I swear, every time I think we have reached peak stupid, reality says “Hold my beer and watch this!” The ruckus this past weekend over cadets at the Army-Navy game appearing on live camera making a variant of the “OK” gesture now has elements of the national media, as well as authorities at the two service academies plain old coming unglued. And this is because this gesture is somehow supposed to be associated with so-called ‘white power’/ racial superiority. Great has been the twitter-tornado launched by the particularly clueless activists who happened to notice the upside-down OK gesture; I can only imagine the numbers of boggarts, ghouls and haunts which are currently living under their own beds and in their closets.
The OK gesture as a ‘white power/racial superiority’ thing is nothing more than a massive troll by the weaponized autistics at 4Chan, and not the first time that they have gotten a rise out of the credulous and readily wound-up by making a ridiculous suggestion and having it swallowed whole.
So, in the interests of saving time on the part of the academy authorities, and energy on the part of the activist twitterati, I will tell you exactly what this gesture means, and what will likely be discovered by the academies; it will all turn out to be an ongoing prank called ‘the circle game’ or ‘made you look!’; a jest which has been enjoyed by bored enlisted troops for more than a decade. The Daughter Unit tells me that young male Marines of her acquaintance employed a refinement of making the ‘circle/made-you-look’ close to their crotch. It’s a game, people a rather silly, juvenile one and one which has been out there long enough to have been the plot of an episode of Malcolm in the Middle, for pete’s sake. A couple of weeks ago, we even spotted a pickup truck with the finger gesture and ‘made you look’ on a window decal!
That’s all that it will turn out to be; doubtless the twitterati will be coming unglued about something else tomorrow, and such will be the embarrassment over this (assuming that they are capable of feeling embarrassment, of course) that this incident will be memory-holed, as if it never happened.
Sure, the OK gesture is indicative of white supremacy. And the moon is made of green cheese, socialism is the wave of the future and I’m Marie of Romania. You may address me as ‘Your Highness’ if you wish to be formal.
Each and every staff member at Annapolis and West Point who has been involved in “investigating” this issue should be fired for harassing these cadets, which should fall under conduct unbecoming.
(It always amazes me how few people know the way that people the military view the senior brass. It’s another downside of the fact that so few people have military experience anymore. Reading the media, you’d think that most folks in the military view those with stars on their shoulders as some sort of gods. Uh, no.)
*snort* – Yeah, sure we view the higher brass as minor gods. *snicker … bwahah!* Ouch, I think I pulled something, laughing so hard.
We viewed the higher brass rather like the villagers of Anatekva viewed the Czar. “God keep the Czar! Keep him far, far from us!!”
It is the Eye-Talians. The “OKay” means “A$$hole”. Sounds right.
The progs must think that everyone els,e like their Black and Hispanic gangs, have a secret sign to declare turf. I bet that is what the Corruptocrats told them.
“OK” [in the Italian sense].
The twitterati would not feel embarrassed, even if forcibly placed face-to-face with the embarrassing facts. They “Mean Well”, in their hate-filled little minds, and that excuses anything.
As an aside, I don’t recall thinking about the Brass all that much. Other than various rude comments about Zumwalt, who was out of the CNO job not long after I got out of Navy A School.
It is entirely possible the cadets (at least the one in the pre-game tv camera shot) were trolling the press.
“Hey, bro, watch this! This is gonna get all those stupid jerks at regular colleges/in the media all riled up!”
Because: Cadets. A fine mixture of earned superiority over, and some disdain for, wusses and morons who spend their days whining about pronouns.
(That’s not a criticism. Just been there, done that.)
I recall this game being around when I was in high school in 1995, and I didn’t get the impression that it was new then.
I was playing multiple versions of this game as early as the late eighties, some where the circle had to be below the waist and others not. It was popular in high school, but I learned it from my uncles working construction building houses for them. They graduated from high school in the seventies and I gathered they learned it from guys that were doing it before them. I bet if we dug down you could find cultural references (movies, magazines, books) that comment on it existing long before my narrow experience.
Oh and by the way, caught my sons 11 and 13 playing it with their friends at Lacrosse practices. I certainly didn’t teach them.
Exactly, the white supremacist meme is a hoax and the snowflakes fell for it. Somebody needs to tell the brass.
The variant I played in high school was that you would put the circle on your body somewhere and if another guy looked you got to hit him on the arm..hard. BUT if you were able to penetrate the circle with your index finger, you got to hit the circle holder twice on the arm..hard. I know, we are silly here in flyover.
“Reading the media, you’d think that most folks in the military view those with stars on their shoulders as some sort of gods.”
Weeeeeellll… That’s not entirely an untrue statement, if you just interview two classes of military members: The ones who serve as remoras, sucking onto those flag ranks like so many servitor fishes along for the ride, and the Very Junior Enlisted who never, ever see the flag rank in person.
The sycophantic mid-grades who suck up? They’re the primary sinners in creating all that. The CG’s driver never, ever thinks the guy is a minor godling; his or her view is usually that the CG farts, snores, and is entirely human. It’s amazing to observe the cycle as these young folks are selected and then exposed to the higher levels; at first, they’re trepiditious and frightened. After a bit, they’re walking in, bold as brass, and drinking his coffee.
The real problems are those aides and mid-level interface positions, where the Courtney Massengales still hold sway; leave it to them, and they’ll have the flag rank they serve so wrapped in a haze of “Yes” that he’ll probably forget he isn’t one of the immortals in very short order; under their ministrations, it’s damn hard to retain a sense of humility.
Personally, I think a lot of the culture surrounding the flag ranks is entirely inimical; they’re not petty godlings, as so many would have it, but men with professional qualifications and executive power. While that’s worthy of respect, it does not imbue them with the attributes that our system has handed over to them. They get treated like minor nobility in some feudal system, and it can’t help but go to their heads. Which produces an awful lot of the problems we see in their ranks…
The American army has had too many officers, proportionately, since WWI. I assume this was because the army was small and the cadre was larger than that required for a small army, assuming the army would rapidly expand and depend on that small cadre in war.
The German army had a much smaller officer class and relied on NCOs far more. Since the end of WWII, the army has persisted in this larger officer class. I guess we could afford it but it seems to have been infiltrated by PC and then SJW sentiments which makes war fighting less effective and more expensive.
I never got beyond E3 and then O-1 so I am not speaking from experience. I did read “Once an Eagle” though.
Support for Mike K’s statement:
1915 US Army (round numbers)
Officers 5,000
EM 100,000
Ratio 1 to 20
1938 US Army
Officers 12,000
EM 172,000
Ratio about 1 to 14
2018 US Army
Officers 90,000
EM 376,000
Ratio about 1 to 4
One can also look at West Point. When MacArthur graduated in 1903, the graduating class was about 90. When Eisenhower graduated in 1915 it was about 164. In 1935 it was roughly 400.
Now its almost 1,000 per year. with an Army of about 450,000.
Is there a plot of that number over time? Did it dip at all in the 90s and then rise again during the WOT? The other Q of course, would be what it looks like if you separate officers into say O5 and up, and those below, to see where the bloat is really concentrated. Intuitively my guess is the top half is where things have gotten really out of control in the last fifteen years or so.
According to the data there were 316 Generals in the US army in 2014. In December 1915, there were 38. In 1938 there were 66. The data for 1915 made me smile. You had:
12 Major Generals
36 Brigadier Generals
Three star Generals? Four star Generals? What’s that?
brigadiers are one stars, major generals are two, lieutenant generals are three,
The numbers for Colonels are even more shocking:
1915: Army 100,000
Colonels (Lt. and Full) 500
1 Colonel for every 200 soldiers
2018: Army 450,000 (round numbers)
Colonels 15,000
1 Colonel for ever 30 soldiers.