Gentlemen of blood and quality

The lesser-spotted sane Christopher Hitchens pops up in Saturday's Wall Street Journal (subs. req'd; alt. free link) to hint that, besides having genuinely botched a joke, John Kerry would have had a point had he actually made his alleged claim that the US troops in Iraq are disproportionately less well credentialed educationally. Hitchens accepted a challenge from conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt to give out his personal e-mail address on air to get what Hewitt believed would be a more representative selection of military e-mails critical of Kerry. So --

I have since had the chance to read about 500 or 600 messages. Almost all of them politely phrased (I exempt one from "the Riordan family" who evidently have not forgiven the long history of British depredation in Ireland) and almost all of them appending the list of college degrees as well as of medals and citations held, these letters show a very deep and interesting rift in which Mr. Kerry plays only a secondary part. Many of my respondents agreed that his words may not have meant or intended quite what they first seemed to mean, but they also felt that the klutziness was Freudian, so to speak, in that the senator's patrician contempt for grunts and dogfaces was bound to come out sooner or later.

One thing I already knew is confirmed -- there is a very great deal of class resentment in these United States. Another thing I wasn't so sure of is also confirmed -- James Webb in Virginia is right to stress the huge rage felt by those of Scots-Irish provenance who feel that they have born the heat and burden of the day in America's wars, and been rewarded with disdain.

Even my most relaxed soldier-correspondent from Iraq itself (a highly educated friend of faultlessly Irish extraction) confessed to a feeling of irritation at the few chances he had to meet Ivy League types in uniform.

Which hits several interesting points. It's over two years ago that we noted James Webb's account of the crucial role that the Scots-Irish played in staffing the US military from the very early days; it's interesting to look back at that now and see Webb in what was clearly, in retrospect, the beginnings of disillusionment with Republicans -- a path that now sees him as the Democratic candidate for US Senate in Virginia.

Anyway, Hitch's e-mail invitation seems to have attracted a more general cross-section of Irish-Americans, but probably not many members of the elite circle that George W. Bush moves in. It's also true that the media rarely pass up a chance to fete any Ivy Leaguer-in-uniform that they do come across; witness the excellent coverage that the Princeton-educated General David Petraeus can always get.

One final observation: with the Green Day video for Wake Me Up When September Ends, no one complained about the stereotypical depiction of a straight-out-of-school small-town teenager heading off to Iraq. Because it seemed realistic.