CHICAGO - Dozens of teens dressed in uniforms provided by the US Marines stand at attention in the gym of a Chicago public high school as a drill sergeant goes through a list of the day’s do’s and don’ts.

Bring your books to class. Come for extra help if you need it. And wear your uniform with pride.

“Young men, you think you can get a haircut and say I’m done for two or three weeks. WRONG,” Sgt. Major Thomas Smith Jr. intones.

“Young ladies. There’s been no problem with your uniforms but there is a problem with your ties. Again, I will go through it again. Wear your ties when you come to my class.”

One in 10 public high school students in Chicago wears a military uniform to school and takes classes — including how to shoot a gun properly — from retired veterans.

That number is expected to rise as junior military reserve programs expand across the country now that a congressional cap of 3,500 units has been lifted from the nearly century-old scheme.

Proponents of the junior reserve programs say they provide stability and a sense of purpose for troubled youth and help to instill values such as leadership and responsibility.

But opponents say the programs divert critical resources from crumbling public schools and lead to a militarization of US society.

“To call these young people child soldiers might be technically inaccurate, but it does reveal the truth of it,” said Oscar Castro, a spokesman for the National Youth and Militarism Program, an advocacy group.

Military recruiters already have the right to give presentations in public schools and to access databases with the contact information of all public school students whose parents do not remove their children from the list.

But they don’t have nearly the same impact as daily interaction with teachers and students in uniform, Castro said.

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Sunny’s Surplus, once famous for military clothing and equipment, is re-opening in Frederick at the same site it closed earlier this year.
The company filed for bankruptcy, closing its 15 stores and liquidating its inventory in February. At the time, the company owed creditors $1.1 million.

Sunny’s, founded in 1948, had filed for bankruptcy in 1997, but emerged from that action a year later.

“We recognize the tastes of our customers have changed and we have altered our product line accordingly,” said Benjamin Gilbert, president and CEO, in a statement from the company.

“The name Sunny’s immediately conjures up images of military gear and we don’t want to lose that branding element. But, we also want to be known as a retailer that offers lower-priced and hard-to-find items that can used in day-to-day life. Consumers will find plenty of wool socks, work boots, backpacks and flannel shirts.”

The Frederick store is at 1003 W. Patrick St. The company also reopened stores in Westminster and Annapolis.

Gilbert said the company is looking to open more stores. No specific sites were noted, but the company once had stores in Virginia and Delaware as well as Maryland.

The 71 workers in the Falcon Perfor­mance Footwear plant have plenty of elbow room these days. They’re stretched out across the fourth-floor of an old brick mill on Cedar Street that is so expansive you can almost imagine seeing a horizon beyond the end of the conveyor belt.

The workers don’t need as much space anymore because the factory narrowed its focus this year from a variety of work boots to boots for firefighters. Some conveyor belts and other machines have been ripped up and removed, opening up large unused spaces in the factory. Most employees now work along one continuous production line, piecing together the factory’s new specialty — a high-tech, high-end fire boot. But despite downsizing and decreasing production, the factory’s sales are up, and its future is more secure.

To see women sewing leather pieces together with even, white stitching and to watch workers attaching boots to their soles is like witnessing a relic from this city’s past. During the exuberant shoe-making era of the 1950s, Lewiston and Auburn’s many shoe factories employed more than 6,000 people, accounting for more than 22% of the workforce, according to Gerard Dennison, senior economic analyst with the Maine Depart­ment of Labor.

But as the shoe market globalized, domestic factories closed. Falcon is one of two remaining shoe factories in Lewiston-Auburn, the other being the classy men’s shoe manufacturer Allen-Edmonds Shoe Corp. Just a handful of shoe-making factories are left across the country, and many of these survive by making footwear for the United States military, which only contracts with domestic producers.

Falcon’s story differs from so many other shoemaking plants in Lewiston-Auburn for its refusal to buckle. The company has managed to stay one step ahead of other shoe factories, narrowly dodging the fate of shutdown under pressure from offshore manufacturers. But its survival has been difficult and painful, with layoffs, declining sales, failed contract bids and unceasing stress. General Manager Roland Landry describes the past several years as “hell.”

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It seems to be the Kremlin’s strategy to pick off ex-German leaders one-by-one and turn them into neo-Soviet operatives. First it was Gerhard Schroeder, and now Helmut Schmidt. He says that Russia deserves credit for not invading other countries, just happening to overlook the minor fact that it has no such power and the equally minor fact of its brutality within Russia itself. Now, that beacon of truth on Russia, the German publication Der Speigel rips him several well-deserved new ones:

Former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt used to refer to journalists derisively as “highwaymen.” There is a certain cruel irony in the fact that Schmidt himself is a journalist today, although members of the profession might be inclined to interpret this as a sign of its irresistibility. A man with his range of experience — as a soldier, a cabinet minister and chancellor for almost eight years — can expect that people will listen when he speaks. Of course, listening to Schmidt doesn’t necessarily mean agreeing with him, at least not automatically. Even former chancellors can be wrong or guilty of exaggeration, especially when they address us as journalists. And being wrong or exaggerating isn’t exactly unheard of in journalism.

“I do not believe that someone who disagrees with me should be criticized for that reason alone,” Schmidt said at a ceremony to celebrate his 85th birthday in 2003. And he added: “But he must be criticized if he states an opinion that is not real.” Let us subject the various opinions to a reality test. Schmidt says: “Russia poses far less of a threat to world peace today than, for example, the United States. You can go ahead and print that.” These were the words Schmidt uttered in an interview with his own paper, the weekly Die Zeit. He also said that, although he does not view Russian President Vladimir Putin as a flawless democrat, he does consider him an “enlightened potentate.”

But why are the Americans more dangerous than the Russians? Why should we be more afraid of the cradle of democracy than of a potentate, no matter how “enlightened” Schmidt says he is? And is it even relevant whether the censor is educated, disadvantaged, harsh or amiable? What is important, however, is that the censor engages in censorship, while the potentate gives arbitrariness free rein.

Isn’t precisely the opposite of what Schmidt says true? That the experienced American democracy is fundamentally less dangerous than Russia, which, after surviving czarism and communism, has experienced only a few years of Putin-style democracy? Even the loud and sometimes insufferable America of President George W. Bush is already significantly less dangerous than it was when he came into office. Today Bush is a dog that barks but can no longer bite. He is limited by four factors, which, in their absoluteness, are foreign to Putin: his own people, the US Constitution, the independent judiciary and the free press. All four factors lend legitimacy to the United States — and withdraw it again. This is precisely the beauty of a democracy: the people have the first and last word.

Bush will soon disappear into obscurity, never to be seen again. Putin, on the other hand, might stay on the scene, only wearing a different hat, perhaps as an oligarch, as the head of Russian energy giant Gazprom or even as prime minister. Even Schmidt agrees that the Russian president’s future is wide open and that, unlike Bush, a constitution, the people, a free press or a constitutional court won’t be standing in his way. This may be typically Russian, but it is sinister nonetheless.

Russia today is a country adrift. Since former President Mikhail Gorbachev gave up the Soviet empire, Russia has been lurching like an anchor ripped from the ground. At times it wants to be part of Europe, which explains Putin’s efforts to convince Germany and France to join him in a pact against America in the run-up to the Iraq war. And at times the Russians seem more drawn to Asia, where Putin has long been pushing for an expansion of Russia’s regional alliance with the Chinese into a military alliance. As if to demonstrate that they are indeed moving in this direction, the two countries recently held joint maneuvers.

According to Helmut Schmidt, the Russian military has not entered any foreign territory since Gorbachev came into power. The Russians, says Schmidt, have not engaged in any aggressive acts, even allowing Ukraine and Belarus to break away from the former czarist empire. And this was done without so much as a civil war, which, in Schmidt’s view, is an astonishing achievement.

It certainly is an astonishing achievement, but one that stems from an astonishing weakness. Moscow today must content itself with the proper treatment of Russian minorities in its former satellite republics. Experts in the West are convinced that the Russian military is in a sorry state, making Putin a reluctant pacifist. Of course, this assessment doesn’t take the bloody war in Chechnya into account.

Today Russia, still a huge country, is being humiliated wherever it turns. The president of Iran has co-opted Moscow’s former role as America’s adversary. A country with a gross domestic product about the size of Connecticut’s now plays the role that Stalin and his successors had in fact reserved for Russia.

Economically speaking, the Chinese are well ahead of the Russians. The neighboring country, which is already unable to satisfy its own thirst for natural resources with its own reserves, is rapidly shooting to the top echelon of the world’s economic powers. In doing so, the Chinese are not shutting off anyone’s natural gas supply or withdrawing any flyover rights. Instead, they have used hard work to supply products to their customers worldwide and cunning to develop into a “soft power.” The Russians, on the other hand, still resort to stomping their boots impatiently whenever something isn’t quite to their liking.

Russia has oil and natural gas, diamonds, copper and lumber, and yet it has failed to establish a truly impressive industrial empire on the basis of its riches. Despite Putin’s efforts to restructure the economy, the country’s fortunes rise and fall with the price of oil. The current president may be an oil-and-gas baron, but he is not the leader of a modern industrialized nation. These many weaknesses make today’s Russia unpredictable and dangerous. The best antidote to internal disintegration and humiliation from abroad is a dose of megalomania. And while it may not eliminate the pain, at least it diminishes it.

America has isolated itself internationally

And now to America. The superpower is experiencing a difficult phase not unlike the period in the early 1970s, when the Vietnam War was approaching its inglorious end. The country senses that no one is impressed by its tough talk on the so-called “clash of civilizations” and the “war on terror,” as long as success remains elusive on the real war fronts. The Taliban in Afghanistan are confident again, thriving within the population like fish in water. Iraq remains a constant challenge, refusing to be pacified. The United States has isolated itself internationally. No one on the planet, not even in its remotest corners, is currently sending Bush the message that the world wants more of America.

The domestic mood is by no means gung-ho when it comes to the war in Iraq. The Americans are defiant. They don’t want to lose the war, and yet their support for it is waning. The strategy of aggression, of launching attacks based on suspicion alone and the doctrine of the preemptive strike are now seen as military and political failures.

Schmidt rightfully characterizes the Iraq war as “a war of choice, not a war of necessity.” But even this choice is no longer available to the outgoing president. Another ground war is no longer an option. Even the military is tired of war. “We are overstretched,” the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff recently said. Preparations are already underway for a partial withdrawal from Iraq. The man in the White House may be gritting his teeth, but he is bringing the first troops home — reluctantly and gruffly — but bringing them home he is.

Bush would be truly dangerous if he could do as he wished. But he can’t. This is precisely the difference. In a democracy, the will of the individual is answerable to the people, and not the other way around. I, in any case, prefer narrow-minded democrats over enlightened potentates any day. Of course, enlightened democrats — the kind of person Helmut Schmidt once was and will hopefully remain for a long time — are the best thing for the country.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !