National service

I have often thought how glad I am that national service was stopped way before my time. PE and games at school were bad enough! How would national service have gone? The passive resistance I had employed in those school PE and games 'lessons' would probably not have worked. Of course it may be that they would have spotted what a thoroughly hopeless case I was and sent me off to whatever it was they did with small sensitive repressed outsiders who showed no sporting or rough play interests and yet also lacked theatrical inclinations. Yes, they may have decided that I had better get theatrical! Or maybe I would have decided that. Alternatively of course they might have spotted the practical, capable engineer and the strong character. And here is the point; this fantasy of incompetence painted first needs to be offset against alternative views including the practicality noted here. There is much physiological baggage for me in all this and it seems to be spread about under various headings in my physiological database. I might throw some headings away then find the same stuff under other headings. Actually I have just been throwing out old files today (real paper ones) from degree courses, training courses and work. All (hopefully) redundant; they have served their purpose and like any raft once at the shore... But I digress, I want to run with this national service stuff for a bit. Upon reflection I doubt I would have been able / allowed to find some place of retreat.

I understand that the military like to get their men beyond their own ego's and working together as a team; all for one and one for all. I would have struggled! Which posses interesting questions about self and Self. And, the deliberately chosen their men points to interesting questions about constructions of masculinities and thus femininities; hegemony. I do not leave out their women although I can hear my feminist friends saying 'oh yes you do; you bring them in second and by association'. I try in these few lines to acknowledge the gender politics and by now the issues should be clear but for clarity I'll list them; construction of masculinity and its part in self, hegemony, subjugation of self by the state by employing group-think and the role of Self in 'seeing' this. This point about the state is slightly different from the hegemonic creation of self, I am thinking more of the inhumanities of war. I am going to shy away from construction femininity as it is just too off radar for me, but I acknowledge the yin principle.

Now, I opened this post with baggage and that's boring; the raft has sailed on, bits of it get reinvented etc. So, rather than pick away at the particulars I'll point just to this- one's historical self is tightly tied into one's environment and I am thankful not to have had to deal with the military.


Oh, and returning to throwing things out, I started up my old computer from 1995; It has been stored away awaiting disposal and we plan to try to freecycle it. It still works complete with Windows 3.11! DC joked as we set it up that it was like starting a time machine! Fortunately we had no flux capacitor!