Stephen King is officially voted off my island

Generally, I am not a Stephen King hater. I own a lot of his books. Many of them have scared the shit out of me over the years - not the least of which being Misery which gave me nightmares about being hobbled for weeks. That shit's got to HURT.

Has much as I enjoy his works of horror, I find King an even better writer when he's considering human beings in all their flawed and broken glory. This is what makes some of his later works, including Lisey's Story and Duma Key so successful. That and the fact that they're really long - I'm a fast reader, and when you need an opus to hold up to a long vacation on the beach, Stephen King is your go-to guy.

I say all this to make clear that I am not a Stephen King hater, a fact which made my shock and disgust that much more powerful when I read the following comment early last month, (I would have spoken sooner, but I was pissed and had to calm down) made by King while speaking to a group of high school students at a Library of Congress event:

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.

Taking the time to parse King's words - as I have done so often for remarks made by Hillary Clinton - I think I can catch a glimmer of his underlying meaning. He hopes that students will do well in school, will make reading a priority, so that they have the greatest number of options available to them as they leave high school and enter the job force. However, the noble aspirations of this underlying meaning hardly justify what King actually said, in effect suggesting - as so many have before him - that anyone who voluntarily joins the military is either mentally challenged or functionally illiterate and marking military service as the last resort of the inept, the unenlightened and the poor.

Those who spout this nonsense always have an example to provide - usually it's a story about the son of their sister-in-law's gardener who joined the military because his test scores were too low to get into the local community college and who died a week after arriving in Iraq. Such stories are considered to represent the majority of today's armed forces, while the life of Pat Tillman - a man who had every option available to him and nevertheless chose to enter the military - is considered a noble but tragic cautionary tale, the exception that proves the rule.

The truth is, of course, more complicated. Most recruits have stories that fall somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. A recent Heritage Foundation study found that military recruits are drawn largely from the middle class, score a grade-level above others their age on reading tests, and have a significantly higher rate of high school education than the general population.
While 2007 numbers have indicated a drop in the military's percentage of recruits with high school educations, this drop is more indicative of the military's scramble to meet recruiting needs during a highly unpopular war than any overall trend in the type of recruits the armed forces regularly enlists.

Many commentators have attacked King's patriotism following this remark. I find this equally distasteful. Despite the with-us-or-against-us rhetoric of the Bush administration's tenure, I feel strongly that a citizen of this country has every right to voice their opinion about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Patriotism is not exclusively bound up with supporting the troops. Patriotism, however, does demand that those who claim to love their country but abhor its policies do more than simply defame its volunteer soldiers in an effort to inspire change.