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Elmendorf
 
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Ok, I Get The Picture.
Our Graduate Student REALLY Hated The Air Force
Up There In Anchorage.
Oh, no !
He LOVED it !

What !?
You Just Spent A Whole Chapter
Talkin' About Rammin' That Stupid Magazine
Up Their Asses !
Oh, no.
The Air Force treated him great !
He lived on Elmendorf for over a year.
They treated him like a hotel guest.
Yeah, it was great !

OK, Fine.
You've Created That Teachable Moment.
You Have Me All Confused
And Ready To Learn.
Tell Me About It.
Alaska is a world of its own.
In those days, it was solid Republican,
with U.S.Senators Ted Stevens and Murkowski (the father)
and Governor Hickel.
The Anchorage Daily News referred to Ted Stevens
as "Alaska's Senator For Life,"
because he was so popular.
They rated him as the most powerful person in Alaska.
He ruled the military in Alaska.
He was a very powerful Senator
with many, many years of seniority
and he loved the military.
He was old school,
a World War II Vet. Pilot, I think.
But real smart. A Harvard Grad, I think.
A real Father Of Alaska,
he helped make it a state.
The generals did whatever Ted Stevens told them to.
Ted Stevens took care of Our Graduate Student.
Our Graduate Student made Elmendorf AFB his home.
One year he lived there all winter in billeting
which is kind of a hotel for travelling servicemen.
$8/night was the winter rate.
It was like a hotel, with cable tv
and fine dining downstairs, also very inexpensive.
But, most important of all,
Our Graduate Student felt at home.
He wasn't under constant attack there.
It was a refuge.
They had a gym with a pool.
He jogged around the air base often,
and that was a ten mile workout.
Doin' that ten mile loop
followed by swimming underwater laps
gave him the great wind he needed to sing well.
They even had a little ski slope there.
He took ground school there for his pilot's license,
though he couldn't afford the flight time.
But, most important of all,
it was a place where he could relax.
The military can be a good life.
Everybody's on the same page.
Everybody's pulling in the same direction.
It's a simple life with time-honored traditions.
Honor and courage and honesty are highly valued.
People form teams
and have to live together and function as teams
whether on ships, in planes, or in the field.
It's not constant political infighting
and bickering and backstabbing like in teaching.
You can trust your co-worker in the military.
With your life.

Our Graduate Student got a lot out of the military
and loves it.
Two years of mandatory military service
would certainly do more to improve this country
than trillions more dollars
thrown at bratty, useless
America-hating,
white-man-hating, white-man-blaming
white feminazis,
whose only function is to swell the ranks
and the coffers of the Democratic union machines.
Every time he passed through the gate onto the base
he breathed a sigh of relief
to get away from the mad, mad world out there
to a society that was ordered and structured and sane.
People weren't "proud" to have AIDS
or dyslexia or other imaginary disorders in the military.
They were proud of real accomplishments,
not of maladies and weakness and pathologies,
real or imagined.
They were proud to struggle to achieve,
not to be victims.
Our Graduate Student often relaxed
in billeting's hotel lobby,
just sitting and listening to the music, for hours.
One day the news was celebrating a boy who had AIDS.
They were honoring him for having his disease
and an older man sitting there
commented in disgust,
"So, is he proud of his disease ?"
That's EXACTLY why
Our Graduate Student
felt so at home at Elmendorf.
Maybe they didn't understand
the racial and sexual politics on the universities.
Maybe they didn't understand evolution
or the geological ages of the earth.
Maybe they didn't really understand
the importance of Freedom of Speech.
But, dammit, they had common sense.
They understood that it took courage
to jump out of an airplane
with just a parachute on your back
and THAT was the kind of personal growth
they recognized and appreciated and admired.
And, they sure as hell knew that contracting a disease
wasn't something to celebrate and admire,
whether a real one like AIDS
or an imaginary one like dyslexia.
So, Our Graduate Student felt at home there.
He was among his own kind.
Normal people.
Maybe they didn't have as much education as he did.
Maybe they weren't veterans of political warfare like he was.
But some of them knew things he didn't know.
Some of them were veterans of different kinds of battles.
He was around normal, sensible people in that lobby.
It was a place to get away from the madness.
Now in a teacher's room in a public school,
there lives madness and insanity.
Everything is upside down, backwards and wrong there.
Every accomplishment is shameful
and every weakness a cause for celebration and honor.
Someone couldn't read ?
Invent dyslexia and tell them they were courageous
and geniuses just for showing up.
Just read D'Souza and Ravitch.
Listen to limbaugh.

Kinda Funny That Our Graduate Student
Loved Elmendorf AFB So Much
But Not The Air Guard.
All Right.
I'll tell you one more quick story.
Like I said, Our Graduate Student
joined the Air Guard mostly as a networking tool.
He was already a professional,
40 years old with postgraduate education
and teaching credentials with 3 high school subject endorsements.
He'd attended a reputable law school for over a year,
the one where current U.S. Supreme Court Justice Kennedy taught.
He had made contact with Governors and U.S. Senators
and dealth with high level people
when he wrote His Newsletters in 1982.
In 1989 he was offered a shipboard teaching job
with a stateroom and the privileges of a Lieutenant Commander.
So, he joins the Air Guard as a sergeant (e-5).
He just wanted to join and belong
and get some technical training and make contacts in Alaska.
So, he goes down to Texas for his tech school
and he experienced very humiliating treatment.
Who knows ? It may have been connected to the conspiracy.
Looking back, it seems that a lot of things that went wrong
may have been connected to the conspiracy.
You never really know what goes on behind the scenes.
And, from the story I told above,
you can see that military people can be really stupid
and clueless and naive and easily manipulated.
So it could be that the conspiracy fed The Guard
some bad ideas during the background check.
I won't go into the details right now
because it'll detract from the story.
The main point is that word of it
got back from the Texas training base to the Alaska base,
and became big gossip and yuk yuk
among all those half-wit moron enlisted people
I described above, with whom Our Graduate Student
would be working with and living with on occasions
for the duration of his Air Guard career.
Well, it was bad enough
he had to go through the shit they put him through in Texas,
but when he got back to Alaska
he could see that the half-wit senior master sergeant
who was the "liaison", the contact point with the Texas base,
had blabbed both ways.
He blabbed gossip to Texas,
and then he blabbed the Texas gossip to the Guard unit in Alaska.
Now you know how gossip is.
Everybody promises to keep it a secret
and then tells their best friends who promise to keep it a secret,
and they tell their best friends, etc.

What Was It ?
Was He Cowardly Or Something ?
No. Actually, on weekends for a  while
he went up to Normal Oklahoma and did skydiving.
He did about 15 or 20 jumps out of a small 4-person plane.
They were the kind of jumps
where you had to crawl out the open door
and hand suspended from the wing
until you were told to release.
Some of the other people from his class
went up there but chickened out,
so it wasn't about cowardice,
but it was about him not fitting in with the class of kids.
And remember, down there in Texas
he was older and more educated and more experienced
than his sergeants and officers.
Actually, he was full of life and excited to join The Air Force.
Besides the skydiving, he even participated
in the "Hotter Than Hell One Hundred,"
an hundred mile bike ride there in Wichita Falls, Tx.
We'll get into it later in detail
because it comes under the umbrella of a larger issue
that I'm going to discuss.
So, anyway, after being put through a humiliating ordeal in Texas,
he comes back to Alaska to find the morons chuckling and snickering
behind his back.
The unit commander was a nice guy who was trying his best,
but the damage had been done.
Once the senior master sergeant broke all kinds of privacy rules
and the gossip spread through the unit,
there was no undoing it.
It was hard for OUr Graduate Student to command dignity and respect,
which are fundamental in the military,
let alone comradeship.
And that was the main reason he had joined,
and now he had to come back to smirks from moron enlisted guys.

So, Our Graduate Student stuck with it for 5 years
because he so much enjoyed Elmendorf AFB as a refuge.
So, one day the unit goes camping for an extended weekend.
Our Graduate Student is out between two buildings
taking measurements for the Civil Engineer.
This goofy punk-ass kid comes up to him
and starts talking shit.
A few years earlier, this kid had gone with the unit to Japan
where he stiffed a cab driver by not paying his fare.
This resulted in the officer in charge
restricting everyone to their rooms
for the rest of the Japanese deployment.
So, anyway, Our Graduate Student is thinking about
the way this kid had been talking to him,
and as he walks back toward the unit,
this kid leaves the group and swaggers straiht toward him.
So Our Graduate Student keeps walking straight
and this kid is walking straight at him
and when they get face to face,
just as the kid is about
to start talking shit again to Our Graduate Student
in front of everybody,
Our Graduate Student smacks him good on the side of the head
and rocks him back and sideways, leavin' him goofy and silly.
That's what happens when you embarass someone
and compound it with your inability to respect privacy rights.
It's kind of like what happened last week at Rutgers
where the student's roommate secretly videotaped him
and humiliated him by putting it on utube.
That kid took it out on himself
by jumping off the George Washington Bridge.
Our Graduate Student took it out on his unit.
So that kid was walking around for the rest of the day
a little goofy and disoriented,
with a big handprint on the side of his face
(Our Graduate Student was wearing gloves).
He was a tall kid, too,
and thought he was hot stuff.
Some of the unit liked Our Graduate Student after that
but, problem is, he didn't like them very much.
And that kid who was his master sergeant was just a brat.

So Our Graduate Student
Didn't Do Any More Teaching ?
Oh, he subbed a bit,
but they were still fucking with him.
Both the left and the right were pathetic.

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OK
Very Easily.
 
OK
Very Easily.