Comments Elsewhere

Macker: Are you saying that Boyington is the equivalent of a General Custer? After all your statement applies to both equally.

(1) They are “equivalent” in both being remembered chiefly or solely as warriors. (2) They are not “equivalent” in that the moral status of Boyington’s military career is more complicated than Custer’s.

What I explicitly stated above, however, is that it does not matter, for the point I’m making, whether Boyington was involved in just or unjust wars. It’s not the job of a University to offer parting rah-rahs for deceased government-hired fighters, whether they are admirable people or not. There are lots of cultural outlets other than the University dedicated to blowing the trumpets for martial prowess, and I don’t see how it is any part of the goals or purpose of a University to celebrate it. (The University does have a purpose, and that purpose is to host, foster, celebrate, and promote a certain kind of life — the life of the mind, or what some would call the Arts and Sciences. There are other kinds of life that are indeed valuable or admirable, but it’s not the University’s job to promote them. The idea that a University owes a twenty-one gun salute to anyone who passes through and goes on to be cheered by others as a Good Citizen, whether or not the things they are being cheered for have anything in particular to do with the University or the kind of life it promotes, has something directly to do with the salivating statism of educational ideas in the last century.)

If you’re going to ignore my repeated explicit statements to this effect then you haven’t got any place complaining that my statements on the matter are disingenuous.