Fancy Dinners and Pro-War Upperclass Women

While the bombing of Afghanistan was in full-swing in November, I was fortunate enough to have been invited to an annual 'friends of the company' dinner. Er, that is to say, my dad is friends with the owner of a local custom tile factory (Which I mentioned in a rant which included a bit about sexism in the workplace, among other things.)

Anyway, I wore one of my nicest suits for this dinner. It was being held at a rather high-end inn located out in the woods about an hour from town. It was a really nice affair. I arrived with my parents and shook-hands with the factory general manager. Immediately after hanging-up my coat, I went straight to the cocktail lounge where the guest reception was taking place. Just for the record, I was the youngest person at the event. Almost everyone else there was above the age of 35, and I think I was probably the only single person there.

Oh, and most of the guests were either higher-ups in the firm, major clients of the firm or major stockholders in the firm. I guess one might call it a rather prosperous crowd.

Nice Spread.

I go to the bar, order a White Russian, hold the vodka (making it a mere Kalhua and cream) and enjoy the hors d'oeuvers. I love nice events like these; but I hate jostling for snacks. Drink in hand, I make a beeline for the table; I politely elbow my way in, and fill-up a plate with everything imaginable. Shrimps the size of my foot. Fresh vegetables and fruit cocktail. Bruchettas with exquisite artichoke dip. Assorted cheeses and crackers. Red caviar slathered on leaves of endive. Fresh salmon topped with shredded thyme. (Ever wonder why rich people always look so... well-fed?) I drain my mixed drink in an eyeblink. I signal the waiter, he is acne-faced, about 20 or so.

I'm like a drink-seeking automaton. Must... have... more... booze!

"What'll you have?" He asks, pen at the ready.

"Gee, I dunno..." I reply. "I'd like to have another mixed drink, but I can't say I know too many of those. Can you help me decide?"

"Care for a martini?"

"Ack. No, I can't take the taste of real strong stuff."

"Well, how about a Tom Collins?" He suggests.

"Nah, too old-geezer."

"A Manhattan?"

"Hmm, no, I don't like whiskey. What sorts of beer have you, my good yeoman?"

"Well..." He looks at the ceiling in thought. "We have Corona-" I hold-up my hands.

"Say no more! One of those, if you please."

Free eats. Free booze. Life simply gets no better.

I'm gulping shrimp and salmon at the rate of a humpback whale, washing-down every third or fourth bite with ice-cold Mexican beer. I'm also socializing with Mr. and Mrs. Ebert. Mr. Ebert is the head foreman of the factory, he is an imposing six-foot wall of a man in his late-50s with salt-and-pepper hair and a really nice silk Madras tie. Mrs. Ebert is silver-haired, wearing one of those conservative-looking, interchangable ensembles that seem to be worn by about 70% of all 50-year old wives at any given dinner event.

When they hear I'm off to Japan, the wife takes considerable interest.

"Oh, do you speak Japanese?" She asks.

"Not very much, I hope to learn as I go on."

"Well that sounds exciting. I'm going to get some celery, would you come with me?"

"Certainly."

We walk-over to the snack table, and it looks as if the other guests have totally cleaned-out the artichoke dip (the greedy bastards). I grab the last chocolate-covered strawberry and dunk it in whipped cream, and skewer a few slices of muenster cheese with a toothpick.

"So tell me, are you married?" She asks me. I chuckle.

"Ahh, no. I was engaged for a while, but I called it off."

"Oh, do you think you did the right thing?"

"Absolutely." I didn't have to think twice. "She was kind of a... a rage-prone psychotic who didn't give a fig about my well-being. So to speak."

Mrs. Ebert throws her head back and laughs loudly.

"Oh, I know what you mean! My son... he's twenty-nine... he was married for two years to the wicked witch of the west. I swear, she gave him no peace at all the whole time." She pats my arm. "I congratulate you on having the guts to call it all off before it was too late. I mean, better now than spending twenty years with a B-I-T-C-H." Oh, speaking of bitchy wives, I've just noticed that my sister and her Hubby have just arrived.

"Thanks." I say to Mrs. Ebert. "Tell me, do you ever get the impression that there are multiple things wrong with the young women these days?"

"Just between you and me..." She leans-in closer to me and lowers her voice conspiratorially. "...that's all I see in them nowadays." She and I share a laugh.

Yup, she's all right in my book.

Its Suppertime! Sup-sup-suppertime!

I've been looking forward to this occasion for two whole months; the food at this inn is invariably awesome. Dinner begins. I'm sitting to the right of my sister's Hubby, and to the left of some other woman I don't recognize.

I am enjoying dinner thoroughly. I have a cup of seafood bisque, house salad with dill-cilantro dressing, followed by pan-seared salmon in a raspberry glaze and steamed vegetables. I also have part of Hubby's prime rib, because he's filled-up on appetizers and Sister is telling him to not eat it due to his cholesterol. I am also averaging three Coronas an hour. Dinner is followed by a triple-chocolate mousse cake that is as dense as a cinder-block. Afterwards, my stomach is set to burst if I have so much as one wafer-thin mint more.

The whole time, dinner conversation is swirling around me. I spend much of the time talking to Hubby; he is absolutely fascinated by the pace of the air-war that was then going-on in Afghanistan. Or at least from what he gets from watching 20 minutes of Fox News per day.

"I hear that we could've killed Mullah Omar on the second day, but we didn't. What do you think is going through his head right now?" He says. I know him well enough to know that he doesn't really pause to listen to my answers. (That, and he probably thinks that 'Mullah' is the guy's first name.)

"Now, what I don't understand..." I steal the conversational initiative. "Okay, the Taliban had the Ministry of Vice and Virtue... those were the goons in the black turbans who went-around beating women who showed too much ankle."

"The goon-squad."

"Right... okay, we didn't start hitting the Vice-Virtue goon-squad until day ten of the airstrikes when we struck their offices in Kabul and Kandahar. What I'm wondering is: why did we wait until day ten? We know exactly where their headquarters were, it was even showed on CNN's documentary 'Behind the Veil' a while back. If we really wanted to loosen Taliban control over their territory, I would've sent a Tomahawk flying at the goon squad's front-door on day one."

"Well, I don't know. But I'll tell you, the sheer scale of this is huge. I mean, they're using stealth-bombers, B-52's, the works. Like what we used against Yugoslavia." He says.

"I've been doing my own analysis of the air-war, and I think the scale isn't really all that impressive." I say.

"How so?" Hubby asks.

"Okay, opening night of Desert Storm, January 16th, 1991. Well over two-thousand, four-hundred aircraft took part. A slow day of Desert Storm had about fourteen-hundred aircraft sorties. Now, opening night of the air war against Yugoslavia in 1999 had over a thousand sorties. A slow day against Yugoslavia had about five-hundred sorties. With me so far?"

He nods, mouth-full of dangling asparagus.

"Opening night against Afghanistan: under one hundred thirty aircraft. Yesterday, there were seventy-eight combat sorties according to the Pentagon web-site. The largest day of this campaign used about one eighth the opening force used against Yugoslavia, perhaps one fiftheenth that the opening day of Desert Storm. The strikes against Afghanistan have been much, much smaller and more focused compared to the big U.S. military actions over the last ten years. So the scale isn't that huge mainly because Afghanistan isn't what you'd call a target-rich environment. I think there are other, more accurate comparisons that you could make. For instance, do you remember Operation Desert Fox in December, '98 or Operation Desert Strike in September, '96?"

Sister, the ever-knowing, interrupts.

"No one cares about your numbers and lists. I swear you always go on and on and over-analyze everything. Just use a bunch of those daisy-bombs in Afghanistan... what're they called?"

"BLU-82 'daisy cutter' fuel-air explosives." I grumble. I knew what they were back in 1991. She'd obviously never heard of them before last week.

"Yeah, those things. Just blow-open the caves and then you're done."

It's not quite that simple, but I know I can't say anything to her once she's got an idea in her head. Gee, I'd really like to go drive a shrimp-fork deep into the back of her eye socket for sheer amusement value. But she's still running-off at the mouth.

"Seriously, it would be a lot simpler if we just dropped a set of nukes on the caves. Just seal-off the mountains, nuke 'em and let the radiation kill 'em all. And the ones who don't die will glow enough to shoot 'em in the dark." Naturally, any idiot knows that using nuclear weapons would render large tracts of land uninhabitable and create heightened cancer risks for everyone living downwind. But she finds this idea to be clever, somehow.

My dad chimes-in. "This is going to be tough. It's not going to be over in two months. The Russians-"

"The Russians went-in to conquer. And they did it stupid. We're not going in to conquer." Sis sneers.

"After this..." piped-up the second woman at the table "... we really need to hit Iraq." There is a nod of agreement from my sister. "He's been an irritation for too long."

"I don't think that would be a good idea." Said my dad. "The partners in the coalition wouldn't support that. France, China-" my sister cut him off.

"Screw them. The Trade Center attack wasn't on them. Saddam's been asking for it for years and Clinton was too big a pus- a moron to do it properly."

I tune her out completely at this point. Hubby doesn't say a word in disagreement because he knows the drill: he's used to agreeing with his haranguing, control freak of a mate. I swear, it's one thing to voice your well-developed opinions. But it's quite another to merely talk-out your ass.

Anyways, forgive me for not transcribing the whole conversation in its entirety, but the general attitude around the table seemed to be rather sharply divided between the genders. The men were generally more conservative and reserved when it came to advocating use of force and commented more on managing the political-tightrope aspects of the war. The women were more likely to overtly favor use of increased force and more thoroughgoing efforts to militarily crush would-be terrorist foes.

Driving Home

I sat in the back seat of my dad's car, nicely buzzed from all the beer I'd enjoyed, thinking about the dinner conversations which I'd been listening to.

It seemed like the women at that table were much more pro-war than were the men. It was the women were rather flippantly and ignorantly advocating use of more force and letting "radiation kill 'em off". It was the women who were using exterminationist rhetoric and advocating raised violence. It was the women who were calling for more blood.

Well, we were all lolling about in overfed stupors and digesting stomachs full of animal fat, so IQ's tend to dip a bit. But still... I don't get why the women were the ones who were calling for more blood. Why is this? Aren't men stereotyped by society to be the more violent ones?

Suddenly, I recalled a study that was commented-on by the historian Robert Loewen in a critique of U.S. history textbooks called Lies My Teacher Told Me. In one chapter, he talked about a survey that was done during the Vietnam war years...

According to the survey, people who'd graduated from college were twice as likely to oppose withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam as were people who had not completed high-school. Specifically, 40% of college-educated people favored continuing the Vietnam war opposed to 20% of non high-school grads.

The most likely possible explanation for this discrepancy? Loewen suggested one possible reason was that college-educated people had less of a qualm with continuing the war because they knew they wouldn't be the ones actually fighting. (Vietnam draftees were overwhelmingly from less well-educated ranks of Americans.) Perhaps one reason the lower-classes were more opposed to continuing the war was because they knew they'd be more likely to be conscripted into the conflict. Naturally, the upper classes could more easily afford to be hawkish than could the people who were more likely to actually fight and die.

I immediately postulated a theory about tonight's dinner conversation based on this poll: could it be that these upper-class women were so hawkish because they knew they wouldn't ever be called-upon to fight in any war, ever? Sounds plausible. They knew full well that no matter how much call for blood-letting they could muster, they wouldn't ever be called-upon to actually do it. They knew they'd be sitting safe and sound at gala luncheons while some guy in his early 20s would be the one foot-slogging through mud to pull the trigger. They knew that some young man would be the one to risk his ass and get shot-at. That is why they could afford to be flippantly casual about nuking people 'till they glow'. It's so easy for them to talk in such a manner when they know perfectly well that someone else will be doing the dirty work.

Us guys know that if we shoot our mouths-off in such a fashion, we might actually have to follow-through on what we say. If a guy gets all hyped-up about going-off to the Hindu-Kush to kill Taliban, he'd either be labelled a psychopath or be told 'oh yeah? Why don't ya go join the army then?'.

I think the women at that table should be immediately given combat roles. Seriously, drag them out from behind the dinner table, give 'em a gun and send them to the front line with an eighty-pound rucksack. See how fun they think it is.

Hell, I'd pay to see that happen! Wouldn't you?

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"You'll never live like Common People.
You'll never do whatever Common People do.
Never fail like Common People.
You'll never watch your life slide-out of view.
And then dance, and drink and screw.
'Cos there's nothing else to do..." -- Pulp, "Common People".

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