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Article: Tenured adolescents. (Notes & Comments: December 2002).(recent exchange between United States Air Force Academy cadet and Peter N. Kirstein, tenured professor of history at Saint Xavier University in Chicago)
- Article from:
- New Criterion
- Article date:
- December 1, 2002
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Foundation for Cultural Review. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!" But it's "Saviour of `is country" when the guns begin to shoot; ...
--Rudyard Kipling, "Tommy" (1890)
We have been reminded of Kipling's poem "Tommy" a good deal lately. Its most famous line--in which Kipling speaks of "makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep"--has a special relevance at a moment when anti-war animus is bubbling out of the universities and other protected redoubts of politically correct sentiment. Living in the aftermath of the 1960s and its culture of protest, most of us have long been inured to the spectacle of privileged adolescents attacking the ...