Belmont Club blog

The Belmont Club is rapidly becoming on of the places I visit every day. His post today regarding military service is an excellent one --- tow paragraphs: bq. Military service was so universal during World War 2 that any child growing up in the 1950s could expect an answer. Yet it was always a little like asking "daddy, how much money did you make?" because the response served as a reliable indicator of status in a societies whose networks were largely a continuation of bonds forged during the global conflict. It made a difference whether one had been a Jedburgh or a supply clerk in Pittsburgh. Joseph Kennedy understood that no one who stood apart from the universal experience of a generation cope hope to succeed in politics and urged his sons into the service. bq. The question will be asked again by children ten years hence, this time in the context of the War on Terror. Unlike the Vietnam War, it is the first since World War 2 that has swept up an entire generation. From lower Manhattan to the smallest town in America there is hardly anyone that does not have or know someone personally touched by the war. But it has swept them up differentially. The anti-war legacy which effectively shut the ROTC out of Ivy League campuses will mean that for the first time since the Civil War the best answer that many university graduates will be able to give is "I marched with International Answer" or "I blogged while at Oxford". And while neither answer is dishonorable, it will be an admission of exclusion from a central experience in American life.