AMERICA: A nation built on an idea not a bloodline!

Braggistan in the America of the Imagination by Andrew Klavan, City Journal Summer 2008

Andrew Klavan has written an excellent piece on his recent experience at Braggistan, a training site at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. The facilities and "Capstone exercises" are intended to prepare our men and women for duty in Afghanistan.

Keep in mind, for most of them, defending themselves and each other is a secondary assignment - reconstruction and building infrastructure is their primary assignment.

They’re being deployed in Afghanistan to try to help build a civil society there in the after-wreckage of the Taliban.

At any rate, Klavan is writing about a third assignment of our military - public relations. A task they are failing miserably at! Here, in his words, is the reason it is critical to our nation and the world ...

Now you may say that capturing the imagination isn’t the job of our fighting forces. But this is America, remember: we’re a country of the imagination, a living state of mind. We’re not connected to one another by bloodlines or any depth of native memory. We’re the descendants of an idea that every generation has to learn to hold in its collective consciousness. More than in any other country, it matters in America who we think we are and what we believe we’re doing.

Therein lies the dysfunction: those responsible for teaching the next generation this timeless truth have failed in their collective responsibility.

The author points out that while liberals and the entertainment industries are tearing our military and nation apart, with their anti-American propaganda, the military is missing a classic opportunity to tell the real story.

Our academies, the news media that train in the academies, and the entertainment industry that’s informed by the news media have become ... a sort of alternative state of the imagination, a kingdom of lies founded in the muck of hysterical guilt, historical distortion, and philosophical solipsism. In their fantastic and labyrinthine narrative, our fascist foes are Nemesis, the emanation of our own sins, and therefore our military can only be the mad or foolish servants of evil.

Go here and read the entire piece in context ... worth the trip.

America, Military,
Patriotism, WOT