"Decadence" is the essential condition of "a society which believes it has evolved to the point where it will never have to go to war."

--Air Force Colonel Robert Wheeler

From today's Philadelphia Inquirer:

PROVIDENCE, R.I. - Fifth-graders in California who adorned their mortarboards with tiny toy plastic soldiers this week to support troops in Iraq were forced to cut off their miniature weapons.

There's a great blog post here which reprints the full story, with pictures of the offending mortarboards. What I enjoyed most was the boys' spirited defense of the wounded troops.

For obvious reasons, the picture on the left is not getting much mainstream media play. I can't think of a better way to expose the anti-war bureaucrats than the boys' simple demonstration that the school bureaucrats had wounded the troops. No words can match the eloquence of the bloodied bandages!

I wrote several posts about eunuchs, and I think this is as good a place as any to add a few words about Phil Bowermaster's post about transmasculinity, which Glenn Reynolds linked yesterday. I have no problem with the idea of transmasculinity (or androgyny), and don't think it is remotely the same as state-enforced policies forcing boys to become eunuchs.

As Bowermaster observes from personal experience, we've gone from persecution to persecution, in little more than a single generation:

I was born in 1962 and attended public schools in the 1960's and 1970's. So depending on whom you ask, I either suffered under the early stages of a dehumanizing PC agenda that was trying to "feminize" me, or I enjoyed the last few halcyon days of a golden era when boys were allowed to be boys. In point of fact, I think the latter is closer to the truth, but let me just point out one important feature of that lost golden age: it could pretty much suck for boys who weren't terribly interested in boy stuff.

Personally, I hated sports when I was a kid. I read a lot, and very indiscriminately -- meaning that I cheerfully read books that my older sister was reading or had just finished, even though many of these were "girls'" books. When I was in the 5th grade, I wanted an Easy Bake oven for Christmas. It's hard to imagine in the age of Emeril what a stigma there once was around a boy showing an interest in cooking. For these points of divergence with mainstream boyhood, I was rewarded with a label which -- unlike tomboy -- was never considered complimentary: I was a sissy, later a queer or fag. Some thought it cute for a girl to be a tomboy; nobody ever thought it was cute for a boy to be a sissy.

What I would have really liked when I was a kid was for other people to leave me alone and let me be who I was. But no such luck -- and I don't think the peer pressure to be "masculine" had as much to do with trying to raise a just and noble and manlike society as it did preventing boys from growing up to be homos. I was always getting crap about how I walked. There was this bizarre belief that boys who "walked funny" had started down a one-way highway that ended in Queersville.

But as we all know, the opposite of crazy is still crazy. And in this case, we get craziness on a much vaster scale. My longed-for world of live-and-let-live never really came about. Instead, rather than persecuting the few boys who don't have traditional masculine inclinations, we've put a system in place that persecutes that vast majority of boys who do have such inclinations. Progress!

It's the heavy arm of the state being brought to bear that I think is the larger problem here. Social engineering when practiced by tyrannical boys against each other is inevitable. While it should be policed by responsible authorities when it gets out of hand, the idea of reshaping boys by doing things like carving up their little plastic toys based on a government edict -- at a time when we are at war -- is simply an outrage.

But again, I don't think it's so much feminization that's going on as it is neuterization, or eunuchization. John Lennon "Imagine" pacifism is not feminine, but neuter -- and in my opinion, decadent.

The problem is, it has taken over the bureaucratic establishment.
Pajamas Media links Westhawk's review of a new article by Robert Kaplan:

Mr. Kaplan thinks there are two Americas, a pacifist Establishment and a warrior class, two Americas that hardly know each other.

The real soldiers are being symbolically castrated with kindness. This includes the very condescending approach of pitying them as victims. According to Kaplan, soldiers want respect, not pity:

I cannot remember how many times a soldier or marine told me that we don't want to be pitied as victims, but respected as fighters.

This seemingly tiny incident is not as tiny as it appears.

UPDATE: My thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link, and welcome to all!

(In answer to Glenn's question, I think bureaucrats may have zero tolerance for decency.)

MORE: Glenn links this post from Marc Danziger offering some suggestions for the Netroots left:

....you've got a choice. You can build a movement of the soy-latte drinkers who know tats, startups, and hip underground bands and represent a highly visible 15% of the country and consider themselves madly progressive. Or you can accept the challenge laid out years ago by John Schaar, who wrote of the failure of the early New Left in America:

"Finally, if political education is to effective it must grow from a spirit of humility on the part of the teachers, and they must overcome the tendencies toward self-righteousness and self-pity which set the tone of youth and student politics in the 1960's. The teachers must acknowledge common origins and common burdens with the taught, stressing connection and membership, rather than distance and superiority. Only from these roots can trust and hopeful common action grow."

So here's the suggestion. Move to the suburbs. Buy a minivan. Reach out and understand the hopes and fears of the average American. Help them reclaim our country.

(Beyond that, maybe getting over the idea that suburbs are evil vectors of sprawl and minivans are proper targets for attack.)

I don't mean to sound cynical, as I generally agreed with the post.

Come to think of it, a year ago I wrote a post about the Netroots and middle America.