Credible Threats
April 13, 2006

I'm not exactly the rah-rah type. But I was enormously proud of my alma mater recently, when I heard that the current crop of UCSC anti-war activists had gotten themselves labeled a "credible threat" by the Pentagon. Good job, kids!

The rest of America may be content to sink ever deeper into an apathetic coma of fear, ennui, junk food and celebrity-watching. But the plucky UCSC chapter of Students Against War are taking on the military-industrial complex where it counts—on campus, at job fairs, where the bloated, ravenous serpent of military recruitment goes trolling for fresh young blood to gobble into the system and keep the machine running.

These days, only about 30% of chip-dipping, Whopper-devouring, Ritalin-popping, videogame and TV-addicted supersize Middle American couch monkeys of service age could even pass the physical, so college recruitment is a big deal. Especially at a health-conscious campus like our city on the hill, where the uphill landscape of forests and trails demands physical activity, stamina, and the pathfinding skills of a bloodhound just to locate a dining hall. Military recruiters descend on UCSC like a plague of sand fleas on the beach.

And when they get here and set up shop at the campus job fair, they're met with the spirited "counter-recruiting" of the Students Against War. The students might form a human chain around the recruitment table and provide an opposing viewpoint to military jingoism. Or they might stage a "queer kiss-in" to point out that gay men and women are still officially taboo in the military (unless they're prepared to lie about it). Or the students might pass out death's head flyers to remind potential recruits what the business of the military is really all about.

In other words: guerrilla patriotism at its finest!

In my day, the word 'student' and the word 'activist' were synonymous. I was in high school when the movie Z came out, Costa-Gavras' intense political thriller about repression and resistance in modern Greece. When the corrupt officials in the film were caught in the act of some criminal malfeasance, the mere warning cry "Here come the students!" was enough to strike terror into their black hearts.

I transferred to UCSC in the middle of the McGovern campaign. Nixon was re-elected, in a day that will live in infamy, but McGovern won by a landslide among the activists on campus. What we were most active about in those days was the Vietnam War. Or "conflict," as it was then called, as if manipulating language to disguise the nature of the beast could somehow make the consequences any less devastating, the fighting any less savage, or the casualties any less dead. It didn't matter what they called it: American youth were being drafted into the army and shipped to Vietnam for an illegal, immoral, undeclared adventure against inhabitants who were surprisingly resistant to the U. S. brand of democracy imposed on the point of a bayonet or a napalm bomb. (Sound familiar?) As one popular slogan of the day put it: "Join the army. See the world. Meet interesting people from foreign countries and kill them."

It would be nice to think that civilization has evolved since then. But the current infestation of government warmongers have actually devolved backwards to the Wild West mentality of shoot (or pre-emptively strike) first, and make up some flimsy justification for it later. They no longer bother to disguise the name of the war in Iraq; they just spin it with lofty notions of democracy and liberation, while branding their detractors as unpatriotic, a credible threat to sacred American values. War is big business and government profiteers stand to—you'll pardon the expression—make a killing. It's all marketing to them. They're not the ones fighting the war. They're not the ones dying.

So the Iraqi War staggers into its fourth hellish year with no end in sight—despite George Bush declaring the "Mission Accomplished" three years and several hundred thousand lives ago. (Unless by "mission" he meant the US plot to control Iraqi oil fields, in which case they were probably the most—if not the only—true words he's ever spoken in office.) And military recruiters continue to stalk college and high school campuses in search of unwary young people to buy into the G. I. Bill of goods, selling the armed forces as harmless and stable a career option as data processing.

The GI Bill is a wonderful thing. Learning a trade, no problem. But don't let the rhetoric fool you, kids. The essential purpose of the armed forces is to kill or be killed, either option a credible threat to moral, mental or physical well-being. This is not a video game. This is not a drill. This is real death, live and in color, up close and personal, and students who find themselves targeted by recruiters in the midst of pursuing an education have every right—if not a moral obligation—to just say no. Let the corporations fight for their own oil fields. Why should your life be the grease on the wheels that makes them even richer? You want to serve your country? Join the Peace Corps, or VISTA, or the ACLU. Better yet, join the Students Against War.