Apparently the books I sent to Iraq were a waste. . .
At least according to our latest asshat, none other than Stephen King. I’ve never thought of him as having a big mouth, but apparently it is just large enough to hold a foot. Quoth King:
I don't want to sound like an ad, a public service ad on TV, but the fact is if you can read, you can walk into a job later on. If you don't, then you've got, the Army, Iraq, I don't know, something like that. It's, it's not as bright. So, that's my little commercial for that.
Ok, politics aside, I think even the most rabid Michael Moore liberal would agree that metaphorically going to Walter Reed and telling the people there, “you’d still have your legs if you were smart like lil ol novelist me,” is in really bad taste. Don’t expect King to sign books at your local VFW hall any time soon.
(Also, does the Army even accept applications from people who aren’t reading English at a high school level?)
via Terry Ann Online
![[Book Cover]](http://www.sff.net/people/saswann/graphics/covers_thumbnail/rust.jpg)
2 comments:
Hey there, just stumbled here ;) I don't mean to defend Mr. King, as I do not know his true intentions for what he said. But I take what he said as more of a commentary on how much it must suck to be poorly educated; not that our army is necessarily filled with illiterates, but that people with nowhere else to go are likely to go anywhere that will take them.
Welcome.
As far as King goes, I'm not doing all the hand wringing about his ethics/morality/intelligence et al. I'll leave that to the right-wing bloggers. What annoys me is that it exposes a particular elitist prejudice that he doesn't even realize is a prejudice.
There's a large class of people who would be appalled as globally maligning the intellectual aptitude of people based on race, or gender, but look at doing so based on geography (the South), social class (folks shopping at Wal Mart), or occupation (military service) as no big deal.
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