Military Affairs

My anarcho-agrarian friend Bill Kauffman, who worked for Reason back when I was still in high school, has an interesting essay on the Counterpunch site arguing that family-values conservatives should be at the heart of the peace movement. A sample:

Absence may make the heart grow fonder, but love requires presence above all. The divorce rate more than doubled between 1940 and 1946. The Second World War, by removing men from households and removing many of those households from the rural South into the unwelcoming urban North, waged its own mini-war upon the American family. Rosie the Riveter propaganda aside, the domestic face of the warfare state was sketched by an Arkansas social worker: "children's fathers go off to war and their mothers go to work, and thus the interests of parents is diverted from the home and the children."

Government-subsidized daycare was one offspring of the Second World War; thanks to the Lanham Act, over half a million children were cared for by strangers in these cold institutions. Today, Hillary Clinton and the corporate feminists point to the U.S. Army as the model daycare provider. And yet conservatives, who froth at the merest hint of the carpetbagger's name, are quiet, struck dumb by their worship of the widow-making bureaucracy.

I do not want to open YET ANOTHER COMMENTS THREAD ON WHETHER THE IRAQ WAR WAS A GOOD IDEA. Forget particular wars for a moment, and think about war in general. Can pro-flag, pro-family conservatives reconcile the tension between their devotion to the domestic and their devotion to the military? Discuss among yourselves.