I’ve mentioned before what a problem I have with being “the guru” or “the wizard” or whatever else the end-users want to call me. Because what I do isn’t magic. It’s not incomprehensible – and the belief that it is makes a convenient excuse not to try to comprehend it. (Example: if I am trying to rip out and reinstall the printing infrastructure on your laptop, you should not try reading your email and ordering a new phone online while I am doing so. You wouldn’t take your car to get an oil change and say “While you do that I’m going to drive down to KFC for a Double Down” would you? Actually, too many people might. Never mind.)
This separation manifests itself in other ways. Google seems to be the biggest offender these days, although Facebook is a close second – in both cases, features were launched and changed in ways that probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but made little to no sense when placed in contact with the real world. These usually revolve around privacy issues, but the current big-name Google phone, the HTC Evo 4G on Sprint, shows some of the same things. It supports 4G, despite the fact that only the top thirty or so metro areas even have 4G coverage – and despite the fact that it’s in the 2.5 Ghz band, so building and barrier penetration is minimal. It has an eight megapixel camera with HD video capture – that stutters and artifacts to the point of unwatchability. It has a 4.3″ display – which combined with the 4G gives its battery the lifespan of a mayfly. It has a front-facing camera for video calling – but requires you to find an app to use it, and may or may not require you to hold down a talk key like a CD radio. Most of all, it has Android 2.1 with the Sense custom interface – which makes it anyone’s guess how soon it will be able to run Android 2.2, and whether that update will be at the mercy of Google, HTC, Sprint, or all three. In short, it represents a laundry list of features and specs thrown together with very little consideration of how effective the total package will be when it hits the real world.
This makes me think about the draft.
From World War II until Vietnam, if you were a guy and you were out of high school, you were going to be doing some time in the Army. Or Navy, or what have you. You might get out on a medical exemption or something religious or whatnot, but odds are that no matter who you were, you were going to do your service. Look at something like Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers – college boys, cab drivers, school teachers, business heirs, all thrown together and re-sorted by military rank, rather than income or upbringing or geography.
That all ended in the wake of Vietnam, with the shift to the all-volunteer force. That happened in 1973. So we have reached a point where literally everyone in the service has come up through the age of the all-volunteer army, which means everyone was self-selected. What happens when a population self-selects for thirty-seven years? More to the point, what happens to the remaining population?
From Eisenhower to Bush I, we lived in an age where it could be safely assumed that every President – in fact, every major political figure – had served in the military at some point. PT boat captain, pilot, even public affairs officer – whatever. Now, it’s safe to assume they haven’t. Basically, anyone in high politics aged 55 and under can safely be assumed not to have been in the service. And this is a perilous disconnect.
Civilians defer to the military – it enjoys levels of respect that most other institutions in public life would kill for. In fact, the Constitution says that the President is commander-in-chief of the armed forces, but to listen to the press, you’d think the President was commander-in-chief of everyone in America but the military. And as we saw with the McChrystal meltdown, it’s becoming evident that a large chunk of the military – including a disturbing amount of the top brass – rejects the notion of civilian authority, or at least any sense that military authority should defer to it. Each side has become progressively more alienated from the other, made worse by the decision of civilian authorities to deploy the military over and over.
The disturbing thing isn’t the idea that the military might decide they should quit taking orders from a bunch of idle loudmouth civilians. The disturbing thing is the number of civilians who would endorse it.