I just love the Gazette’s headline on their July 4th front page: POST IS KEEPING TABS ON ITS ‘BOOTPRINT’. Is it a cute eco play on words, or an ironic malapropism? About collateral damage, Rumsfeld famously said the US doesn’t do body counts. I am reminded of course of George’s Orwell’s foretelling: “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”
Certainly the PR crew at Fort Carson meant to imply the equivalent of an environmental footprint in Army lingo. But footprint is itself no longer the literal track left behind you as you walk. It has come to mean the space you occupy, or the resources you consume. Or that of your computer or the printer on your desk for example. The portion of surface resources which each item displaces.
There must be a semantic fallacy which applies here, a mixed semaphore perhaps? As if you could tell me “put a sock in it.” And the Army would add “Put a BOOT in it. HA HA.”
If the Fort Carson sustainability spin doctors want to call the Army eco impact a “bootprint” instead, it probably is more accurate. Their activities have devastation-unleashing consequences. And as the interviews in the article reveal, the warrior’s real passion is in the warfare, hybred-whatsits be damned.
On this Independence Day when we’re all wishing ourselves “Happy” Patriotism, let’s reflect on the full context of Orwell’s 1984 passage:
Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.
Fort Carson’s house paper, The Gazette, yesterday did let this Pentagon shit fly in a puff piece nonsensically titled… Fort Carson is keeping tabs on its carbon ‘bootprint’ Actually, it was a piece of gaudy makeup that an LA Times ‘reporter’ sweetie, DeeDee Coral, originally wrote, and oh, of course, since it was so ‘Green,’ we got the Pentagon press dump, too.
Gazette article
Sad to say, we have a whole herd of local Greenies who buy into this nonsense, and the Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission when it is not busy hugging cops, caters to this crowd that believes the idea that Fort Carson can be a real environmental leader! This is a sure sign of how miserable a group of misleaders this group is now under.
Yes, some of the PPJPC office hacks think they are BIG players by going along with this Pentagon ‘Green’ misinformation campaign! They are heavy into the Green Poop flying out of Fort Carson and want to be active participants in the talk! And we can expect a lot more of this green stuff to fly from the Fort Carson propagandists in the weeks ahead. It distracts people from the trillion dollar failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
‘See, Hitlers soldiers never worried about the ‘carbon bootprints’ they left behind, but we are a democracy and talk up a storm of poop, so we will record it all!’
Oh Thank You, Fort Carson… Yawn, this psyop stuff just so pathetic. And it’s pathetic to be promoting this nonsense and pretending that it is big stuff, PPJPC. (Oh, BTW, I wonder how their PPJPC Vacation Bible School is doing with the kid or two that goes?)