from The Screed

When I was a college student there were rumblings about the return of the draft. Madman Reagan was in power, and we feared he would conscript the fruit of American youth to fight the goodly Sandinistas - why, we were certain Al Haig labored every night airbrushing pictures of the Nicaraguan hunta to remove the halos, just to convince that addled tool Bonzo Ronnie to gather up young men and send them in Verdun-like waves against the “enemy.�?BR>
I wondered if I could avoid this fate. I wondered how I’d beat a draft. I had a conversation with a coffeehouse habitue, a veteran of the 60s - which is to say, not a veteran at all. Unless you regard protesting the war as the equivalent of war itself, as if chanting and marching was the moral, physical, spiritual, intellectual, and emotional equivalent of squatting in a rice paddy with your britches full of half-metabolized C-rations, hearing the screams of your buddies. Maybe it's the same. One guy spent an afternoon spend stuffing envelopes to mail to politcians; the other spent a minute stuffing his intestines back into his gut after a shell hit his position. A matter of semantics. I wasn’t there and cannot say. I only know that when confronted with the simple possibility of the draft, I wanted out. I did not want to go, and I turned to my elders for advice.

The coffeehouse vets were pleased to hear that their Padewan was eager to learn. They laid out the options: conscientious objector. No, I had no religious objections. I’m not about to dress like the guy on the Quaker Oats box and pretend I’m under orders from God, because that would be a lie. Well, then there’s Canada. Really. Hmm. Uh . . . no, I’m not leaving home; I’m not leaving America. Isn’t there some deferrment for people who are too . . .artistic? I was a poetry major at the time, after all. What sort of nation sends POETS to war?

I could not escape the unflattering truth: I didn’t want to be drafted because it would have screwed up my social life. No more coffee houses and long afternoon arguments and cheap wine and flirting with waitresses. I realized, with a sick sinking feeling, that if I was drafted, I would go.

On the other hand, I could lord it over my peers for years to come, so there was a theoretical upside.

When I read a poll that said 37% of college students would try to beat the draft, I understood. It’s a stark contrast to my father’s generation - my dad enlisted at age 15 - but the civilian / military disconnect is great these days. The rest of the poll, however, contained some effervescent idiocies unique to our times, our campuses. Shall we tour the ivy-swaddled parapets and sample their honeyed delusions? We shall. The story is here, if you want the full horror. (As well as some odd reassurances.) Let’s begin:

American students intensely and overwhelmingly disagree with the statement that Western culture is superior to Arab culture. Only 16% believe Western culture is superior to Arab culture but 79% do not.


A. Essay question. Two choices: life as an gay atheist in Fargo North Dakota, or life as a Christian gay in Riyadh. Write 1,000 words describing how each faces equal hardship. If your essay contains less than 1000 words, you will either be docked one grade or have your left hand removed with an ornately engraved scimitar, depending on which morally-equal culture the teaching assitant wishes to consult.

B. Western Culture is equal or inferior to Arab culture because: (check any you believe apply)

1. Our so-called democracies are fronts for corporate interests. Nader doesn’t win here; Nader doesn’t win in Syria. What’s the difference?

2. Our so-called freedom of scientific inquiry unshackled from religious strictures is a sham - Galileo was oppressed by the Catholic Church, wasn’t he? Didn’t every American moon shot end in failure because we believed the sun revolved around the earth and we failed to account for the gravitational pull? Stupid Pope!

3. We spend more on flavored massage oil than we do on foreign aid, which is so, like, typical. Saudi Arabia spends more on mosques here in the United States than their citizens spend on Hustler, which should tell you something

4. They may stone adulterers, but we are equally puritanical about sex, as evidenced by the recent refusal of the Toledo City Council to grant medical benefits to the pets of cohabiting transgendered city employees

5. I saw this documentary on the Crusades, and did you know that the Europeans catapulted plague-ridden bodies into enemy cities? Are we demanding WMD inspections against the Franks? I didn’t think so, because they’re WHITE.

6. No culture is better than any other, except the Tibetans, who are probably better than Thuggee death-cults, but that’s just coming from a post-Orientalist perspective inherent in the Western mindset which pollutes my every thought no matter how much Yoga I do. I mean, I grew up in a house where my dad kept his Veterans of Foreign Wars magazine in the bathroom downstairs. YOU try to overcome bad karma like that.

7. Did you know that “hashish�?comes from the Arab word for “Assassin?�?Seriously. I read that in this book. They used to smoke it before they went out and waxed a dude. They’d get like totally baked and see paradise and then go take care of biz-niz. It makes you wonder if the Arabs an�?all call liquor “Johnny Walker�?‘cause that’s what the Mafia dudes drink before they do a hit. Or maybe they call it “hitman.�?Like, “dude, we got so fucked up on hitman last night there was this car on fire outside and I was like, whatever.�?BR>
Yeah, I’ve been thinking of doing stand-up! You guys’d come and laugh, right?

8. There’s absolutely no chance of me getting a hook-up on this campus if I said Western values rule. Nada. Half the women you meet are all like, y’know, the Catholic church won’t let women be priests just like the Taliban, and if the West was so great we wouldn’t need Title Whatever to have gender equity in sports, and a buncha other stuff you just learn to nod and say uh-huh to, ‘cause they’re all pissed that dad is on their case for a tattoo or something. It’s way too much. And they’re all into Buffy like some kind of role model, and I’m like girl? Buffy rocks, okay, but I saw that Al-Jarreau station or whatever it’s called and there ain’t no Buffys over there. There ain’t going to be no Buffys. It’s like a total No-Buff zone, awright? They got like police who can arrest you for toe rings, but if you point that out you’re like this major Bush guy which is so uncool with your top-line hotties.

Yeah, I voted for Bush. Almost wish I hadn’t, ‘cause now I have to lie.


C. The world’s largest skyscrapers are now the twin Petronas Towers in Malaysia, so:

1. Describe the likelihood of Prussian Fundamentalist Christians flying planes into the two towers.

2. If this occurred, write an imaginary description of the celebration in a Milwaukee neighborhood, as they celebrate the great victory of the faithful over the Great Malaysian Satan

3. As for the towers themselves, they are derived from local culture: The pointy floor shape is based on the suggestion of a government official, who felt the eight points were more representative of Islamic design.

Describe your feelings if a member of the Bush administration had suggested that the rebuilt World Trade Centers be shaped like crosses. Extra credit if you conclude by warning of internment camps for atheists.


37% of all college students said they would be "likely to try to evade the draft," while another 21% would be willing to serve "but only if stationed in the United States." Only 35% of college students today would be "willing to serve and fight anywhere in the world."

To those 37%:

1. Have any government loans for college? Just curious.

2. Do you have a romantic notion of joining an underground railway that spirits you from safe house to safe house, where gray-ponytailed comrades from the sixties hide you out under piles of old Ramparts magazines while The Man bangs on the door upstairs, after which you’ll take a gaily-painted VW bus to the border, cross over to the arms of fiery compassionate Canadian pastors who will take you to safety while you look out the back window at the receding sight of America, feeling as though you should hum “Mrs. Robinson�?by Simon and Garfunkel under your breath?

3. Really, is that what you think? And your dad is paying how much for your education?


"More students (55%) can name the leader of the Palestinian Authority than the US Sec’y of Defense (32%) or National Security Advisor. (19%)"

A. Since the leader of the PA is a heterosexual male, and the National Security Advisor is a single Black female, your inability to know the latter is due to:

1. The systemic racism of a system that refuses to - hold on, what was the question?

2. The People! United! Will Never Be Defited!

3. Single Black women cannot be Republicans, therefore she does not exist. She has been digitally inserted into news footage by George Lucas.

B. You realize that we are pressing sexual harassment charges against you because you used the phrase “digitally inserted�?when talking about a woman of gender.

1. oh - my - Gaia

2. Go ahead. I’ll tell the board I saw you in the campus bookstore trying to put a copy of Ann Coulter’s “Scandal�?on the shelves

3. Hey hey ho ho! Your intra-procedural hijacking of the grievance modality structure with its systemic appeal to patriarchal notions of male-defined Logic has got to go! Along with your phallocentric concept of of “meter!�?BR>

"While President Bush receives very high marks for his handling of the presidency (70% approval), a majority of college students (57%) believe the policies of the United States are "at least somewhat responsible" for the September 11th terrorist attacks.

“A clear majority of college students (60%) believe "developing a better understanding of the values and history of other cultures and nations that dislike us" is a better approach to preventing terrorism than investing in strong military and defense capabilities at home and abroad" (33%).�?BR>
Given that Osama et al wish to reestablish the Caliphate and establish their faith as the planet’s sole religion, would you:

1. Understand the values of those who would rewrite the First Amendment to make Islam mandatory

2. Support a national effort to rewrite spellcheckers so they replace “Jew�?with “pig�?BR>
3. Support sending the religious police to break up Victoria’s Secret photo shoots and whip everyone with sticks until their brazen ankles are made decent again by a covering of blood

4. Understand why the cause requires the death of this child:



This is, or rather was, five-year old Gal Aizenman. She was ripped to shreds by poison-soaked nails at a Jerusalem bus stop this week. Your task: find the Western value that says she deserved to die. Find the Western value that says God wants this child to be blown up in front of her mother. Find the Western value that insists God not only smiled upon her death, but welcomed her killer to a whorehouse heaven. Find a big-league Bishop who commended her killer to paradise, and a murderer's mother who exhulted in this child's extermination.

Last question: you remember that famous, horrible photo of the young girl fleeing naked from a napalm attack in Vietnam. You may know that she was treated in Saigon by American-staffed hospital. She survived, was held up as a heroine by the Communists, sent to Cuba to be educated - and she defected to the West for freedom the first chance she had.

Describe, in as many words as necessary, the likelihood of a neighbor of Israel giving intensive medical care to Gal, granting her citizenship, appointing her to an international human rights board, and writing stories - for domestic newspapers - drenched in shame for the trauma she suffered.

Assume, for the sake of argument, Gal is alive.