A Militarized South

Everyone who yearned for the South to rise again may not have had this in mind. The Noriwch (Connecticut) Bulletin reports:

The Pentagon’s recommendations for the next round of military base closings show a clear regional trend, cutting operations in the Northeast and Midwest, while further enhancing the South as a bastion of the nation’s defense and military culture.

There’s a lot of blah blah about the “loss of jobs” in the Northeast, but John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org gets to what I think is the heart of the issue and makes it very clear:

John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense analysis firm, says that while there are logical reasons for the move from the solidly Democratic Northeastern states to the mostly Republican Southern states, the trend could produce undesirable results.

“My concern is it would further polarize the country culturally into heavily militarized red states and demilitarized blue states,” Pike said. “It’s creating a situation where military bases are normal in states like Alabama and Texas and abnormal in states like Michigan and Wisconsin.”

What better way to, in the the future, ensure that the military is essentially loyal to one policial party (and disloyal to the other) than to tribalize it, to embed it even more deeply among those most steeped in the idolatry of God-and-Country and who are most willing to believe that the God of Deuteronomy is their god as well and asks the same things of them? (That is, endless war, mass murder, and adherence to a brutal law.)

And what better way to make sure that future soldiers will willingly police unruly and heathen-filled California, New York, Ohio and Wisconsin if asked, than to make sure those places are far-away, almost foreign places, as needful of their saving work as Iraq and Afghanistan?

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11:35 am on June 1, 2005