' girl who enjoyed cruelty

POINTING crudely at the genitals of a naked, hooded Iraqi, the petite brunette with a cigarette hanging from her lips epitomised America's shame over revelations US soldiers routinely tortured inmates at Abu Ghraib jail near Baghdad.

Lynndie England, 21, a rail worker's daughter, comes from a trailer park in Fort Ashby, West Virginia, which locals proudly call "a backwoods world".

She faces a court martial, but at home she is toasted as a hero.

At the dingy Corner Club Saloon they think Lynndie England did nothing wrong.

"A lot of people here think they ought to just blow up the whole of Iraq," Colleen Kesner said.

"To the country boys here, if you're a different nationality, a different race, you're sub-human. That's the way girls like Lynndie are raised.

"Tormenting Iraqis, in her mind, would be no different from shooting a turkey. Every season here you're hunting something. Over there, they're hunting Iraqis."

In Fort Ashby, in the isolated Appalachian mountains 260km west of Washington, the poor, barely-educated and almost all-white population talk openly about an active Ku Klux Klan presence.

There is little understanding of the issues in Iraq and less of why photographs showing soldiers from the 372nd Military Police Company, mostly from around Fort Ashby, abusing prisoners has caused a furor.

Like many, England signed up to make money and see the world. After her tour of duty, she planned to settle down and marry her first love, Charles Graner.

Down a dirt track at the edge of town, in the trailer where England grew up, her mother Terrie dismissed the allegations against her daughter as unfair.

"They were just doing stupid kid things, pranks. And what the Iraqis do to our men and women are just? The rules of the Geneva Convention, do they apply to everybody or just us?" she asked.

She said she didn't know where her daughter was being held, but had spoken to her on the phone.

"She told me nothing happened which wasn't ordered by higher up," she said.

"They are trying to pin all of this on the lower ranks. My daughter was just following orders. I think there's a conspiracy. "

A colleague of Lynndie's father said people in Fort Ashby were sick of the whining.

"We just had an 18-year-old from round here killed by the Iraqis," he said.

"We went there to help the jackasses and they started blowing us up. Lynndie didn't kill 'em, she didn't cut 'em up. She should have shot some of the suckers."

Six soldiers from the 372nd are facing court-martial.

The commander of the prison service in Iraq, Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski, 50, has been suspended from duty and is expected to be charged.

Colleagues of the tough, super-fit officer last night described her as a woman with one mission -- to raise her own profile.

Sources also said soldiers at Abu Ghraib, where Saddam Hussein was held after his capture, were often drunk -- including when the shocking pictures were taken.

One colleague said: "Janis sees herself as making way for women to get to the top in the US Army. But many of her soldiers said she had been promoted beyond her ability because she was a woman.

"She was out of her depth and on a mission to raise her own profile. Now, she ll be forced to quit.

"She should have been aware what her troops were doing, but she wasn't."

Another soldier facing charges is Staff Sergeant Ivan Chip Frederick, 37, of Dillwyn, Virginia.

His father, Ivan Frederick, 76, said his son, an ex-prison guard, sent him a journal outlining the barbaric treatment of Iraqi PoWs.

He said his son was a scapegoat.

"He was unhappy with what he saw. There is no way Chip would do these things unless he was ordered to do," Mr Frederick said.

Pentagon officials have confirmed that other alleged incidents of torture under Brig-General Karpinski's regime were being investigated.

A military source said: "The word is that she was told it would be beneficial if the prisoners were willing to talk.

"Let's just say a blind eye was turned to certain events."

Colleen had a copy of the article behind the counter and showed it to me.  She said that the reporter had appeared at midnight on a Thursday or Friday night at the height of turkey-hunting season, when the place was full of hunters and so raucous with conversation you could barely understand a word anyone said to you.  Colleen had not yet heard about the prisoner abuse scandal, Lynndie England's role in it, and possibly even about the fact that England was a hometown girl.  (Others in the bar knew the England family; I'm not sure Colleen did.)  The reporter had to explain all these things to Colleen before she could ask Colleen to comment on them.

I doubt if the reporter could hear much of anything Colleen said in response, and in any case she spoke to Colleen only a few minutes.  I wound up talking to Colleen for three hours--far longer, she said, than any of the reporters who interviewed her.  The impression I had of her was of someone who habitually refrained from passing judgment, who was keenly aware of the complexities of living as a human being in this world, and who had a fundamental sympathy toward pretty much everyone.  Kitty, for her part, was emphatically of the opinion that nothing--not orders from a superior, not the transgressions of the prisoners--could justify what England and her comrades had done.  "Two wrongs don't make a right."  Nobody toasted Lynndie as a heroine.  No one defended her.  The most anyone did was to stick up for the young woman's parents, to say they were good people.
Colleen herself mainly seemed hurt and embarrassed to have been portrayed as saying anything remotely like:  "A lot of people here think they ought to just blow up the whole of Iraq . . . .  To the country boys here, if you're a different nationality, a different race, you're sub-human. That's the way girls like Lynndie are raised. Tormenting Iraqis, in her mind, would be no different from shooting a turkey. Every season here you're hunting something. Over there, they're hunting Iraqis."

I don't think Colleen said anything of the kind.  In fact, I doubt if Colleen said anything quotable at all.  Everything I heard her say had a reflective, tentative quality--a sort of principled refusal to draw conclusions before the facts were in--the kind of hesitation that leaves each would-be sound bite still-born.  This must have been maddening for a reporter on a deadline, besides which it largely undercut the point of doing a story on Fort Ashby.  The fact of the matter is, a visit to Fort Ashby sheds absolutely no light whatever on what transpired in Abu Ghraib, but when your editor has sent you to get a story and you've traveled hundreds of miles:  well, if the bar is loud enough and conversation is difficult enough, your ears can hear pretty much whatever you need them to hear.

The closest Colleen came to anything quotable was the following:  "Lynndie never came in this place.  She was underage.  But if she came in now I'd give her a hug, I'd buy her a beer, and then I'd ask her, 'What in the hell did you think you were doing?'"  Even this quote doesn't get at the heart of what Colleen was trying to say.  It needs context.  What framed the comment was Colleen's recognition that at 21 years of age, Lynndie had made a mistake from which her young life would quite likely never recover.  Most of us screw up, at least once or twice, in a big, big way.  Few of us screw up so publicly that the world forever sees us frozen in the worst moment of our lives.

I finally broke away from the Corner Club Tavern around 9:30 p.m.  As my headlights lit the highway back to Cumberland, I thought about the story that had brought Sharon Churcher to Fort Ashby:  the way in which American service personnel had abused and humiliated human beings in Iraq.  I doubt it ever crossed her mind that she, in turn, had abused and humiliated human beings in Fort Ashby.

Follow-up:  A search of Lexis Nexis this morning shows eleven hits for articles containing the terms "Lynndie England" and "Colleen Kesner."  The headline in the version published by the London Daily Mail is drawn directly from the quote attributed to to Colleen:  "Here if You're a Different Race, You're Sub-human. Tormenting Iraqis to Lynndie Would Be Just the Same as Shooting a Turkey."

Retired Colonel Peter Mansoor, Lifelong Republican, Will Vote for Hillary Clinton

My friend and colleague Pete Mansoor, a retired Army colonel, has just completed a series of interviews with CNN, MSNBC, and other outlets. Pete is a life-long Republican. In all of of these interviews he goes on record to state that not only does he regard Donald Trump as unacceptable as a commander in chief, he will vote instead for Hillary Clinton.

Pete's qualifications as a military analyst could hardly be stronger.

Pete isn't simply a retired colonel, he graduated first in class at West Point,  commanded a brigade in Iraq, served as the founding director of the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. There he helped to edit FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency, published in 2006, which was used to reshape the conduct of the Iraq War.

In the fall of 2006 he served on the so-called "Council of Colonels," a task force of senior officers created by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that reexamined the strategy for the war in Iraq.

The capstone of his 30-year career was as Gen. David Petraeus' executive officer in Iraq during the 2007-2008 Surge.

Pete, a fellow in the Council of Foreign Relations, currently holds the Raymond E. Mason Professor Chair of Military History at The Ohio State University, where his duties divide equally between service to Ohio State's Mershon Center for International Security Studies and teaching in OSU's Department of History.

He is the author of three books, two of which--Baghdad at Sunrise:  A Brigade Commander's Experience in Iraq and Surge: My Journey with General David Petraeus and the Remaking of the Iraq War--recount his experiences in the Iraq War.

With all these qualifications--as well as Pete's quick, sharp mind and ability to present his views lucidly, forcefully, and concisely-it's no wonder that he's a much sought after figure for media interviews.


He is also one of 100 national security analysts who came out in opposition to the Trump candidacy in March.

As I can attest from numerous discussions with him, Pete is a die-hard Republican with a formidable ability to articulate the Republican political philosophy.  When he decided that he had to reject the GOP presidential nominee in favor of Hillary Clinton, hell did not exactly freeze over, but a skin of ice had definitely formed.

Here is Pete's interview with Chris Hayes's All In on MSNBC. He has made similar statements on  other venues, notably CNN's Anderson Cooper 360:

Why Military History Sucked

Recently a graduate student sent an email telling me that my online essay "Why Military History Sucks" was on her reading list but that she couldn't find it on the Internet.  (My university some time ago discontinued the faculty web pages where the essay originally reposed.)   It seemed to me that the easiest way to provide her with it was to re-publish the essay as a blog post.

The title I have given the post--placing the provocative verb in the past tense--is done pointedly.  The essay originated twenty years ago.  In those two decades military history has greatly matured as a field. Many of the points in my critique no longer apply; certainly not to the same extent.  I'm especially pleased that the sense of persecution that the essay rebukes is no longer a common sentiment within the field.

With that said, here's the essay in its original form:

Why Military History Sucks

In November 1996, H-CIVWAR featured a number of posts from individuals frustrated by a belief that military historians were the victims of a kind of blind prejudice on the part of non-military historians. This was my response.

I've read with interest the views of those who think that military history suffers from a bad rep in the groves of academe. I agree that prejudices such as those described exist. But I also believe that we military historians have done much to perpetuate our own marginalization within the academy. Since others have made the case for a political bias against military history, let me make the case for an adverse judgment based on the real shortcomings of military history.

To begin with, those who compare us with women's history, ethnic history, and so on, overlook the fact that such fields have created categories of historical analysis that command the attention of historians in other fields. No one any longer would argue that gender relations have not powerfully shaped human affairs; historians of gender have created sophisticated conceptual tools by which to understand those relations. The fact that the more mediocre scholars dress up commonsense ideas in the language of gender, or construct pseudosophisticated towers of Babel, should not blind us to the fact that the best gender history is imaginative and illuminating. Few human activities are more completely dominated by gender than warfare--it is a preeminently masculine activity--yet how many military historians have ever read the work of Cynthia Enloe or Jean Bethke Elshtain, each of whom has dealt explicitly with women and war; to say nothing of gender historians who do not look at war directly? If we fail to engage with them, why should we expect them to engage with us?

Much more damaging is the fact that we military historians have yet to create a category of historical analysis with anything like the interpretive power of gender, race, or class. You can sneer at the "holy trinity" but you can't deny that these things fundamentally shape our lives and have been doing so--with the possible exception of race--for many centuries.

We military historians can point out again and again that much historical change occurs violently, but that's not enough. Any rube can see that such is the case. But what can military historians tell other historians that they can't figure out on their own? Why exactly do we need experts in the subject? And what exactly is our subject? Most military historians think our subject is the history of "war," but war is an inherently politicized concept. Indeed, most of our intellectual definitions are borrowed from diplomatic, government, and professional military authorities. We haven't examined our field afresh. Women's historians sometimes seem morbidly absorbed with theory. We're not nearly theoretical enough. Even if we ultimately fail to create a "coercive variable" in history that is as powerful a tool as the trinity, we can at least systematically explore the sources of social power and show how military affairs relates to them.

I think it's nuts to assert that the rest of the historical community isn't interested in the military dimension of human affairs. Political historians, social historians, cultural historians have generated enough work on this subject to choke a horse. Indeed, I would argue that the best military history is usually done by people who were not trained as military specialists. And the fact that they do do it should suggest not only their interest in military affairs but also the fact that they have to do it--that when they pose a historical question related to military affairs, too often no military historian ever thought of the question before or thought it was worth exploring. We were too busy writing about our subject in a way that did not connect with the concerns of non-military historians.

I would argue that we are not good military historians even on our own terms. At a minimum, military historians ought to be historians of warfare. Too often, we're really historians of specific wars. At a minimum, military historians ought to have a working knowledge of non-western military history. Instead few of us do, including myself. In fact, I am scandalously ignorant of non-western history and the only reason I'm not ashamed to admit it is that I know most of you are in the same boat. How much comparative military history gets written? Not much.

I will add one final observation, based on a number of years spent observing my peers. The best military historians are among the best historians around. They possess a wide knowledge base; they are conversant with--and sincerely interested in--nonmilitary history as well as their own specialty; they have thought deeply about their intellectual assumptions and search diligently for appropriate conceptual frameworks to inform their work. But too many military historians are as prejudiced against nonmilitary historians as they claim nonmilitary historians are prejudiced against them. They dismiss new trends in history as a lot of P.C. fadmongering. They don't engage with, for example, the new cultural history and find it wanting. They ignore it--and then complain when cultural historians ignore them.

You want to get hired by a history department? Learn to talk about something besides military history. Learn what other historians care about, and show them how an understanding of the military dimension can illuminate the issue. Don't expect that just because a lot of students are interested in military history that that should be a credible reason to have military historians on the faculty. A lot of students are interested in beer, too; it doesn't mean we have to offer courses in the subject. Given a choice between creating a faculty position for world history or one for military history, I would choose the former--the military history enthusiasts in the student body can get their fix from A&E, the History Channel, and the bulging military history section of the local bookstore.

But if a person trained in military history applied for the job who could show me credibly that she or he knew more about world history than the rival candidates, and that their expertise in military history strengthened their ability to understand and teach world history, I would hire them. And so would many historians. When it comes to military history, most nonmilitary historians are not antipathetic toward the subject, just skeptical. In effect, they're from Missouri: we are going to have to show them.

Finding Common Ground

Cross-posted from Sibling Rivalry
By Scott Grimsley

Honoring Our Dead With Taking Chance

As anyone who knows him can attest, my brother Mark loves movies.  His DVD collection is, to say the least, extensive, and he is actually a true scholar of films.  He has published numerous movie reviews about World War Two movies that I have really enjoyed for their insights and examination of deeper themes contained in the films.  Interestingly he is also passionate about films concerning Jesus, and has taught several studies privately on the subject.

I read his blog entry this morning and saw his comments on the movie Taking Chance.  I had never seen the movie and was intrigued by its premise and how he had used it to instruct his daughter Chloe on the meaning of Memorial Day.  (Chloe, by the way, is adopting her father's appreciation for classic film: on one visit she wanted me to watch Singing In the Rain with her as opposed to the more conventional Disney or Pixar offerings my kids grew up with). Fortunately I had access to Taking Chance on one of my internet subscription services, and so I watched it.



The film is incredibly moving and really had no message except it told the tale of how the body of a fallen soldier was treated with respect and dignity throughout his journey from the combat zone to burial in his Wyoming hometown.  I admit I cried like a baby watching it.  I was reminded of the famous quote attributed to Joseph Stalin "the death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic".  Sometimes, unless we know the deceased personally, we fail to acknowledge the real human impact of war, and that is another valuable reminder of the film.  I understood the conflict experienced by Kevin Bacon's character as well, about whether his service as a staff officer working basically a military job on civilian work schedule allowed him to claim the title of a "real" Marine compared to the obvious sacrifice of those who are actually fighting.  I am a Desert Storm era veteran who did not go to Desert Storm.  I spent that time assisting in refresher training of reservists recalled to active duty to backfill units in Germany, but still was the beneficiary of the outpouring of public affection for the military during that conflict, and sometimes felt like an impostor.

However the point I want to make is about the diversity of backgrounds of the people honoring Chance Phelps, the fallen Marine, and his escort officer, LTC Michael Strobl.  Throughout the film, spontaneous gestures of respect take place, ranging from the complimentary upgrade of the outbound flight to first class Strobl receives at the airline ticket counter, to the stewardess who wordlessly hands Strobl a crucifix on the plane, to a baggage handler getting bedding for Strobl to sleep on so he can stay with Phelps' body during an overnight layover, to finally an impromptu funeral procession that forms as Phelps' body is driven 5 hours from the airport to his home.  This is where I see hope for us as a nation.  There are points that divide us, sure, but there are also those where all of us as Americans can agree.  Honoring those who have died in the defense of our freedom is definitely one.

So, thanks to my brother, I feel I celebrated Memorial Day with a proper attitude of respect and remembrance.  Despite the gulf of what often seems to divide us, and our very real differences, there is common ground.  This is what we can build on.