Hate all that you can hate




Despite what the recruiting ads say, in the Army, you can't quite be all that you can be. You can't be a homosexual, for example. At least you can't tell anyone that you are. As Gen. Colin Powell and others tell us, it's bad for morale, bad for "unit cohesion." 

But you can be a racist. You can openly talk about "kikes" and "niggers." You can put Nazi flags on your bunkhouse wall. You can get hate literature in the mail. That's called "passive participation,"  and it's o.k. with the US. military, so long as it doesn't cross that rather fine line into "active participation." You're not supposed to put on a white robe and join a Klan rally, or arrange group meetings and target practice for like-minded fellows on the base. You're certainly not supposed to go out and shoot two Fayetteville, NC. black civilians in the head at point blank range, as two avowedly racist privates from the elite 82d Airborne did last week. 

The Army expressed shock that such a thing could happen. Scrambling, military officials assured us this was an "isolated incident," just the work of a couple of wild and crazy guys, and not part of a broader, more disturbing pattern. This is America, after all, not Guatemala. 

But before the Army's official probe of the ranks reaches the same complacent conclusion when it reports back next March, it might want to talk to various rights groups who have been sending up flares about increasingly violent racism in the military for some time.  "The military is a fertile ground for the far right," says Noah Chandler, a research associate at the Center for Democratic Renewal,  a group that monitors hate groups' activities in the U.S.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, itself the target of a bomb plot in 1986, claims that Fort Bragg, home of the 82d Airborne, has long been a fertile recruiting ground for white supremacist organizations -- witnessed by the popularity of the white supremacists' modern garb (black boots and white laces, red suspenders, flight jackets and chains) -- among off-duty soldiers there.  

Brian Levin, the center's associate director, told the Los Angeles Times that the extremist White Patriot Party "recruited active-duty military personnel at Ft. Bragg." Levin also said that the racist magazine Resistance, which was found in  20-year-old Pvt.  James Norman Burmeister II's trailer (along with the 9 mm semiautomatic pistol believed to be the murder weapon in the Fayetteville case)  is published at Fort Bragg  "by a clandestine group of 35-80 active duty special forces soldiers." 

In the past, active duty personnel at Fort Bragg have been connected to neo-Nazi plots to steal explosives, anti-tank rockets, grenades and automatic rifles from the base.  

It is also worth remembering that gay liberationists aren't accused of blowing up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Three former soldiers are -- at least one of whom, Timothy McVeigh, openly associated with racist groups while on active duty. 

The Army would be better off worrying less about the supposed "loss of morale" caused by openly gay troops -- and more about the violent racists in its ranks.
 


--Andrew Ross













Madonna: Marriage material girl?





Madonna thinks that people are beginning to see her as a human being with a brain. At least that's what she told Forrest Sawyer in her much-publicized interview on ABC-TV, an obviously desperate attempt to restore her tattered reputation. 

Actually, we never doubted that Madonna Ciccone had a brain, and talent, too. But she long ago sacrificed both on the altar of celebrity -- or, rather, notoriety -- for its own sake. It was a very post-modern thing to do, of course, and financially, enormously rewarding. But there were consequences. Madonna, her brain long since confused with her crotch, failed to realize how rapidly her schtick would age.    

Instead, she became a laughing stock, the Leona Helmsley of rock and roll, doomed to haunt night clubs, watching her record sales decline and her movies bomb. And she has no one to blame but herself. In the ABC interview she lambasted her lousy scripts, but no one pointed a gun at her head to do the kind of movies that even Sharon Stone wouldn't be caught dead in. Nor did they force her to descend to the depths of "Sex." 

Now, she mournfully told Forrest Sawyer, she wants a partner, someone to father her child. There's one problem: every man she meets is "an asshole." So, maybe she'll put ads in the newspaper for a suitable sperm provider. "Who knows who's gonna apply for, you know, the fatherhood gig?"  

Poor Madonna, condemned to a permanent place in the cheese 'n' sleaze Hall of Fame. Who would be a good match for you? A few names come to mind:




--Andrew Ross