Search Results for: military

How to Spell the Rebel Yell

Elena Passarello | The Normal School | 2010 | 14 minutes (3,470 words)

The Normal SchoolOur latest Longreads Member Pick is a deep dive into the sounds of history, from Elena Passarello and The Normal School. The essay also is featured in Passarello’s book, Let Me Clear My Throat.
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“Yee-aay-ee!” “Wah-Who-Eeee!” -Margaret Mitchell

 

“Wah-Who-Eeee!” -Chester Goolrick

 

“Rrrrrr-yahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh-yip-yip-yip-yip-yip!”

-H. Allen Smith

 

“More! More! More!” -Billy Idol

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What Ails Us: A Reading List About Disease

In last week’s Reading List, I wrote about Eula Biss and her new book, On Immunity: An InoculationIt is a meditation on the United States, disease, race and motherhood, using vaccination as a metaphor/catalyst. With that on my mind, this week’s list is about diseases—four essays about Ebola, Parkinson’s and more.

1. “My Mother, Parkinson’s and Our Struggle to Understand Disease.” (N. Michelle AuBuchon, Buzzfeed, July 2014)

In a combination of memoir and science writing, from her father’s careful logs to the books she reads to her ailing mother, AuBuchon comes to realize “we come from people who listen and people who believe in stories, because stories are the only thing getting them from one moment to the next.”

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The Technology of ‘Nonlethal’ Weapons and Crowd Control

What the “protesters” had come up against was the Active Denial System, a weapon, we were told, that “could change the rules of war and save huge numbers of lives in Iraq.” Active denial works like a giant, open-air microwave oven, using a beam of electromagnetic radiation to heat the skin of its targets to 130 degrees and force anyone in its path to flee in pain — but without injury, officials insist, making it one of the few weapons in military history to be promoted as harmless to its targets. The Pentagon claims that 11,000 tests on humans have resulted in but two cases of seconddegree burns, a “safety” record that has put active denial at the forefront of an international arms-development effort involving an astonishing range of technologies: electrical weapons that shock and stun; laser weapons that cause dizziness or temporary blindness; acoustic weapons that deafen and nauseate; chemical weapons that irritate, incapacitate, or sedate; projectile weapons that knock down, bruise, and disable; and an assortment of nets, foams, and sprays that obstruct or immobilize. “Non-lethal” is the Pentagon’s approved term for these weapons, but their manufacturers also use the terms “soft kill,” “less-lethal,” “limited effects,” “low collateral damage,” and “compliance.” The weapons are intended primarily for use against unarmed or primitively armed civilians; they are designed to control crowds, clear buildings and streets, subdue and restrain individuals, and secure borders. The result is what appears to be the first arms race in which the opponent is the general population.

-Ando Arike, in Harper’s (2010), on the history of “nonlethal” weapons used in crowd control.

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Photo: katerkate, Flickr

Why Do So Many People Pretend to Be Native American?

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Russell Cobb | This Land Press | August 2014 | 16 minutes (3,976 words)

This Land PressFor this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we are thrilled to share a brand new essay from Oklahoma’s This Land Press, just published in their August 2014 issue. This Land has been featured on Longreads often in the past—you can support them here.
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The 'Serial Abuse' of Our Armed Forces

The intensification of the War for the Greater Middle East after 9/11 revealed unsuspected defects in America’s basic approach to raising its military forces. Notwithstanding the considerable virtues of our professional military, notably durability and tactical prowess, the existing system rates as a failure.

The All-Volunteer Force is like a burger from a fast-food joint: it’s cheap, filling and tastes good going down. What’s not to like? Take a closer look, however, and problems with the existing U.S. military system become apparent. It encourages political irresponsibility. It underwrites an insipid conception of citizenship. It’s undemocratic. It turns out to be exorbitantly expensive. And it doesn’t win.

Dishonesty pervades the relationship between the U.S. military and society. Rhetorically, we “support the troops.” But the support is seldom more than skin-deep.

In practice, we subject the troops we profess to care about to serial abuse. As authorities in Washington commit U.S. forces to wars that are unnecessary or ill-managed or unwinnable — or, in the martial equivalent of a trifecta, all of the above — Americans manifest something close to indifference. The bungled rollout of a health care reform program might generate public attention and even outrage. By comparison, a bungled military campaign elicits shrugs.

-Andrew J. Bacevich, in Notre Dame magazine, on the history of U.S. war in the Middle East over the past 30 years, and why there’s no end (or strategy) in sight.

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Photo: usafe, Flickr

‘Cooking Was My Mother’s Principal Weapon’

Born into the permissive Sixties, raised in the disillusioned Seventies, the third of three children, I came of age in a world where few rules were trusted, few applied. Of those that did, the rules contained in my mother’s cookbooks were paramount.

The foods of my childhood were romantic. Boeuf bourguignon. Vichyssoise. Salade Niçoise. Bouillabaisse. Béarnaise. Mousseline au Chocolat. Years before I could spell these foods, I learned their names from my mother’s lips, their smells by heart. At the time I took no notice of the gustatory schizophrenia that governed our meals. The extravagant French cuisine prepared on the nights my father dined with us; the Swanson TV dinners on the nights we ate alone, we three kids and my mother, nights that came more frequently as the Sixties ebbed into the Seventies. On those nights we ate our dinners in silence and watched the Vietnam war on television, and I took a childish proprietary delight in having a dinner of my own, served in its aluminum tray, with each portion precisely fitted to its geometrical place. These dinners were heated under thin tin foil and served on plates, and we ate directly from the metal trays our meals of soft whipped potatoes, brown gravy, sliced turkey, cubed carrots and military-green peas.

Had I noticed these culinary cycles, I doubt that I would have recognized them for the strategic maneuvers they seem to me in retrospect. Precisely what my parents were warring over I’m not sure, but it seems clear to me now that in the intricate territorial maneuvers that for years defined their marriage, cooking was my mother’s principal weapon. Proof of her superiority. My father might not feel tenderness, but he would have to admire her. My mother cooked with a vengeance in those years, or perhaps I should say she cooked for revenge. In her hands, cuisine became a martial art.

From E.J. Levy’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” which was featured in the 2005 edition of The Best American Essays, edited by Susan Orlean. When anyone asks me to name a favorite essay I’ve read, I often point to this one.

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First Chapter: Dave Eggers’ Novel, ‘Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?’

Dave Eggers | Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? | June 2014 | 23 minutes (5,800 words)

 

BUILDING 52

—I did it. You’re really here. An astronaut. Jesus.
—Who’s that?
—You probably have a headache. From the chloroform.
—What? Where am I? Where is this place? Who the fuck are you?
—You don’t recognize me?
—What? No. What is this? Read more…

Pablo Escobar’s Private Prison Is Now Run by Monks for Senior Citizens

Longreads Pick

In exchange for his surrender, the top Colombian drug lord was allowed to build his jail—complete with a disco, jacuzzi, and waterfall. Now 23 years later, it’s a home for the elderly.

With negotiations underway in the spring of 1991, Escobar began hunting for the perfect piece of land upon which to construct his prison. He took along his brother, Roberto, who was the cartel’s accountant. Escobar had scouted much of the vacant land surrounding Medellín but found the lush mountainside of Mont Catedral particularly ideal. “This is the place, brother,” Escobar said during a site visit. “Do you realize that after six in the evening it fogs over and is foggy at dawn, too?” Escobar also appreciated the steep topography that would make it nearly impossible for the military or rival cartels to mount an air attack on the compound. And so, prior to formally surrendering, Escobar began construction on The Cathedral.

Source: The Daily Beast
Published: Jun 7, 2014
Length: 13 minutes (3,472 words)

Insuring the Dead

Longreads Pick

Inside the business of corpse-repatriation insurance:

It is said, by people who would know, that at its peak, Colombia’s infamous Medellín drug cartel was spending $2,500 a month on rubber bands to wrap around bricks of cash. The arithmetic of human excess begins to acquire mythic status when money becomes nearly impossible to count and we are left to communicate chiefly through estimates and legends, like the one in which Pablo Escobar set fire to $2 million in cash to create a fire for his daughter when they were on the run and she got cold. During Colombia’s dark and bloody 1980s, the cartels’ pecuniary abundance was not only the stuff of legendary proportion. Death, too, became grimly innumerable—and at the intersection of cartel, guerrilla, and paramilitary violence was the question of how to respond to the ubiquity of death.

Source: The New Inquiry
Published: May 20, 2014
Length: 6 minutes (1,505 words)

70,000 Kids Will Show Up Alone at Our Border This Year. What Happens to Them?

Longreads Pick

Officials have been stunned by a “surge” of unaccompanied children crossing into the United States.

Although some have traveled from as far away as Sri Lanka and Tanzania, the bulk are minors from Mexico and from Central America’s so-called Northern Triangle—Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, which together account for 74 percent of the surge. Long plagued by instability and unrest, these countries have grown especially dangerous in recent years: Honduras imploded following a military coup in 2009 and now has the world’s highest murder rate. El Salvador has the second-highest, despite the 2012 gang truce between Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18. Guatemala, new territory for the Zetas cartel, has the fifth-highest murder rate; meanwhile, the cost of tortillas has doubled as corn prices have skyrocketed due to increased American ethanol production (Guatemala imports half of its corn) and the conversion of farmland to sugarcane and oil palm for biofuel.

Author: Ian Gordon
Source: Mother Jones
Published: Jul 1, 2014
Length: 11 minutes (2,878 words)