Dumézil

So… I was spurred into pulling an old book off the shelf by Grim’s post this morning. I looked at that drawing, and then thought back to that idiot cartoonist that the Joint Chief’s wrote a letter to, and wondered what type of moron really believes this with such a broad-brush?

Despite how pissed I get, the majority are not morons. What they are is ignorant of military culture and open, through thousands of years of distrust/wariness/prejudice, to being prey to a minority with an agenda.

Televising and embedded reports, even on the scale we have today, is not enough to overcome the millennia of wariness directed towards the warrior functions. The book I reached for this afternoon was Georges Dumézil’s The Destiny of the Warrior. Dumézil is a philologist who identified a stratified society in Indo-European cultures, made up of a Sacral (First) Function of kings/priests/magicians, Warrior (Second) Function, and a Common (Third) Function made up of the everyday Joe. To get to the point, he states that no other function of society straddles the ethical boundary of society in the manner of the warrior.

Warriors train for, and engage in, actions seen as reprehensible to the greater society. Warriors make killing and deception part and parcel of their lives... they train in the very acts which threaten society in order to defend society.

Short of removing that minority, I’m not sure what we can do to overcome the fears. Intense military marketing? Compulsory military service?

Anyway- just a thought before I head out of the office for a long weekend.