Lay Off It, Mr. Rangel

by: Dark Wraith

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) went on "Face the Nation" today and called for reinstating the draft, claiming he would introduce legislation to the effect in the next session of Congress. He claimed a draft would keep the country from going to war.

According to CNN.com, the Selective Service now has approximately 16 million individuals who have registered, as is now required by law.

Preventing wars is a noble goal, provided we are preventing thoroughly ill-planned, useless wars of opportunity based upon lies, the kind of military adventures the neo-conservatives favor. Preventing wars by pursuing honest, concerted, no-holds-barred diplomatic, economic, and political channels is statecraft in its most sublime form, and it is unfortunate that the American people have not been treated to examples of this since the Clinton Administration, even though many of those same Americans seem thoroughly unconscious of the scope of peace and brevity of military conflicts the United States had during that better era.

All of that aside, to Rep. Rangel I offer this advice:

While I respect your uncautioned and extensive criticism of this vile Administration, please use gamesmanship on something other than young lives, Mr. Rangel. You know exactly what you're doing: you're trying to hang 16 million human lives in front of a blood-thirsty band of hooligans, thinking they wouldn't dare pick a fight if a few of those millions were their children.

It's bad enough that we have the Bush Administration and its lackeys—both Republican and Democrat, I might point out—who drag us into bad wars, but your plan is going to provide them with all the flesh and blood they need to round out a war machine they're finally figuring out just doesn't work on the small-Army/big-technology paradigm of the Donald Rumsfeld era.

You seem to think it would be a good thing if, say, Jenna Bush were to have to serve in combat. Maybe that would disabuse her father of his fantasy world where wars are for the dumb, the brown, the poor, the outcasts, and the crazies to fight and die in. Maybe it would. Then again, maybe it wouldn't.

First, the rich will always find a way around the conscription of their kids if they really want to. That's just the way it is and always has been, and you cannot construct a draft that would not be made an instrument of the age-old sorting of the wretched, who will go to the trenches, from their betters, who will not.

But let's say, in a brief suspension of reality, that we really could send Jenna Bush into combat, and her father could not keep it from happening. Let's get down and dirty, shall we?

Do you know how an improvised explosive device does its savagery? You're driving along, and all of a sudden, the entire planet changes: your whole brain is full of roaring sound, and you're going up in their air: sky and ground flash alternately in front of you.

A bizarre cold is all over your back, your ass, and your legs: that's your skin melting into the seat.

When you hit the ground maybe 50 feet from where you started this split-second eternity, you're dead. Your optic screen is closing down from the periphery to the center: that's the "white light" people describe as some near-death experience, except that you're going to get to die all the way.

You can still hear for a few minutes; auditory perception will be the last thing to vanish into the black well. Even if you're screaming, you really don't know about it so much. You might stay around long enough to hear people: boots running and getting louder; someone yelling, "Aw, fuck, man... Oh-god-oh-god-oh-god... SHIT!"

You might hear the second one go off. That would be the one for some guys from the truck behind you: they were too shocked to think about a sucker bomb.

You get to close down, even though what's left of your body is jerking violently even after you're hopelessly dead.

You go away forever. The black well has finished swallowing you whole.

That's good because that means you don't have to hear the people who grieve for you when that guy plays the Taps on that forlorn bugle and those other soldiers do that painfully slow, methodical folding of the flag so they can hand it to someone who loved you.

You've gone away forever. That's if you're some crazy kid who signed up because he needed some way to prove he was a man, or if you're some rich kid who got sucked up in a draft whipped together by a Congressman who wanted to make a point.


Mr. Rangel, making war unpalatable to the war-mongers is no substitute for making peace attainable by the peacemakers.

Lay off this crusade of yours, sir. For the sake of 16 million people now, and countless millions who will come of draft age in the years ahead, let it go.



The Dark Wraith has spoken.