And as I hung up the phone it occurred to me, he'd grown up just like me, my boy was just like me

My slowly developing man crush on Eric Posner has grown to a full fledged love that makes my youthful infatuation with his father pale into insignificance. The reason? His regular output on Slate's Convictions group blog, and especially this post:

In this bloggingheads.tv episode involving my co-bloggers Dahlia Lithwick and Richard Ford (I checked it out because I wanted to confirm that they have corporeal existences and are not merely algorithms invented by Slate's IT staff), Dahlia accuses the Bush administration of hypocrisy for claiming, in the Omar and Munaf case, to be concerned about respecting the sovereignty of foreign countries. The Bush administration, after all, did not care so much about the sovereignty of Iraq as to refrain from invading that country. Iraq aside, is it hypocrisy for a nation to profess respect for international law but then to violate international law whenever doing so is in its self-interest, when all other nations are doing the same thing?

Hypocrisy is something more than dishonesty: not all liars are hypocrites. It seems to have more to do with lying about one's character. A hypocrite holds himself out to be sincere, courageous, respectful, honorable, and in all other respects virtuous, when he or she is none of those things. However, often hypocrisy is a socially necessary trait, and we frequently observe groups of people profess respect for norms, ideals, or aspirations that no one obeys. In such cases, you will often find a few individuals who refuse to go along with the game and pronounce themselves outraged that people are not acting consistently with their words. We need a new word to describe these critics-people who confuse ordinary hypocrisy (which is bad) and social hypocrisy (which is necessary and unavoidable), and accuse everyone of hypocrisy because they act like human beings. Let me propose a new word for this trait: literocrisy. The literocrite condemns people for uttering social lies that no one believes.

When Captain Renault, says "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!", he's not being a hypocrite, he is satirizing the literocrite. When everyone understands that gambling is going on, even though everyone professes not to believe that gambling is going on, only the literocrite is outraged. The literocrite believes that people should always be candid about their motives, even when there are good social or political reasons not to be.

There's more.

You like me? You really like me?

My talent for getting away with verbal murder appears to have weirdly expanded during the course of BOLC II.

Despite my always below average physical fitness test results (a first pass heuristic for identifying dirtbag officers), my technical responsibility for the Great NVG Crisis of '08, my extreme passive-aggressive positive-negativity about BOLC II, openly and cheerfully flaunting several minor annoying restrictions that others mostly observed out of necessity or faint hearts, and initiating two short but very nasty screaming matches with peers last week, I'm told that while I was away packing up my house Wednesday the captain in charge of my platoon held a meeting to discuss the results of our squad peer evaluations and revealed that I was ranked 1 or 2 by "several" of my peers. Maybe they just love long, excessively complex sentences.

Somewhat more inexplicably, I once again got the feeling when I signed out today that the cadre platoon sergeant who I caused so much grief for during the Crisis actually likes me. But the suspicion that our captain always remembered the reasons she wished she wasn't married when she looked in my eyes, was, I'm sadly certain, just wishful thinking.

As you were

When I first arrived in Lawton, OK, the afternoons were unpleasantly hot as the mornings began to chill, the parking lots were full of the corpses of a disgusting cricket infestation, I was living out of an empty house on an air mattress, and I made 5-7 trips a week to Carnival of Ice to feed my snow cone addiction and be smiled at by the too young for me but very cute blonde who works there.

All that's really changed is that the mornings are unpleasantly cold as the afternoons start to warm, the parking lots are full of confetti-like flower blossoms (they have this thing called "seasons" here, I'm told), and I begin to suspect that the blonde might be smiling at other customers now that they've reopened. I expect everything else to suck in all the same ways if I come back for the captain's career course in three or so years.

I'll be in Texas for the next week and a half until heading for Colorado. If you're one of my law school friends who intermittently reads this to make sure I'm alive, my phone still works.

Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun

Did I say I'd blog more now that my three weeks in the field are over? Someone realized we were starting to approach levels of self respect and free time more traditionally associated with privates in basic training, decided we needed to be ground down to a level of frustration and despair more appropriate to lieutenants in BOLC II, and thus decreed we would sit in a giant room and clean weapons until the utter eradication of all traces of carbon or midnight, whichever comes last.

Fortunately, I have movers coming tomorrow. As I was returning around 2100 from an hour and a half at home packing stuff I got a call that I and a similarly situated comrade had received permission to go home early and pack stuff. Before I disappeared some buddies had already failed three weapon inspections. As a young witness of domestic violence, I know better than to try to appease my abuser; I managed to turn mine in without suffering the indignity and pointlessness of any inspection at all.

Three days until I'm finally out of TRADOC and headed to the real army, a little more than three months before I probably head to Iraq. Thank god. I think this school pretty clearly failed at its goal of making us better leaders of small units trying to kill people, but it certainly gave me the overwhelming desire to accomplish that end goal.

A dark and hungry god arises

I've been on a minor crusade to locate Sunday donuts in this accursed town. Four weeks ago I discovered my sometime provider went out of business, which only makes sense since it was clean, professional looking, and located at a busyish intersection. On the following weekends I found dirty looking storefronts in bad areas of town that can't be bothered to open on Sunday. Last weekend I found a mediocre one in an out of the way but commercially viable spot that had the audacity to open on the Lord's Day but, as a handwritten notice informed me, had run out of product and closed early before my early afternoon arrival.

I went back today early enough to avoid a similar fate, but found it inexplicably closed without any note and in clear contravention of the posted store hours. So I diverted to Plan B, a disappointing but always outrageously overcrowded breakfast place ten minutes away. As I got close I noticed the adjacent shopping center was surprisingly deserted even for a Sunday morning when all good citizens of this town are at church or sleeping off their previous night of demeaning casual sex and/or a crystal meth bender. My initial confusion changed to alarm when I realized Plan B was also deserted.

I confess my casual interest in the peculiar customs of primitive cultures has waned of late, becoming largely restricted these days to etiquette matters involving the Marine Corps personnel on this base. And as I've aged I find myself adopting my paternal grandmother's once embarassing habit of talking to oneself more and more. So I hope you'll forgive me for belatedly yelling out to myself as realization struck:

Jesus fucking Christ, it's Easter!

Burger King was open. If this is salvation, I choose Homer Simpson's path.

Only the dead know Jokertown

Based on the pain in my legs and the pangs of sleeplessness still lingering after a four hour nap, I must conclude I'm still alive. One more week of administrative stuff and I'm out of Ft. Sill for good. I will attempt to write something interesting in the interim.

I've been for a walk on a winter's day

I've avoided talking about the course I'm currently enrolled in, Basic Officer Leadership Course II (BOLC II), because to bitch about it is the biggest new cliche in the Army. 95% of lieutenants who've been through it hate and despise it as a waste of time, especially those who've been through OCS and done the vast majority of this stuff in the recent past.

What little is new to me is also superficial; the substantial minority of ROTC kids who might benefit because their school's substandard program didn't teach them anything are infected by the overwhelming negativity of those dragged unnecessarily along with them and fail to gain as much as they could. I'm in the vanguard of those walking around in a perpetual rage at this colossal waste of my time, but hearing a member of my platoon cadre make a sarcastic comment about how they loved to read us bashing the course on our blogs has prevented me from venting here.

And I'm not quite going to start today. So what follows is clearly a dispassionate analysis of my past week and nothing more.

Last week was the first of three to be spent on an artificial forward operating base (FOB) to not really simulate the real thing in Iraq. Just like we apparently would do when deployed, we spent Monday at a weapons range firing an assortment of crew served weapons, Tuesday conducting advanced rifle marksmanship training that was 50% more sophisticated and 500% more dangerous than what I did in basic training (how the thoroughly incompetent LT C avoided shooting anyone in my platoon still amazes and gladdens us), Wednesday on the practice land navigation course (I found the minimum of three points and came back an hour early, while virtually everyone else who "passed" got at least four and often the maximum of five), and Thursday was the real land nav course.

They woke us up at 0130; the course itself ran from 0400-0900. It was freezing, 30 mph winds, and heavily snowing after the sun rose. I probably walked 8-10 miles, most of it up and down rocky hills. My toes showed early signs of frostbite by the time it was over. A friend who took this course last fall was briefly amazed when I told him we weren't served a late hot breakfast in the field until he remembered he was the one who had warned me about the proclivities of a certain decision maker associated with my company.

40% of my platoon and a slightly higher proportion of the company failed to get the required five out of eight points and had to retest. When they announced the results half a dozen heads turned to stare at me in amazement at "[Dylan], eight out of eight." What? Don't I always do my best to exceed the minimum standard in this course? Half the platoon cracked up at that.

I'm so misunderstood.

Friday was land nav retest for nearly half the company and convoy operations (finally something new!) for the first time passing remnants of every platoon but mine (oops!). We were allowed to skip it so we'd get back early enough that "we wouldn't get released really late." My housemate in the company across the yard was released just after 1600, the time our first platoon made it back to the barracks. By 1745 we'd finished turning in our weapons. Then our acting First Sergeant (1SG) decided (or was told) it would a good idea to do a barracks cleanup and inspection on Friday evening.

The moment I was most in awe of my senior drill sergeant in basic training was when we'd gone through the first two weeks of hell, sucked up the arbitrary and unfair punishment, and then legitimately screwed up and totally demoralized ourselves on some task that I can't remember any more. I knew we were going to get hammered with an hour long session of "correctional training" when we got back to the barracks that night, I knew we for once kind of deserved it, and knew we were going to fall apart and quit caring or trying after we got it.

And we didn't get it. That man was a motivational genius who knew exactly how far he could push and prod people, when to give undeserved rewards as well as us unearned punishments to get what he wanted out of us. That night we got our first kind words (as well as fair criticism) and went to sleep early and unmolested. We tried harder than ever and outperformed the next week. I was unsurprised to later learn that DS had a degree in psychology, and probably for the same reason mine is in economics; he already thought that way before he took his first class.

Our acting 1SG at BOLC II is clearly an excellent, dedicated NCO and a skilled infantryman who is wasted teaching and administering a pointless course like this. He's also clearly not a master of psychology. After four weeks of a fundamentally flawed and irredeemably unpopular course made far worse by what I will charitably and perhaps safely characterize as questionable command decisions layering petty indignities not shared by the other three BOLC II companies on a crop of lieutenants unusually full of former NCOs and field artillery lieutenants who've already been through their branch schooling at BOLC III and are collectively accustomed to being treated as adults, no one really cares about the latest continual martinet posturings of the powers that be.

Cleaning proceeded in a desultory who-gives-a-fuck-they'll-just-invent-more-pointless-bullshit method for a while until the enraged 1SG called a formation to make us stand outside and freeze for half an hour while he harangued our lack of dedication to clean stairwells on a Friday evening after a week in the field while our peers in other companies were already drunk. We were appropriately, which is to say not at all, chastised. After inspecting the barracks and calling in a squad to reclean a deficient latrine, we were finally released at 1900, nearly three hours after my housemate had gone home, but not until we received a last lecture on the need to "want to lead."

As I muttered sotto voce to those in my platoon right before we received the command dismissing us, what we really need around here is something worthy of leading. Half the platoon laughed, although this time it sounded forced and uneasy.

Sometimes I'm perfectly understood.

Addendum: This post will substantially self destruct in seven days.

Fast forward

I'm in the field all week. I'll post something next weekend.