Notices by timberwraith (timberwraith@mastodon.social), page 2

Hey, I heard a little piece of that story when I was waiting to board my plane yesterday.

"Military service members may board at this time. Thank you for your service."

Thank you for your service... Yeah, I'm being "served" by my fellow citizens in olive drab. It's all warm and fuzzy feelings about the good guys with guns. They work hard to protect us, right?

Heh. Who was that who you are protecting? I think you're protecting the same people as the cops.

People with money and power. Not me.

Everybody's got a story. I know. There's always a story. Some are better stories than others but there's always a story that folks turn to when explaining why they joined.

I do know that at least 50% of the story is the brainwashing that u.s. culture dumps on people that portrays the military as a goodly helpful institution that does great things for the country and the world.

Little helpers with big sticks.

That sort of thing.

The culture says that about cops too.

Think about that.

[looks at u.s. war bullshit unfolding]

Do you finally get why I have been saying that choosing to work for the united states military is choosing to work for and be a part of evil?

Is it not obvious?

Still, setting asside the snark (but truthful snark), the military is portrayed as a group of great folks who are there to protect the country and make the world safe for becoming like the united states, and who wouldn't want to be a copy of the united states because this country is the best thing and we need to protect this country because people are jealous that we're such a good country with good intentions.

Please consider enlisting. Protect the good things and good people in the u.s.

And I gotta say... The people with money and power in the united states kind of have a giggle-shits love affair with the nazi guy in the white house?

I mean, this isn't a first. They've kind of had a love affair with other fascists, oligarchs, colonizing blood letters, tyrants, and various u.s. presidents who were quieter about their own dabbling in such roles.

It's not a new thing.

Thank you for your service.

Now, the other 50% can be other things:

- money for college
- a wage when no other is in the offing
- a way to escape a really abusive family/community/marriage/etc.
- a way to travel and see the world
- a way to find one's sense of manhood (which winds up snaring way too many trans/queer people, honestly)
- a way to find a sense of meaning
- a family tradition
- a way out of a dead-end life
- I love a man in uniform 😳
- I love a woman in uniform 😳
- the last two were snark... but may be true

But it's true. That IS the hype, cultural teaching, promotional advertising, news media portrayal, and literary/movie portrayal of the united states military.

When you work for the u.s. military, you are the Good Guys™ and who wouldn't want to be working for and with the Good Guys™?

That's the red, white, and blue story that people really, honestly believe in.

It's a bundle of lies and misrepresentations, of course.

But so is so much of u.s. culture.

Shit, I think I snarked again.

I'm not very good at this.

Anyway...

But let's just bring home reality, can we?

YOU ARE NOT JOINING A GOOD AND DECENT INSTITUTION.

It was NEVER good, either. Not even before the citrous colored clown occupied the white house.

You were led to believe the u.s. military was good. You were lied to. You were brainwashed. You were fed a lifelong stream of propaganda that was made to protect the interests of those who hold massive amounts of land, money, power, and other stolen things. This country was built on lies and brainwashing.

And the ubiquitous:
- miscellaneous other reasons

Oh, I forgot one reason why an ex-friend from high school had joined:
- to kill brown people.

He was an asshole and I am *not* making this up. I heard him express sentiments like this. For real. Specifically addressed toward people in the Middle East. The military was also a tradition in his family. I wonder why *they* joined... [shivers]

Yeah. The reasons aren't always good. Some people are just evil from the start. Gods.

OK, so what's the story that people are sold?

You have to be (because it's good and virtuous):

- strong
- stoic, emotionless
- a protector of those who are weaker and cannot protect themselves (girls/women, usually) (the sexism of that makes me really angry)
- skilled at expressing/using violence
- competitive
- dominant (a corollary of "being strong")
- in control
- sexually accomplished/dominant
- a good provider (a corollary of "protector")

It wasn't stated so bluntly, however. Those are my own words distilling down a social message that I had to shake off in my teens.**

But this message was/is everywhere and it's stated, as propaganda so often is, in positive ways which lead people to think that bad behaviors and bad beliefs actually aren't bad and they exist in service to do good things for good people.

**(I sucked at it anyway and had trans-femininity as a cheat code to help.)

Look...

I've walked the walk with a bunch of you on this for something like 17ish years at the start of whatever the fuck this thing is that I call a life.

I'm not a man or a boy but regardless, I can assure you that masculinity/manhood is a propaganda tool.

(Gender of all kinds so often is. It's true.)

Many of you were told a lie from your youngest years:

"To be a worthy and good person in the world, I have to inflict violence and control over others. To be a good man, I have to do this."

And let's bring this home to gender because I always do, right?

Some of the people who join the military, who happen to have "boy" pasted on their lives by a doctor who believed their own lies and propaganda, wound up believing in another lie that seems to get people to do bad things for (sometimes) good intentions:

masculinity and manhood

(You knew it was going to come to this, didn't you?)

So, when you get down to brass tacks, as they say, maleness, masculinity, manhood, boyhood, etc. are constructed in such a way that they are centered upon incorporating dominance over others as an overall organizing principle of who a person is.

Do you know what institution also has dominance over others as an overall organizing principle of its existence?

The military.

Dominance is POWER.

Power over others.

Patriarchy is a social/cultural system of dominance/power over others. (There are many others. White supremacy is another.)

Men over women, when distilled down to its basic roots, form the heart of this arrangement of power-over-others but there are a multitude of other power-over pairings that flow out of patriarchy as well.

Now, run down that list and consider this:

All of those things are entwined, by cultural assumptions regarding maleness/masculinity, with notions of dominance/strength.

You are culturally trained, from birth, to believe that you can not be a good person, a good *masculine* person, without centering strength and dominance at the core of your being.

And since this exists in the heart of a cultural system know as patriarchy, it actually distills down to just ONE word:

DOMINANCE

BUT you have been the rube in a much, much larger pyramid scheme.

Do you actually believe that this little piece of power that you are seeking, for the good of your strength and virility, is actually something that benefits you (and presumably, others you care about)?

It's not.

The military and manhood/masculinity don't create strong people.

They create people who a willing to fit themselves into an exploitation scheme that works to funnel power upward to a rare few.

That's reality.

And if you weren't so great at channeling those "natural" traits in the first place?

Well, the military can help with that.

The military can make a man of you.

They'll fix your brokenness as a man.

Because the military is masculinity and manhood concentrated down into an organized machine that turns people into paragons of strength.

Or so the sales pitch goes.

And people do believe the sales pitch.

They've been doing this for ages.

And the key psychological hook that society and the military (and all of its social promoters and sales representatives) push is:

Being in the military is an effective and honored expression of masculinity and manhood.

You are learning to be a part of an organized body of protective violence. You are there to be disciplined (emotionless/stoic) and to learn to channel your "natural" traits of dominance/aggression toward an organized social machine for the good of your country, your god, etc.