Where Do We Get Such Men?

We call it “going downtown and seeing the elephant.” Like so many throw-away lines in our vernacular it is innocuous and until those on the outside spend some time thinking about themselves, their lives, their experience and their mortality, they won’t understand it. I know a lot of folks who have seen the elephant. I’ve seen it myself. I’m a different person than I was before that. My elephant might not have been the biggest. I know there are much larger ones and maybe there are smaller ones, but for me there was nothing else similar in my life until that moment. The first time I saw him, I was nearly overwhelmed. When I glimpsed him subsequently, I knew he wasn’t as big as my first impression and I knew he couldn’t hurt me unless I gave in to him.

The elephant is your fear and your courage and the battle which they fight in your mind when you are faced with combat. You get to choose whether to fight for what you have said you believe in or whether you abandon the field. Make no mistake, this isn’t about philosophical or political battles, this is about real guns, bullets and dying. Some men can’t deal with the elephant and some seem to have been born in the jungle among the beasts, living a life that is neither awed by their power nor intimidated by their potential. Karl Rove writes about encountering some of those folks:

Sleep Well, Rough Men Stand Ready

The effete are reluctant to acknowledge that such folks exist, let alone to admit that we as a free society are dependent upon them. They look down their patrician, Ivy League noses at such brutes and view them as a manifestation of society’s failures rather than the guardians of our way of life. They could not do what these guys do, therefore rather than respecting it, they demean it as some sort of Neanderthal behavior. In the process they ignore the education, intellect, training, patriotism and dedication of the profession. Pity the fools.

Can we be surprised at this?

Gaining Trust

Is there any evidence on the record to indicate that the gentleman in question, who will be making decisions so critical to these folks has any appreciation at all for what they do on our behalf? Do we see him as leaning politically toward those who support them or coming down heavily on the side of those philosophically opposed to the realities of life in our global struggle? I think that it is going to take a considerable length of time before those who have seen the elephant will be able to have confidence in the administration of the donkey.