It Makes a Fellow Proud to be a Soldier
With much tittering, stories of some half-baked proposals for research into inventive new non-lethal weapons are circulating about the internet and the kind of news services that titter about the news. Among the proposals are identifying combatants that melt into the civilian populace by spraying them with a chemical that gives them lasting bad breath and another chemical to induce stinging insects to attack the target.
The proposal getting all the attention, however, is a proposed chemical to turn soldiers gay. It’s not the first time the military has come up with some really stupid ideas, but this is just so stupid on so many levels that it’s hard to imagine anyone seriously suggesting it in the first place. Wouldn’t you love to have been a fly on the wall when the guy who thought it up made his proposal?
“Now, see, it has long been scientific’ly proven that homo-asectialty is a preversion. And it stands to reason your basic prevert can’t control his sectial urges, otherwise he wouldn’t be a prevert, right? So the moment a homo-asectial is in a foxhole next to another man, he’ll immediately throw aside his weapon, even if he’s getting shot at at the time, and start trying to grope the other man, distracting him and effectively taking two soldiers out of the fight at once, which is why we in the army have long maintained a zero-tolerance policy of making sure none of them homo-asectials get in.
“Besides which, even when he is alone, a homo-asectial is a poor fighter on account of anti-masculine brain chemicals that make him less aggressive in combat.
“Now it has also been scientific’ly proven that homo-asectialty is caused by a imbalance in the brain chemicals. So if we can find the right chemical to turn the enemy into a homo-asectial, we can spray it over his side of the battlefield, thus simultaneously decreasing enemy combat capacity, undermining enemy morale, and incident’ly making sure there won’t be no next generation of terrorist hostiles to worry about.”
I’m certain it didn’t go quite like that, but I’m not so certain that the internal dialogue of the guy who thought of it wasn’t pretty similar, even if it wasn’t quite so verbally explicit. (Explicit reasoning and really whacko thinking are not, strictly, mutually exclusive, but they rarely walk arm-in-arm.)
Even more than the proposal, however, I’d like to know whether anyone thought about the possibilities of a gay-bomb arms race, and what that would mean for the U.S. military, which seems to fear homosexuality more than any enemy military force. Once the technology got out, whole stretches of our own army would be one quick chemical bomb away from being rendered wholly ineffective; our generals could never trust them to fight again, and the soldiers would be overwhelmed with self-loathing in any case, shooting themselves if they’re not too busy feeling up the next soldier. Treatment would be impossible, of course, thanks to “don’t ask, don’t tell.” If a gay-bomb could ever work, we’d be screwed. Better just to keep our mouths shut on the subject.
(…than to open them and remove all doubt.)
With much tittering, stories of some half-baked proposals for research into inventive new non-lethal weapons are circulating about the internet and the kind of news services that titter about the news. Among the proposals are identifying combatants that melt into the civilian populace by spraying them with a chemical that gives them lasting bad breath and another chemical to induce stinging insects to attack the target.
The proposal getting all the attention, however, is a proposed chemical to turn soldiers gay. It’s not the first time the military has come up with some really stupid ideas, but this is just so stupid on so many levels that it’s hard to imagine anyone seriously suggesting it in the first place. Wouldn’t you love to have been a fly on the wall when the guy who thought it up made his proposal?
“Now, see, it has long been scientific’ly proven that homo-asectialty is a preversion. And it stands to reason your basic prevert can’t control his sectial urges, otherwise he wouldn’t be a prevert, right? So the moment a homo-asectial is in a foxhole next to another man, he’ll immediately throw aside his weapon, even if he’s getting shot at at the time, and start trying to grope the other man, distracting him and effectively taking two soldiers out of the fight at once, which is why we in the army have long maintained a zero-tolerance policy of making sure none of them homo-asectials get in.
“Besides which, even when he is alone, a homo-asectial is a poor fighter on account of anti-masculine brain chemicals that make him less aggressive in combat.
“Now it has also been scientific’ly proven that homo-asectialty is caused by a imbalance in the brain chemicals. So if we can find the right chemical to turn the enemy into a homo-asectial, we can spray it over his side of the battlefield, thus simultaneously decreasing enemy combat capacity, undermining enemy morale, and incident’ly making sure there won’t be no next generation of terrorist hostiles to worry about.”
I’m certain it didn’t go quite like that, but I’m not so certain that the internal dialogue of the guy who thought of it wasn’t pretty similar, even if it wasn’t quite so verbally explicit. (Explicit reasoning and really whacko thinking are not, strictly, mutually exclusive, but they rarely walk arm-in-arm.)
Even more than the proposal, however, I’d like to know whether anyone thought about the possibilities of a gay-bomb arms race, and what that would mean for the U.S. military, which seems to fear homosexuality more than any enemy military force. Once the technology got out, whole stretches of our own army would be one quick chemical bomb away from being rendered wholly ineffective; our generals could never trust them to fight again, and the soldiers would be overwhelmed with self-loathing in any case, shooting themselves if they’re not too busy feeling up the next soldier. Treatment would be impossible, of course, thanks to “don’t ask, don’t tell.” If a gay-bomb could ever work, we’d be screwed, so to speak. Better just to keep our mouths shut on the subject.
(…than to open them and remove all doubt.)