Draft dodgers.

Yesterday, in my hallway of the law school, we were talking about the connotations of "draft dodging." The subject came up in connection with calling President Bush a draft dodger for joining the National Guard. One thing you can say here, and I've said it myself, is that calling Bush a draft dodger for joining the National Guard offends all the many people who have served in the National Guard. Another thing one could say is that joining the Navy, as Kerry did, is "draft dodging," by the same token, because it is another option men chose in preference to being drafted. But I was saying yesterday that every young man I knew back in the Vietnam era sought to avoid the draft, and no one felt the slightest need to feel ashamed of doing so. How to dodge the draft was a frequent subject of conversation, back when I went to college at the University of Michigan in 1969, and I heard endless talk of things like getting letters from psychiatrists and getting one's weight below 120 and, as a last resort, moving to Canada. The chant of the time was "Hell, no, we won't go." Students who participated in ROTC were viewed as aliens: who were these people? Draft dodging was completely socially acceptable, encouraged, and applauded. The only criticism of draft dodging I ever heard in those days was that the least privileged members of society would fill the draft, because they were the least able to exploit the loopholes. The accepted answer to that criticism was that activists therefore should advise these persons on how to get in on the draft dodging action themselves. In any case, it was argued, it was crucial to keep up the resistance to the draft, to destroy it as a workable policy. (Suffice it to say, I'm not worried Bush has a secret plan to bring back the draft!) I think there are millions of men out there who know they enthusiastically resisted the draft and even looked down on anyone who didn't. I think it must be the younger folks who perceive it as a harsh criticism of Bush to call him a draft dodger. The truth is, he was the sort of person that the people I knew would have scoffed at because he did serve. But those of us who remember those days are pretty old, and serving in the military is viewed quite differently now. I asked my younger colleagues if they remembered the song "Alice's Restaurant," and I was actually surprised to find out they hadn't even heard of it. Here's a sample of the circa 1969 zeitgeist:

They got a building down New York City, it's called Whitehall Street, where you walk in, you get injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected. I went down to get my physical examination one day, and I walked in, I sat down, got good and drunk the night before, so I looked and felt my best when I went in that morning. `Cause I wanted to look like the all-American kid from New York City, man I wanted, I wanted to feel like the all-, I wanted to be the all American kid from New York, and I walked in, sat down, I was hung down, brung down, hung up, and all kinds o' mean nasty ugly things. And I walked in and sat down and they gave me a piece of paper, said, "Kid, see the psychiatrist, room 604." And I went up there, I said, "Shrink, I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill, KILL, KILL." And I started jumpin up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL," and he started jumpin up and down with me and we was both jumping up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL." And the sargent came over, pinned a medal on me, sent me down the hall, said, "You're our boy."

To get the full sense of how people thought about the draft back then, read the whole text of this immensely popular Arlo Guthrie song. No one was outraged by Arlo's paean to draft dodging. Arlo was an icon. Recasting Bush as a draft dodger and not a military guy would in those days, for the people I knew, have taken him out of the category of social outcast and made him one of us! UPDATE: An emailer sends a link to the well-loved "Girls Say Yes to Boys Who Say No" poster of the Vietnam era. ANOTHER UPDATE: Another emailer sends this link to a picture and some discussion of a proposed Canadian monument to American draft dodgers. Here's the FoxNews report about it. Quite apart from the politics of it all--that is one ugly monument! Who knew the Canadians turned out in the nude to welcome our dodgers with outstretched arms?