Will it be this?

Or mojitos and butt-dancing at Senor Frogs?

Hmmm.

For the last two generations, the military has been sold as a jobs program.

To be sure, it was always a jobs program where people might shoot at you, and set up that way largely because Republicans have always despised the idea of job training as a virtue unto itself. Despite the fact that such training pays tangible social and economic dividends many times over, Republicans just loathe the idea that anyone gets anything for “free” – even when that “free” benefit is the down payment on helping make that man or woman into a productive, property owning citizen

Seems so wefare-y.

Best make them bleed for it. Maybe die for it.

I have no particular problem with attaching a social price tag to education benefits. Sending doctors into blighted neighborhoods, or freshly-minted teachers into hard-to-hire districts if they take the Queen’s Crown seems like a pretty fair trade. And since the end-product of all such programs is the making of tax-payers, who in turn pay back into the pool of public revenue that can then be used to fund the next batch to trainees, you can legitimately call such an arrangement a wise investment.

This isn't about the philisophy of public service, but what over thirty years of marketing the military a low-risk/high-reward ticket to a diploma has meant.

The Army was where you went when you couldn’t get a sweet gig at Thrall Car. The Navy was for you when Mom said that she knows she promised, but after the divorce there just isn’t any way she can pay for college.

When bases were closed – at least here in Illinois – the argument was always economic first – the effect on the local economy – and national security a distant second.

Ideas of national service were in there somewhere, but the contract closer was always College and a Bright Career.

As long as the military was a public works j-o-b that the upper class could finance without feeling all liberal and squishy, and the wars we fought were all 100-day blitzkriegs where our devastating firepower could flatten an enemy over a long summer break, the arrangement worked fine.

And then came Iraq, and suddenly the marketing campaign that has paid big dividends for decades has come back to bite us on the ass.

Here's what put me in mind of that (emphasis added)

Military's Recruiting Troubles Extend to Affluent War Supporters
By Terry M. Neal
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Monday, August 22, 2005; 8:00 AM
There was an eye-opening article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette a few days ago that explored the increasing difficulty the military is having recruiting young people to enlist. As has been well reported in many newspapers, including The Washington Post, the Army and Marines are having a particularly tough time meeting recruitment objectives, in part because of Americans' concern about the war in Iraq.
When you dig deeper into the reason for this phenomenon, it turns out that parents of potential soldiers and sailors are becoming one of the biggest obstacles facing military recruiters. Even top military officials acknowledge this and unveiled a new series of ads this spring targeted at "influencers" such as parents, teachers and coaches.
But the Post-Gazette raises another issue. There has been much talk about the relationship between race and ethnicity and military recruitment. But what about social and economic class? Are wealthier Americans, who are more likely to be Republicans and therefore more likely to support the war, stepping up to the plate and urging their children and others from their communities to enlist?
Unfortunately, there has been no definitive study on this subject. But it appears that the affluent are not encouraging their children and peers to join the war effort on the battlefield.
The writer of the Post-Gazette article, Jack Kelly, explored this question in his story that ran on Aug. 11. Kelly wrote of a Marine recruiter, Staff Sgt. Jason Rivera, who went to an affluent suburb outside of Pittsburgh to follow up with a young man who had expressed interest in enlisting. He pulled up to a house with American flags displayed in the yard. The mother came to the door in an American flag T-shirt and openly declared her support for the troops.
But she made it clear that her support only went so far.
"Military service isn't for our son," she told Rivera. "It isn't for our kind of people."
...
So would it be logical to conclude that, if the strong economy is one of the reasons it is more difficult to recruit, the most affluent parents should be the most difficult to reach? After all, their children have more options, including college, than less affluent parents? And if that's true, isn't it somewhat ironic that the military is paying millions of dollars ultimately to influence the behavior of the parents who are among the most likely to be supportive of the war in Iraq?
"I disagree with your premise," Robbins said, arguing that the military is represented strongly across the board by people of all income levels and faces challenges in recruiting at all income levels.
...

The wealthier you become, apparently, the more likely you are to vote Republican. ...
Those making more than $100,000 made up only 18 percent of the electorate, which explains why Bush won by a narrow 2.5 percentage points in the general election.
...
By looking at long-term trends, it seems logical that some of those most likely to support Bush and his Iraq policy are also those least likely to encourage their children to go into the military at wartime. And it raises questions, such as, if you are among those most likely to support the war, shouldn't you be among those most likely to encourage your child to serve in the military? Shouldn't your socioeconomic group be the most receptive to the recruiters' call? And would there be a recruitment problem at all if the affluent put their money where their mouth is?
...
Among the more recent studies was one done last year by Robert Cushing, a retired professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. He tracked those who died in Iraq by geography and found that whites from small, mostly poor, rural areas made up a disproportionately large percentage of the casualties in Iraq.
...
Today's affluent merely see themselves as having more options and are not as enticed by financial incentives, such as money for college, Segal said.
...
Journalists can get themselves in trouble by drawing simplistic conclusions based on less-than-exhaustive research, and we won't do so here. But we can at least raise the question of whether the rich are more likely to support the war because their loved ones are less likely to die in it.

This is the difference – the tragic difference – between the nature and tradition of a thing, and the marketing campaign to sell a thing.

Whatever those realities are, military has been packaged as the WalMart of the upward social mobility for years; it's where you go where you can’t go anywhere else.

And when you focus only on how the marketing campaign has been directed at the poor you forget the blowback you get from that campaign. That the very reasons it’s so effective with its target demographic – that it’s Affordable, Welcoming and Convenient – become the product’s worst liabilities – Cheap, Vulgar, and full of those kinds of people from the wrong side of town -- when seen through the eyes of those at the other end of the income scale.

Thirty years of selling WalMilitary as a blue-collar job-outlet-of-last-resort can’t be reversed and remarketed to the affluent with a hurry-up-quick rebranding campaign that trots out quaint ideas of service and sacrifice.

Because Jenna and Not-Jenna don’t “do” service and sacrifice.

That's not how George and Laura raised them.

Jenna and Not-Jenna don’t shop WalMart.