My favorite TV shows all involve men and women in uniform. Battlestar Galactica revolves around a space military. In the Star Trek universe, all the characters are in Starfleet, which is like a futuristic pacifist military. And all of the Law & Order series focus on police officers. And lest we forget, there's my love for Sean Connery in The Hunt for Red October. I love seeing military operations and police procedurals in film and television.What makes all of this so baffling is that I am completely ill-equipped to be a man in uniform myself. Not only am I physically unimpressive as a military specimen, but I have strong aversions to pain and death, which seem to be encountered by police officers, soldiers, and space cadets on a regular basis. I could probably handle being a behind-the-scenes kind of guy, handling reports and making witty comments about the war effort. I see myself as being a lazier and chubbier version of Hawkeye from M*A*S*H, only not as successful with the ladies... and, you know, not a doctor.
But this is not my attitude when watching TV. I love Admiral Adama, Lennie Briscoe, Captain Kirk, and all these other people who devote their lives to serving the greater good. I want to see my TV heroes charge into the weapons-filled drug house right in front of everyone else! After all, that's what heroes in uniform do.
Of course, that's not really what they do in real life. The guy leading the charge is usually the first guy shot. Fuck that noise. Let the loud motherfucker with delusions of grandeur who wants to charge the enemy get himself killed; I'll be huddled down about 400 yards away pissing myself and weeping like a little girl, but my cowardly ass will survive. The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
I guess I'm just fascinated by the mindsets of the men and women who live their lives in this way. It's a social structure that's interesting to me, but I'm not sure why. It's clearly not just the whole uniform thing, despite what my title says. If that were the case, I'd like sports more than I do.
Maybe I'm just a sucker for militaristic values. I guess that makes my dreams of Hitler that much more disturbing.
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90% of all military personnel secretly dream of being unpaid bloggers with a Masters Degree in English.
5 comments:
Just to keep the English pain going on, from Sylvia Plath:
"Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you."
;)
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Smoop!
Oh, Aardvark Man, if you only saw the swath he cut through Morgantown, you'd think otherwise....the ladies are probably safer he's moving away.
:D
Damn right! The ladies love an Aryan overlord to ravish them while he quotes poetry.
Brute. ;)
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