… but that’s the thing: West Point isn’t West Point, and hasn’t been for at least thirty years now. This kid went to Ranger school, did a tour in Afghanistan, and was commissioned in the 10th Mountain division after graduating from West Point. In case you don’t feel like clicking, he’s the kid who took selfies with a Che Guevara shirt under his cadet grays and “communism will win” scribbled on the inside of his hat. Note the timeline: the kid was commissioned after those selfies made the Internet rounds. He still graduated, and for a time was an active-duty officer in the United States Army.
Bad as that is, there’s much worse. Notice the passivity of it all. What were any of the parties involved trying to accomplish? If Cadet Che had wanted to get kicked out of the service (as it seems finally happened, according to the linked article), there are a million easier ways. In fact, cadets at West Point are volunteers. The Army makes a big production out of this: If you can’t hack it at the Point, you’re simply not officer material. All it takes is a letter to the commandant, and you’re out — Cadet Che could’ve been drinking beer with his fraternal socialist comrades at Big State 24 hours after turning in his resignation.
Even the kid’s form of “protest” was passive. There’d be a certain utility, I suppose, for the Revolution if the kid had written “I’m a Communist sleeper agent” on the inside of his hat — evidently our standards are so lax that we don’t do basic background checks on our potential military officers. But he didn’t write that. Instead, he wrote “Communism will win,” a passive, bloodless statement … and that’s it.
The passivity is the truly terrifying part. A West Point graduate is among the elite if anyone is — he has command of at least a platoon of heavily armed trained killers, and the radio one of them carries has the power to call in armor, air strikes, cruise missiles … and yet, not “I’m a communist,” not “¡Viva la Revolución!,” not even “Lenin lives!” Just … “communism will win.” How, comrade?
Severian, “The Man of the Hour”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-05-22.
June 29, 2022
QotD: How Cadet Che shows that West Point isn’t West Point anymore
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