Kerry's gaffe--or moment of greatness?

(October 27, 2006 Army recruits express their motivation during a platoon competition at an obstacle course at Fort Benning, Ga. This photo appeared on www.army.mil.)

"You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq."

To me, everything surrounding Kerry's statement makes no sense; except for the statement itself.

When I read it, it made perfect sense. When I heard him say it, it made perfect sense. The only two things I don't understand are, first, everyone's reaction to it; and second, his apology for saying it.

Are we all brain-dead? We all know that education is the key to success; and the poor guys who don't make the effort, or who don't have the ability, why they go into the military for want of any other alternative, and then they get stuck in Iraq.

Does anyone seriously doubt this? Isn't the truth of this brought home by the innane ads for each service of the military? "Ya did som'p'n ya never did before: ya called me sir and ya shook m'hand." Or being told of the breathtaking vistas of knowledge and fulfilled dreams and of heightened dramatic scenes that will inevitably unfold upon joining with others of a similar bent.

Wow. Wish I could be like dat.

During a moment of sincere musing to himself out loud, a politician with the right motives and a humane sense said an honest and decent thing. Yet the public, acting with the same mentality displayed at the Salem Witch Trials, recoils in horror. Simultaneous with public gasping and staunch defenses of the honor, integrity, and spiritual virginity of our military, we see the spectre of Senator John Kerry, with the aplomb of Frank Driven of LAPD, rendering the "stream of conscience" inarticulate by infusing the objective "us" somewhere, and then declaring triumphantly that the whole shebang was really a criticism of the current occupant of the White House.

Consistant to the end, Senator Kerry blows an opportunity to say what everyone desperately needed to hear our loud--that this accursed war is just that, and that it becomes the habitat of the modern equivalent of the Foreign Legion, or that of the reluctant Soldier of Fortune, who, lacking in the necessary skills to make a future for himself, finds himself in that unholy morass--which perhaps initially to be a noble cause, now, in the throes of almost three thousand dead American youth and over 650,000 Iraqis--and which now appears as and for what it is--a shame, a blight upon our name, and I will say it--a dishonor to the concept of any morality in military action.

Perhaps the worst tragedy of all is the fact that our youth, having been dis-educated in our schools and therefore lacking in the skills of critical judgment, and substituting obedience in place of independent thought and moral judgment--now become the heirs to Macbeth, and to the tragedy which was his and his alone, precisely because now the public will turn their nose up and their head away from the debaucle, as they did in Viet Nam, and shun the returning ghoulish proof of its perfidy.

May our dreams be our perpetual curse.