I saw you talkin’/ To Christopher Walken/ On my TV screen
I had no idea my story about recruiters would cause people to comment. I thought I was just showing how low recruiters would stoop to bring in another warm body. Flagrantly breaking rules doesn’t seem to line up with the credos of our armed forces, yet that’s what so many recruitments are built upon.
Regardless, I was just trying to tell a story about recruiters who buy tons of pee-cleansing products.
Dag yo.
Malnurtured Snay links to an article in which a Republican senator from Alabama calls for Bill Maher’s dismissal from television, based on Maher’s remarks that “that the U.S. military has already recruited all the ‘low-lying fruit’” and that there is no one else left to recruit.*
Snay brings up the point that the Army has had a problem with recruiters telling recruits to lie on applications, and not worry about their drug habits.
Unfortunately, this has been going on for a long time. I used to work in a record store in the Baltimore area (1998, 1999), and one of the products that we carried was Detoxify. Actually, we carried all of their products. Every now and then one of the recruiters from the office up the block would come in with a recruit and buy a bottle of Detox for the kid.
Bad? It gets worse. Every week or so, the recruiter would come down to the store by himself and buy CASES of the Detox products, sometimes spending close to $1000. After about 2 weeks, he would come back for more.
Finally, I asked the recruiter what he was doing with all the Detox, even though I thought I knew the answer.
He told me that the Army drug tested recruits at random intervals, sometimes more, sometimes less, but everybody got drug tested at least once. He would buy the stockpiles of Detox so he could give it to every recruit he was working with when he would hear about drug tests coming through.
I asked him what kind of drugs these kids were doing. He said that it was mostly pot and ecstasy, but every now and then it would be heroin, coke, crack, meth, PCP, or whatever the recruit “accidentally” got into.
Talk about scraping the bottom of the barrel. I know this doesn’t represent all of the recruits, but at the rate he was unloading Detox, it can’t be a insignificant percentage either.
In this case, I’d have to say that Maher is right, and the recruiters have scraped the bottom of the barrel and have begun digging.
Would Nancy Reagan still be telling people to just say no?
*If you want to comment on the politics of this, go to Snay’s site. Thanks.
I feel like I’ve been able to scrub the goo from my brain. The fog is gone, and it’s last smoky tendrils dissipated from within my neural network at some point last night to allow my synapses to begin firing as usual. I’m back to being my indefatigable self (with regards to blogging, at least) and the unwholesome union of languidity and lethargy have left the building.
No longer is my brain searching for words like, “gasp” or “hush” or even “spill”. Believe it or not, but those words were all elusive to me a mere 12 hours ago. This very paragraph would have taken me hours to complete, and would not be nearly a fraction as literate. Teaching a monkey sign language comes to mind.
That said, I punished my brain again last night, but luckily the effects wear off as soon as the television is rendered to a state of inoperation. Kmart and I watched the last 2 episodes of 24. Well, I puttered around the apartment and did laundry while Kmart watched the last two episodes of 24.
It’s not a particularly riveting show, and I wasn’t a big fan of the shows’ characters adopting the benighted patois of W in the pronunciation of “Nuclear”, nor his administration’s dismissal of the inherent wickedness of torture, but it did make for some interesting jokes about next season.
Maybe 8 episodes would focus on Jack sleeping. You could have 1 whole episode devoted to him getting something to eat. Maybe you could have an episode where Jack takes a walk. It would be a Seinfeldian drama meets avant garde television. It would be groundbreaking.
Unfortunately, I feel most of the American public’s brain functionality is equal to that of mine after a night of drinking, so I don’t think they’d get it.
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