Live Out Your Repressed Homo Dreams...In the Army

Yet another borrowed story from Yahoo! News (I don't do my own digging, you see):

The Pentagon is trying to outsource its recruitment database to a private company, thereby bypassing the Privacy Act provision that forbids the government from obtaining and keeping certain information about people. Under the new scheme/dodge/conspiracy, the Pentagon's information-gathering agancy would get high school and college students' personal data, including grade point averages, and use them to decide whom to recruit. This is just a guess, but I'm going to say that poor, black, and Latino students are the intended targets of this project.

There are several implications to this--and not just what the "privacy advocates" (slippery term, that: even fundamentalist Christians are advocates of privacy when it's their privacy that is threatened) say: that this doesn't live up to the spirit of the Privacy Act and that more personal information in the hands of government is not a good thing. The biggest and most interesting facet of this program is that it proposes to gather this information on all college students. That includes, of course, College Republicans and wealthy dumbasses like George Bush's daughters, nieces, and nephews. It will be very easy, one would think, to check the actual demographics of future recruits against the known (it's all college students!) recruitment pool--what does the Pentagon do when it is revealed that none of the rich, white kids in the targeted group will join the service? What, then, happens to our collective attitude towards the Armed Forces, the GI Bill, and the nature of class relations and responsibilities in this country?

Another angle is, for the Libertarians and nuts out there, that if the Pentagon can live up to the letter but not the spirit of the law and get away with it, then why can other government agencies not do the same? Isn't the Pentagon's attempt to do this akin to a prosecutor attempting to introduce into evidence a plain, brown package that came over the transom in the middle of the night? Will American courts and the American public accept the proclamations of government agencies who claim no knowledge beforehand of the information third-parties are being paid to collect on you?

The Pentagon says that, if you for some odd reason (perhaps you fear death, or maybe you actually LIKE yourself the way you are and you don't want to be mindfucked for the next four years?) don't want to be part of the winning team, going in for the big score, then you can "opt-out" of the database. Of course, they also say that the exact same information will be gathered on you, but rather than using it to recruit you or your offspring, it will just be put in a separate file and kept, um, like, for no discernible reason. And, of course, the two files will never, ever, get mixed up. We are looking at a first step towards a total information society, and I for one can't wait to get the mark of the beast on me...oh, wait--I mean, I can't wait to get that microchip implanted in my forehead. That's better.

Finally, The database may not be the real issue here. I'm not sure myself. But, if lifelong experience means anything, then it seems that many (by no means all, or even most) of the people in the Armed Forces want to be there in some capacity. It ain't (much as I wish it were) that they're all there for the college money, folks. Some of them want to shoot at human beings, kill women and children, eat dead, burnt bodies, and see veins in their teeth. And some of them probably actually believe that the Army builds roads and schools and helps people. Helping people is a key--it also explains the crossover between military people and cops and firemen.

But I digress (no! me?). The problem is not necessarily one of access; that is, giving the Pentagon little Dick's phone number does not equal signing him up for a six-year hitch in Afghanistan. I would like to think that any responsible parent would raise a child smart enough not to piss his life away just because some loudmouth jarhead calls him up and calls him a pussy for not wanting to enlist. But more than the fact that some people actually are in the market for military service and that some people are too dumb to say no, the problem with any effort to step-up recruitment is that such efforts too often cross the line and enter the realm of illegality. Recall, if you will, the situation brought to light last month, where an Army recruiter threatened to get an arrest warrant if a teenager did not agree to meet him to discuss enlistment. That was a crime. Similar crimes are committed everyday, and no one seems to care because 1) the kids being coerced are poor and brown and 2) it's all in the "service" of the country--one that has become quite a scary place in the last few years, thanks largely to that kind of thinking. So the point is not "I don't want the Pentagon to have my information" but instead "The Pentagon's malfeasance is troubling, but as long as we defend the force of the rule of law, then the Pentagon can go fuck itself for all I care."