Thanks to the Mission Continues program, I have started a six-month fellowship with BEDLAM and BEDLAM Outreach. 

The fellowship enables me to work with BEDLAM as they teach Shakespeare to military veterans. As a part of the fellowship, it is one of my personal goals to begin teaching classes to other groups affected by violence, such as inner city youth, police and fire associations, and refugees. But for the first couple of months I am just learning the ropes and trying to assimilate the BEDLAM way of doing things. Along with Jenny Pacanowski, I will be helping to curate a few BEDLAM Outreach public presentations in the fall and winter of 2016.

BEDLAM Outreach is run by Stephan Wolfert, one of the most beloved members of the veterans artistic community in the country. His show 'Cry Havoc' encapsulates much of what I feel about the arts, especially Shakespeare. Interestingly, we both fell in love with Shakespeare through the same two plays, Richard III and Macbeth.  

Every Monday night, 6pm to 9pm, we host free acting classes and writing workshops for military veterans at the Sheen Center on 18 Bleecker Street. If you are a veteran and want to check us out, please stop by and see us. 

BEDLAM is an outstanding theater company. They are led by Eric Tucker and Andrus Nichols. Since arriving in New York a few years ago, they have taken critics and audiences by storm with inventive, smart, fast-paced interpretations of challenging classics, including George Bernard Shaw's SAINT JOAN, Shakespeare's HAMLET, and Kate Hammill's adaptation of Jane Austen's SENSE AND SENSIBILITY. 

Terry Teachout of the Wall Street Journal named Eric Tucker the director of the year in 2014. He also called their 2015 Midsummer Night's Dream the best interpretation of the play since Peter Brook's white box version opened in 1970. 

Perhaps the best sense for the vibe around this company is that artists, audiences, and critics have been giving BEDLAM's work repeat viewings: this is the kind of small-scale stuff that carries the excitement of a Beach Boys song, where the fun surface is under-girded with a deep understanding of the classical structure and intelligent ideas that have informed theater for hundreds of years. Their plays are filled with sharp acting, playful excursions into the audience, and clever staging.

Check us out sometime. 

In commemoration of Veterans Day, my friend Sam Strum and I got to perform an excerpt from Westhusing in the House of Atreus at the Lincoln Center's David Rubenstein Atrium on 12 November 2015. Our appearance occurred alongside other veteran artists at the 'Home Show' event, which served as a showcase for artists who happen to be military veterans. Gary Jaffe directed our performance, while Alex Mallory of the Veteran Artists Project deserves special thanks for inviting us to the event.

We had a great turn out, which I suppose occurred because 1) it was the Lincoln Center and 2) performances were scheduled on a Thursday evening, which is a pretty reasonable time to host a series of performing arts shows. Alex did a great job putting together a fun lineup, which alternated between Tom Mooney's all-veteran band, and short excerpts from plays, books, essays, and poems created by veterans. Two stand-out performances from the night were Stephan Wolfert's Cry Havoc, and Paul Mooney's clip from Vetted, a television pilot that mocks the more incongruous aspects of returning home from war.

Sam and I started working together through UT Austin's Spirit of Shakespeare program, which for many years was run by English professor Alan Friedman. Gary then joined Sam and I (and many other fine people) to create THE PRICELESS SLAVE at the Cohen New Works Festival in 2013.

It's nice to still be among friends, though I now live several hundred miles from Austin. ​​

Do you remember the board game "Chutes and Ladders," where players take turns climbing the rungs of a ladder, only to slide back to square one over and over again? The makers of the game illustrated the board with children who, for good behavior, were shown climbing the ladder, and for bad behavior were sent sliding down the chutes. KILL FLOOR, the new play that just went up at LTC3, depicts modern poverty, where the ladders are missing the lower rungs, and the gleaming steel chutes of modern America provide the blind and driving illusion of progress all the way back to square one.

Marin Ireland delivers a star turn as 'Andy,' a newly released ex-convict. Desperate for a job, she signs on as slaughter-house employee, where she's quickly sent to the kill floor. Every thirteen seconds a bolt gun kills a cow, while another machine lifts the fresh carcass out of the pen and skins it--sometimes while the animal is not quite dead. Accidents are common, sometimes leading to more pain for the cattle, and sometimes injuries for the workers. The kill floor itself is kept just beyond our sight, but its implications bleed out into every aspect of Andy's life.

Rick, Andy's affably manipulative and dangerously amorous boss (played by Danny McCarthy), ​ tells her not to worry: her co-workers are Mexicans ("good workers...reliable") but because his bosses are "racist as hell," she's likely to get promoted above them and sent upstairs to do office work. As the Bard says, "All [wo]men have some hope," and some hopes are higher than others.

Andy's desperation to find a job is rooted in her desire to provide for her biracial teenaged son, B, who is simply embarrassed by Andy's reemergence. B is understandably more interested in surviving high school and first-crushes than he is in bringing his estranged and needy mother back into his life. B remembers too well his mother's arrest, and Marin Ireland provides subtle, nervous gestures that suggest that Andy is still struggling with past addictions, though she insists otherwise to her boss.

Instead of loving his mother, B reaches out to Simon, a white schoolmate and self-fashioned rapper. Simone lays out "sick rhymes" for the benefit of B. B helps Simon score weed. More importantly, the two are caught in an unequal and entirely believable sexual awakening. 'Coming out,' which is getting easier in much of America, seems a nihilistic social choice in their world, and their relationship stands tensely at the edge of discovery. The two young performers, Nicholas L. Ashe and Samuel H. Levine, fully own their characters; under the guidance of director Lila Neugebauer, they create the play's most dynamic, topsy-turvy moments; even if Koogler's insights on race, sexuality, and high school politics are not radically fresh, they are truthfully delivered with wit, grace, and daring.

With B avoiding her, Andy hesitatingly looks for connection elsewhere. She first turns to Sarah (played by Natalie Gold), an outgoing woman from the right-side of the tracks; the relationship allows the play to show that the two women face similar emotional trials, but with such wildly different economic resources as to not be speaking the same language. Sarah thrives (and perhaps even applauds herself) for keeping Andy company, but Andy is unwilling or unable to broach her own past, and so their friendship is stunted. As that relationship stalls, Andy takes a turn into another dead-end by consenting to her married boss' request for a date.

Abe Koogler, showing his chops for modern drama, begins many of his quick, short scenes in media res, with the relationships already established and understood by the characters, and the drama centered on each person's peculiar verbal strategies as they drive after their meager, vulnerable (and often funny) desires.  He expertly writes in the staccato semi-fluency that thrives in America's small black box theaters.

(Why, in American dramas about the economically disadvantaged, is there a shortage of eloquent, rhetorically powerful people saying stupid things? It must be a two-hundred year carryover from the imprinting excellence of Charles Dickens. But Mark Twain is our man, and he had plenty of characters who earnestly believed in the tomato paste they were selling.)

At any rate, as with David Mamet and Annie Baker, each broken and partial sentence leaves room for our sympathies. The less the characters say, the more we root for them; the more they open their mouths, the more we know they lack the resources to thrive, and dash the hopes we have invented for them in their quiet moments.

The set by Daniel Zimmerman (wide, shallow, and grey) works with Ben Stanton's lighting and Brandon Wolcott's sound to deliver the audience into an icy world where a slaughterhouse and budget apartment share the same colorless walls. Prison and slaughter are never seen, but always present. The actors dart in and out of the wings like cattle through chutes, and neither they nor we have much idea of what's coming next. The simplicity of the design invited the imagination into the world of the play, and ties together the disparate threads of the story, so that the voices and themes from one scene echo into the next.

It is a play that disposes with an obvious ending, or a well-made play's denouement. Unlike in Annie Baker's THE FLICK (or Oscar Wilde's THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ERNEST), there are no craftily hidden pieces of paper that cause the play to burst into a climax and a resolution. Most of Koogler's characters could struggle on, nearly unchanging, and constantly caught off-guard, for years and years. Rather than forcing a neat cap on the play's final moments, Koogler brings it to a close at the ninety minute mark, like the closing shift in a warehouse; the lights silently dim on an evening of open, honest, and throat-catching performances. KILL FLOOR depicts characters living in poverty; they prove likable, but they will not win.

This play is a necessary stab in the eye to the Group Theatre's optimism at the end of the Great Depression.​

If the playwright senses hope, but sees little way out, then we should take his word for it, and thank him for his honesty: we should not request that playwrights invent neat little plots designed to satisfy our complacency. ​

In Christopher Sykes' 1959 biography of Orde Wingate, he uncovered Wingate's harsh criticism of T.E. Lawrence. Both Lawrence and Wingate were twentieth-century British officers who favored 'irregular warfare.' Their campaigns in the First and Second World Wars would influence future generations of military leaders, and the ways in which modern armies organize their forces.

Though separated by more than twenty years and two continents, the campaigning 'styles' of Lawrence and Wingate shared some similar features. Both wielded small numbers of men, and avoided sustained combat against larger rival forces. Both took exceptional personal risks. Both fought in foreign lands, and at the head of largely foreign soldiers.

The similarities between the two officers are clear, but the specifics of Wingate's criticisms are not quite as easily discernible. (Besides the Sykes biography, the two best sources for understanding Wingate's critique of Lawrence are two of his Abyssinian soldiers that followed him from Palestine: the officer Anthony 'Tony' Simmonds and the Jewish-Palestinian clerk Avram Akavia.) In his desert campaigns during the First World War, Lawrence had used British money to hire Arab tribesman to conduct irregular warfare against the Ottoman Empire. In Abyssinia in 1940, Wingate sought to use soldiers loyal to the British Empire to inspire Abyssinian 'patriot' forces to rally by his side; Wingate wanted to avoid direct payment and direct distribution of arms. Lawrence appealed to Bedouin patriotism, but he did so with a sense of irony and bemusement: nationalism, he thought, was a paltry motivation for the Bedouin, whereas British gold and war-time honor could provided more effective incentives. Wingate viewed Lawrence's approach as too close to bribery; Wingate wanted to appeal to patriotism and pride, and refused to allow direct payments to Abyssinian militia leaders or their followers.

The puzzling aspect of Wingate's critique is that, despite their technical differences, it seems as if Lawrence still could have served as an advantageous and famous model of successful irregular warfare, thus inspiring Wingate's commanders to devote further resources to his campaign; and Wingate, if nothing else, was obsessed with clawing for more resources. In fact, Field Marshal Archibald Wavell plainly states that Lawrence's previous efforts in WW1 directly influenced Wavell's deployment of Wingate in WW2 (see The Good Soldier, 1948). But instead of substantiating an ostensibly favorable comparison, Wingate denigrated Lawrence's methods as wasteful and ineffective. Why?

First, I want to avoid rarifying 'denigration.' ​Denigration occurs in everyday life on a regular basis. In front of spouses, friends, and partners, human beings denigrate potential rivals to sculpt their own status position relative to that of the rival. Some typical, casual examples include: "He's not that good of a writer." "If only her talent could keep pace with his ambition." "She's pretty, but she doesn't have taste." Denigration occurs for other reasons, however, besides rivalry for status. Other possibilities include 1) a genuine disagreement about strategy 2) Jealousy. 

I think that rivalry over status is the best answer. It doesn't matter that Lawrence was dead; rivalry is not a 'reasonable' thing. It's a basic mechanism that propels us unwittingly forward. It often happens subconsciously, and rarely needs to justify itself. ​

Wingate, however, was a pensive officer, and he was the sort that would search-out a basis for his feelings about Lawrence. I think it's likely that Wingate not only disliked Lawrence's 'methods,' but found fault with Lawrence's personal conduct during military operations. In particular, Wingate probably felt that Lawrence had abdicated his personal responsibilities as an officer to play too-much the desert warrior.

A quick comparison of the two men can highlight their differences in outlook: Whereas Wingate was a career-oriented soldier, Lawrence was an amateur officer. Wingate never lost any family members to war, but Lawrence lost two brothers before embarking on the campaign to take Aqaba. Wingate preferred leading professional soldiers on well-organized campaigns; Lawrence had a respectful but difficult relationship with professional soldiers, and preferred fighting alongside loose bands of Arab raiders. Wingate directed and orchestrated violence in the traditional manner of an officer, whereas Lawrence preferred hands-on violence in the style of a medieval knight (and hated/loved himself for it).
​
​There are no records of Wingate actually shooting an enemy in combat--he was too busy maintaining his erratic supply line and keeping his troops on a relentless march. Lawrence, however, fired his weapon often, and preferred the emotional rush of battle to the more mundane tasks typically required of officers in combat. Lawrence's emphasis on action, in Wingate's view, was an abdication of responsibility. 

Lawrence, I think it's fair to say, had a much better nose for politics, bureaucratic maneuvering, and power. He could also express his thoughts clearly, eloquently, and in an interesting way. But despite his clear talent for political life, Lawrence prioritized his efforts in the second-half of the First World War towards hands-on participation in violence. His own memoir, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and his letters from that time period show a keen awareness of the ongoing political situation in the Levant. But those same sources also point to the fact that Lawrence was more interested in being involved in raids and ambushes.

Wingate seems to have noticed the peculiarities of Lawrence's behavior as an officer, and he also noticed that Lawrence used direct payment because this was Lawrence's easiest and quickest way to get rid of the resources the British Empire offered him, thereby freeing Lawrence to charge back into the mix on personal terms.

Only once Lawrence was in Damascus did he refocus his energies towards politics; but at that point, it was too late. The Arab forces that he had he supplied and fought with lacked the hierarchical structure and discipline necessary to successfully occupy and manage a city. Lawrence also did not concern himself with the legitimacy of his occupation of Damascus, or how it would be perceived by the locals. (I am not saying that the British Army's occupation of Damascus was legitimate; I am just pointing out that they were better prepared for it.)

Wingate had a bold imagination, and he was unusually lucky in his guesses on how things would turn out. But his writings betray a lack of specificity and accurate knowledge of human behavior. He was very smart, energetic, and imaginative--but he was not as accurate or precise of an observer of human political behavior as Lawrence. Wingate did, however, simply care more about politics: he took steps at every juncture of his planning to build working, useful coalitions. And Wingate bothered to make assessments about whether or not his plans gelled with the local political situation in the Sudan, Palestine, Abyssinia, and Burma. That's not to say that Wingate was a purely strategic animal: like most generals, his goal was not to win the war, but to ensure that his campaign succeeded. The terms of a success in a campaign can be objectively measurable, even if they are also objectively pointless from a wider perspective. Wingate was perfectly comfortable with that paradox; Lawrence tried (and failed) to ignore it, which led to a crises of consciousness for the rest of his life, and to his writing of a Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a memoir seeped in self-searching and unrest.

I think Wingate deserves some credit for his reading of Lawrence's outlook on military affairs. While Lawrence did not deserve the harsh disparagement that he received from Wingate, Wingate did notice Lawrence's unusual motives for war. And he probably saw that Lawrence's personal motives diverged from those of career soldiers and politicians.

​From a distance, the tactical approaches of Wingate and Lawrence still resemble one another. They rode similar horses towards similar objectives, but they rode for different reasons, and these differences materially affected the lives of their men, the results of their campaigns, and their own self-regard at each step of the journey.

Visual art pursues a quietness of purpose rarely afforded in the theater. A piece of theater dies without an active artist vocally and physically sustaining it. A piece of formal visual art expects to stand without its creator's immediate presence.

One of the most interesting recent sightings occurred at the MOMA. It was a piece that put me in mind of the playwright Leegrid Stevens' The Dudleys! A Family Game.  Stevens' piece was a theatrical satire of family drama that injected color into domestic conflict through Nintendo Entertainment System escapism. When the characters stumbled into a crisis point, their world collided with projected pixels, and they had to beat, bash, and dash their way past local cops, lost relatives, and the like. The emotions were deeply personal, but the modes were Brechtian.

A similar (though I think more political) attempt is on display at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. It is the 2008 piece 'The Long March: Restart" by Feng Mengbo. (Here's a MOMA link.)

The title takes its name from the Red Army's fighting retreat of 1934. The installation assumes the form of an NES style video game projected on the parallel walls of a long, dark hallway. The interaction between the viewers/players and the video game generates the piece's artistry and political vibrancy. At the opening of the hallway is a small table with a video game controller, labeled with the sign "Please be considerate of others waiting to play." For a game about a violent retreat, the sign is oddly ominous. 

The game itself is a side-scrolling kill-them-all adventure; the avatar of the game is a Maoist soldier wearing a blue uniform, who can either crush his enemies by jumping onto them, or blow them up with exploding Coca-Cola cans. On one wall, the entire 'level' is projected cleanly and comprehensibly, but on the opposite wall, the image of the avatar is magnified, and the details of the level are impossible to discern. Every time the hero reaches the end of a level, the projected image reverses, so that if the player does not turn around, they are faced with the blocky, indecipherable super-sized avatar image, rather than the clean image of a side-scrolling game. 

What's odd and wonderful to watch is the interaction between the viewers, the gamers, and the installation. Young men (and some women) grab the controller with confidence and familiarity. After a few seconds of destroying everything they could find, they would turn to strangers in the room and sheepishly admit that they "have no idea what's going on." And then they would go back to blasting. When the player reached the end of a level, they would often refuse to look around and take stock of the situation; instead they would just keep blasting. Occasionally, a player would figure out the relationship between the shifting projections, but this was rare. 

If the player asked his or her companions "Where am I?" his or her friends would respond solely within the context of the game with "You're all the way over here," or else they would refuse to answer the question and say something like "Jump on that pipe" or "Blow them up--you missed one." Discussion of the wider context, or the purpose of the game, were inadmissible, naïve, or impolite.

As the placard suggested, the players gladly handed off the controller to other audience members. But with old 8-bit NES games in particular, there is not much of an expectation that we need to "understand" the game; there is no particularly interesting plot, or unspoken rules. And so the players proved entirely interchangeable. If the controller was put down, the game would 'restart' and launch into a fifteen second piece of pixelated Maoist propaganda. 

The relationship between the game's theme (revolution) and the installation's action (confused tedious violence) proved rewarding. I observed the game for about fifteen minutes, and at times I was tempted to 'explain' that the magnified avatar switches walls when you complete a level--as if that would really bring any clarity to the game. 

I often view violence in terms of status and reward, and my own work details the links between sexuality, violence, and strategic decision-making. But the Mengbo game is largely uninterested in status, rewards, and sexuality, and shows the glowing attraction of repetitious task-completion within a familiar medium. Many people would prefer marching onwards, rather than questioning where they are going. I would love to see Mengbo's work within a Chinese context; it would be a great cross-cultural study...and maybe they could explain why the Maoist soldier is chucking explosive cans of Coca-Cola. I also wonder how Mengbo describes the work to Chinese audiences. Does he demonstrate an underlying challenge to capitalist assumptions? Or does he refuse to reveal his intentions altogether?

Deepest congratulations to 1st Lt. Shaye Haver, Capt. Kristen Griest and their Ranger peers for being a part of the first class of Rangers to include women. The men and women who graduated today did so without the instructors changing their rigorous, world-class standards. Rangers lead the way.

The data science website 'FiveThirtyEight' just published a new 'What's the Point' podcast about the limits of Drone Warfare, and especially the difference between tactical tools and strategic thought. Their guest is William Arkin, a former intelligence minder and current journalist. The prompt for the discussion is Arkin's new book, Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare. an awkward title with an important theme.

The gist of the discussion is that the U.S. security forces have, with the aid of drones, amassed mountains of data which they comb through to find targets to destroy. The United States has devoted tremendous resources to this ongoing project, and it has led to a large number of deaths, and a comparable amount of controversy among ethics watchdogs. Drone strikes though, compared with 'boots on the ground' soldiering, consumes relatively few resources, does not immediately risk the lives of U.S. soldiers, and so receives little media attention. The film Good Kill and the play Grounded explore the moral costs of these issues for those who pilot and command drone operations, but little time is spent understanding the conflicts that we enter.

Arkin argues that an investment in drones cannot displace an intensive investigation of the purpose and end-goal of the conflicts we enter. Good data can lead to good knowledge, but when that data lacks a coherent framework to understand it, it may simply help perpetuate the slack fighting that we have been involved in since September 2001. It's true that drones have created a tempestuous legal debate, and discussions about the morality of assassination. But these debates lack the purposeful depth of strategic discussion.

Why do our leaders want us to engage in violence on the far side of the world? Can the violence we are capable of actually help us achieve the objectives laid down by our leadership? Is the public fully informed of the costs and dangers of entering such a conflict? Can we achieve better outcomes using different tools, including diplomacy, or an alternative military action? How do people interpret our drone strikes, both those that succeed, and those that fail?

When data displaces debate, we silence the most important questions, and replace strategy with rote task management.

This is not, of course, a new trend. It can occur whenever technology or workforce expertise permit rapid gains in data gathering and data analysis. As Lawrence Freedman describes in Strategy: A History (a wonderful read and door-stopper of a book), former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara led a similar data-driven revolution during the 1960s, one that encouraged tremendous introspection and self-justification within the Pentagon, but also one that failed to consider the dark spots in American knowledge and strategic thinking. Pentagon leaders spent more time justifying their beliefs than they did altering them. Here in lies the hard problem: smart thinking does not necessarily lead to strategic thinking. Strategic thinking, even when it takes place, may very well fail due to the overwhelming complexity of enforcing one's political will against an opponent. 

Given that strategy is, at best, a coping mechanism rather than a master stroke, it is tempting to fall into the bureaucratic trap of pursuing further drone attacks as a good unto themselves. Commanders, not knowing how to win the war, may therefore settle for continuous attacks via drone.

Drones (of course) will not go away. Within the military, I suspect that in a few years time they will be  relegated to company and battalion command: a more efficient version of mortar fire. Drones will also likely assume a dominant role in domestic policing--a quiet, efficient accompaniment to traffic patrol and police helicopters.

Drones may also encourage a new crop of useful close air support aircraft to replace the A10. Ground troops have been clamoring for years for air support that flies low and slow, and (unlike Apache helicopters) are not such expensive toys that they cannot afford to take risks in heavy ground combat.

But tactical weapons are not the same as strategy: the pursuit of strategy requires a steady, moderate march disciplined with human dignity and a reasonable hope for peace.

Joseph Ellis and Robert Moore. School for Soldiers: West Point and the Profession of Arms. OUP, 1974.

School for Soldiers: West Point and the Profession of Arms examines the people, institutions, and customs of the United States Military Academy at West Point, the nation's legendary resource for educating potential Army officers. The authors of the study are Joseph J. Ellis*, a successful historian of the American revolution, and Robert Moore, an American literature specialist with a particular emphasis on William Faulkner. Ellis and Moore researched their book when they were both young army officers assigned to short teaching stints at West Point. School for Soldiers was published in 1974, the same year that General David Petraeus graduated from the academy, and so provides a close examination of a particularly important generation of soldiers. The soldiers who graduated in 1974 were too young to serve in Vietnam, thrived in the unrestrained military spending of the Reagan years, survived the cuts of the Clinton years, and then (if they were not already retired) led American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. West Point cadets serve as the backbone of the officer corps; they are the dependable individuals who desire to make at least a partial career out of soldiering. Back in 1974, Ellis and Moore took the time to investigate what exactly these officers were learning in college and, using anonymous interviews with instructors and cadets, what they thought about it.

Most (if not all) military academies, including West Point, exhibit the same basic attributes. The students operate within a regimented, military-like organization, with carefully regulated hours. Much time is spent developing attributes that will prove useful to a military officer, like physical fitness and attention to detail. The cadets, to some extent, police themselves. The freshmen (or plebes) follow the sophomores, who follow the juniors, who follow the seniors, who take guidance from tactical instructors and the official organizational heads of West Point. Student grades are public knowledge, and each cadet knows how he is faring compared with his peers. At the time of Ellis and Moore's book, the academy did not admit women; an act of Congress changed  this policy in 1975. Cadets follow a straightforward path to graduation, with little room for electives or experimentation or clubs. The unrelenting emphasis is on graduating individuals who will prove useful officers to the United States Army. The academy's basic methods comes from the 'Thayer' system, a comprehensive military and educational tradition established by Sylvanus Thayer, a "cold, severe graduate of Dartmouth (1807) and West Point (1808) whose personal correspondence reads like a set of battle orders." Thayer led West Point from 1817 to 1833, and his main goal was to make West Point a prominent national institution. He succeeded absolutely. West Point became "an institution that knew what it was about, a place where a young American was remade in the image of Thayer himself." At first the academy churned out the young nation's premier corps of engineers; but since before the Civil War the emphasis has been on creating career military officers with only a secondary emphasis on the complexities of modern engineering, social science, or liberal arts methods. The military minds that come out of West Point retain the Thayer confidence, and the Thayer spirit.

The authors make much out of the "distinctiveness" of West Point's indoctrination methods. The school includes a two-month 'basic training' process for all incoming freshmen. Mid-career Army officers teach most of the classes, and they arrive at West Point fresh off of earning a Master's degree in a one or two-year period. Administrators, rather than looking for able educators, tend to recruit officers that seem likely to succeed in West Point's closely monitored conditions, and who themselves performed well as cadets. The authors, who themselves taught at West Point as young Army officers, found the 'Thayer system' stifling and odd; the resultant education (in their view) could not compete with elite educational opportunities offered at Harvard, or the best public universities. The cadets spent too much time conducting mind-numbing training exercises, obeying rote instructions, and scraping through their coursework, and not enough time in serious study. But by placing the socialization of West Point cadets in closer comparison to institutions elsewhere, the authors would have been forced to admit that much of higher education is, regardless of the institution, unfortunately (unavoidably) devoted to socialization and indoctrination, a point hit upon two years later in a famous book by sociologists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. An emphasis on discipline and unthinking obedience does not set West Point cadets apart--these types can be found anywhere, even the most prestigious liberal arts schools (see David Mamet's play Oleanna).

A liberal education costs so much time and money for the teacher, student, and community (and places traditional values at such risk) that it almost never occurs. A liberal education requires the participation of nearly every part of society, including family, friends, and government. The sort of person who goes to West Point for an education is, in part, looking for a place in an unusually stable social system, one with traditions that stretch back for two-hundred years. People attend West Point for reasons similar to why they "waste time" in fraternities, or athletics, or any other club: most people enjoy competing for status rewards and developing social networks in which those rewards hold stable value. Ellis and Moore's critique of West Point's 'negative' attributes lacks teeth when considered from a wider perspective.

The deeper point that they approach, however, is that the stakes are much higher for a West Point graduate than for a typical young American. The key attribute of a West Point graduate is deference to authority; this proves successful when the country pursues a unified foreign policy, but looks foolish or absurd during controversial moments, such as during the war in Vietnam. The authors believe the academy leaves West Point graduates with a capacity for ceaseless hard work, superb staff skills, excellent bureaucratic gamesmanship, and a necessarily useful ability to ingratiate themselves with key superiors. So West Point cadets will succeed in one way or another--the question is: What exactly are they succeeding at? And does a cadet's preparation at West Point help secure the country and satisfy the needs of the Constitution? West Pointers are particularly good at appearing on top of the problem, "But the difficulty for a military man is that, having mastered the ability of appearing to be on top of the problem, he is very reluctant to set his legerdemain skills aside and admit he doesn't understand the problem." This difficulty might be funny when examining the blustering of a newly hired advertising agent. But it is potentially tragic when officers lead soldiers into combat.

Ultimately, the exceptional nature of West Point is not that its education resembles mere training and socialization; what sets West Point apart is that its students, upon graduation, may immediately be placed in circumstances in which education would prove useful. A merely decent military career can be had with strict socialization and group discipline, but a truly great one requires liberal education and personal discipline. This argument has a moral quality to it, and it does not actually appear in Morris and Ellis' book. They skirt the issue, and rely on the reader's familiarity with the Vietnam war to provide the obvious context for the problem. This may be just as well. The authors seem aware that the problems they describe in the book lack any coherent answer given the social and political forces that buffet West Point from Washington DC, the United States Army, and West Point's influential alumni network.

School for Soldiers ultimately provides a useful, if overheated account of West Point in the 1970s. Ellis and Moore offer interesting insights into the lives of cadets and instructors at West Point, and sketch the inherent tensions between military life and academic pursuits. The book's heavy-handed critiques limit its value as a work that explores the nature of education in military settings. Their argument contrasts the lives of West Point cadets to the ideals of reputedly top flight academic institutions, a comparison of fruit versus trees. A fuller critique would require two steps. First, a comparative analysis of West Point cadets with undergraduates from other universities. Second, a historical consideration of those individuals who fit Ellis and Moore's vision of a 'proper' Army officer would help determine what exactly a West Point education should strive to provide. Despite these structural flaws, School for Soldiers ably introduces the basics of life at a cloistered military academy, and it does so with an engaging, thoughtful voice.


*Late in his career, Ellis received an academic suspension for fabricating major aspects of his own brief military career. He told students--and talk show hosts--that he served in Vietnam, and that this experience informed his study of our country's founders. He never served in Vietnam. West Point values integrity above almost every other attribute, so it is unfortunate but necessary to point out the tension between Ellis' achievement in School for Soldiers, and his own difficulty in satisfying the demands of the institution. 

Here is a lousy quote from the opening scene in Gone with the Wind:

There is a tendency in the state of Texas, and in southern literature, to imagine and fantasize about the 'Old South' as the last gasp of feudalism, feudal honor, feudal obligation, and its accompanying virtues and vices. This tendency credits the Old South with retaining special vestiges of nobility, and a connection between the earth and the people on it.

Let's try to clarify when and where feudalism existed. It was a form of politics, or social organization, that predominated in some parts of Europe, especially England, during the medieval period. It began falling to pieces in the Early Modern period, beginning with the Tudor monarchy; that is to say , it began falling apart under Henry VII. Henry VII's successor, Henry VIII, used parliamentary process to destroy the feudal lords that put his ancestors on the throne in 1066; the destruction culminated in the English Civil War, which diminished not only the feudal lords, but the monarchy as well. 

During this same time period in Early Modern England, feudal lords began severing their relationships with their serfs and vassals; the lords sought to shift away from subsistence farming so as to enter the English wool industry and conduct lucrative trade with Europe. The movement to kick the serfs off the manor and to introduce shepherding was known as the 'enclosure' movement. While it temporarily solved some debt and financial problems for the English nobility, it ultimately created a wealthy merchant class that could maximize its own benefits from European trade. Henry VII and his successors saw the new professional bourgeoisie class as a source of power that would allow them to confront their dangerous nobles. 

So the feudal system in England began collapsing in the mid 16th century, just prior to the establishment of the first English colonies in America. 

Let's look at the South. Remember, Southern legends often associate the Old South with the feudalism of Old England.

Two facts about the Southern economy undermine the notion that it was a feudal system:

First, the dominant economic activity of the south was capitalist, and it came in two forms. First, cotton dominated the economic landscape. Cotton tended to exhaust the soil, and required the opening of new lands to continue its growth. Most of this cotton was sold to Great Britain, where it was processed into cloth. Southern planters sold the remainder to northern industrial states like New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.

The original southern lands--those that rested along the Atlantic, like the Carolinas and Georgia, were exhausted after generations of growing tobacco and cotton. So these states, especially after the banning of the international slave trade in 1808, specialized in breeding and exporting slaves to cotton plantations opening in Texas and in the territory belonging to the Louisiana purchase.

Now--what do these two facts tell us? Well, first, they bear no serious relationship to feudalism. In feudalism, both lord and peasant were stuck to the land, and as the land went, so they went. Land ownership was primarily a status symbol and a useful political lever; lords and peasant were judged on their ability to maintain a calm sense of order and habit despite raids, violence, and encroaching rivals. Though lands changed hands, this was viewed as ignoble, and lesser than maintaining custom and holding on to what one already had.

In the Southern United States, on the other hand, Westward expansion allowed the depletion and shuffling off of old soil, and old obligations for new frontiers in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.

The South was not feudal in character. Though feudalism, and more specifically, classical notions of liberty, served as a productive intellectual scaffolding for the processes that occurred on any given plantation. So did traditional morality as found in the Bible. Southerners also used a sort 'scientism' to argue for the 'naturalness' of slavery due to the perceived inferiority of people of African descent. Through Southern society looked conservative and later, after the war, became conservative, it was in fact fairly radical form of agricultural capitalism. No one had ever quite used up soil and labor the way the South did in the years leading up to the civil war. Never before had there been such a worldwide demand for cotton, which we must remember is an inedible agricultural product. Southern planters used the land to grow a product that held no nutritional value. They relied on international trade to maintain their lifestyles, and to help feed their families, their workers, and their slaves. There was nothing feudal about it. The planters were bourgeois, callous, and rich.

By some accounts, when one assesses capital in the United States in 1860, slaves accounted for more wealth than all the railroads and all the manufacturing combined. Southern states viewed the Republicans as a dual threat, both to their wealth and their way of life. Republican candidates, including Abraham Lincoln, did not even appear on state ballots in many Southern states. When Lincoln won 180 electoral votes, and virtually all of the northern states, he only obtained a plurality of the popular vote, and not a majority. Southern states were shocked and outraged, though they had astutely avoided any displays of outrage when the mere plurality favored the South in 1844, 1848, and 1856 presidential elections. 

Now, I do not mean to denigrate the south simply to raise up the northern states as a collection of model states. States both north and south refused women the right to vote. Northern states treated untrained immigrant labor as expendable. Since northern manufacturing could not compete with European manufacturing, the northern industrialists demanded tariff protections to allow them to capture the supply chain to Midwest farmers and Southern planters. 

But as Barrington Moore points out in his classic treatise, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966), the North did see a short-lived union between the interests of Northern industrialists and small farmers. What allowed this alliance? In part, it was the rapid formation of the Republican party, and the party's desperate attempt to pull together disparate elements of society to win elections that would swing the balance of power towards the creation of government-sponsored infrastructures like better roads, new cut canals, and continental railroads. 

The broader Republican campaign in 1860 made the alliance between small farmers and northern industrialists quite clear: "Vote yourself a farm--vote yourself a tariff."

Tariffs and hard scrabble farms along the Ohio River are not especially romantic. But they are a superior part of the American memory to the disturbing nostalgia of some Americans for a feudal Southern society that never existed. 

Wavell, Archibald. Allenby: A Study in Greatness, George G. Harrap & Co. (Vol. 1 1940; Vol. II 1943.)

 The life of Edmund Allenby, a soldier and a statesman, in many ways anticipated the trials of his first biographer, Archibald Wavell. Born of "old-rooted English stock," Allenby grew into a tall, barrel-chested young cavalry officer. He served among the first generation of officers in which attendance at Staff College, rather than purchase, ensured promotion. He loved literature, the outdoors, and hunting; his letters to his wife rarely depict warfare, but often mention nature. Allenby's first  experience in a contest of arms occurred during the Boer War of 1899-1902. He served ably, but more importantly he developed connections with the soldiers who later became the key officers of the First World War. Such connections helped ensure his promotion through the ranks. When the Great War began he immediately assumed command of a division of cavalry as a major-general. But the weight of command transformed his personality, so that an "easy-going young officer and a good-humoured squadron leader [became] a strict colonel, an irascible brigadier, and an explosive general." Out of fear and resentment, his men coined him "The Bull." The early years of the First World War cemented his reputation, as thousands of men died under Allenby's command as he bluntly executed orders from above. The year 1917 proved particularly fateful. Allenby began the year with serious losses at the Battle of Arrass, removal from the Western front, and the loss of his only son to German artillery shells; Allenby ended the year in the Middle East with the conquest of Jerusalem. The next year, he conquered Damascus. Given fresh resources and a weakened enemy, Allenby commanded one of the most decisive and efficient campaigns in the history of modern warfare as he swept up the Mediterranean coast and destroyed the Ottoman Empire. His relentless energy provided the Egyptian Expeditionary Force with the necessary momentum to decisively defeat the enemy.

 T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom gives a far more heroic portrait of Allenby than Wavell does here; in fact, Wavell goes to great lengths to temper Lawrence's praise with a sober assessment of Allenby's flaws: his zeal for rules, loyalty, and unquestioned service. Wavell writes with praise, and yet a subtle sense of irony creeps into the biography, as though Wavell no longer believes in greatness. While it lacks the humor of some of Wavell's other works, the book sustains interest as a surprisingly impersonal reflection on Wavell's views of military and civilian leadership.

Archibald Wavell (Field Marshal, Viscount, and Viceroy of India) published his two volume biography of Field Marshall Edmund Allenby in the midst of his own challenges. Wavell served under Allenby in the First World War as a liaison and a staff officer with the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. As Wavell finished the first volume of the biography, he served as Commander in Chief in the Middle East, a status similar to the command Allenby once held. As Wavell finished the second volume, he held the Viceroyalty of India, a status somewhat greater than Allenby's eventual post of High Commissioner of Egypt and the Sudan.