The same word – “ascetic” – caught TD regular Bill Astore’s eye and mine. It was in a recent NYTimes article about the “rehabilitation” of General and former CIA Director David Petraeus and was previously much used in media ravings about a military associate of Petraeus’s, General Stanley McChrystal, before he, too, went down in flames. It’s a particularly amusing choice for Petraeus because his particular brand of asceticism ran to getting between the covers with his biographer Paula Broadwell. Think of it as a fifty-shades-of-khaki version of asceticism. Astore points out as well that, as an attribute for generals, it fits better with Spartan or perhaps German conceptions of war than American ones and is a curious way to measure the failed leadership of our recent wars. Tom “The whole ascetic ideal is not a citizen-soldier concept. It’s a Spartan or Prussian conceit. And it’s fascinating to me how generals like Petraeus and McChrystal were essentially anointed as ascetic warrior-priests by the U.S. media. So much so that in 2007 the Bush Administration took to hiding behind the beribboned and apparently besmirchless chest of Petraeus. “Of course, both Petraeus and McChrystal bought their own media hype, each imploding in his own way, but both manifesting a lack of discipline that gave the lie to the highly disciplined “ascetic” image of the warrior-priest. And of course both are now being rehabilitated by the powers-that-be, a process that says much about our imperial moment. “Something tells me we’d be better off with a few plain-speaking, un-hyped, citizen-soldier types like Ulysses S. Grant rather than the over-hyped “ascetic warriors” of today.” contraryperspective/2013/09/18/americas-ascetic-warrior-generals/
Posted on: Wed, 18 Sep 2013 16:18:18 +0000