Miranda Devine, Gen Y, white feathers and how video games must be good for something ...

(Above: go on, pin on that white feather).

There used to be a noble tradition in Australia involving the sending of a white feather to men who refused to partake in the insanity of war.

It was nifty short hand for coward, and as with many wondrous aspects of civilisation, we owe it all to the finer aspects of the British empire.

As usual, there's a wiki on it, under the header White feather, which will draw your attention to the preposterous A. E. W. Mason 1902 novel The Four Feathers, still being re-made by producers desperately short of imagination, and the Order of the White Feather, founded by Admiral Charles Fitzgerald, with the idea that women could present men of an enlistable age with a white feather if they weren't wearing a uniform.

There's more interesting information here, including a poem which gibbers on for eight stanzas and concludes in rousing fashion thusly:

Why do they call, sonny, why do they call
For men who are brave and strong?
Is it naught to you if your country fall,
And Right is smashed by Wrong?

Is it football still and the picture show,
The pub and the betting odds,
When your brothers stand to the tyrant's blow,
And England's call is God's!"

Gee, was the Devine scribbling poetry back at the turn of the century? Last century ...

Amongst the finer moments of the white feather brigade:

The practice of "awarding" the white feather often got out of hand. Many Australian women became excessive and over-reaching in their attempts to force men to enlist.

Men who came home on "Anzac Leave" after 4 years of war were issued with badges to be worn on civilian clothing so that they wouldn't be accused of "shirking".

A British VC winner at Gallipoli, who was wounded at least 24 times, and who was attending a celebration in his honour in his home town was "awarded' a white feather because he was in civilian clothing.

All this because some men tried to avoid fighting in World War 1, surely one of the most useless wars ever to grace this earth.

Which reminds me.

Can someone please explain what we hope to achieve in Afghanistan? Okay, apart from the heroin trade, which is doing remarkably well:

The latest International Narcotics Control Strategy report from the US State Department says that despite a decade of counter-narcotics efforts, Afghanistan remains the world's largest producer of opium poppies, responsible for 90 per cent of the opium gum used to manufacture heroin worldwide, worth $2.8 billion a year.

UN figures show opium production has exploded in the decade since US-led forces invaded Afghanistan, with curbing the heroin trade a key objective. In 2001, poppy fields covered 7600ha and produced 185 tonnes of opium, last year they covered 131,000ha and produced 6900 tonnes. (Afghan heroin funds growing insurgency).

Two thirds of Australia's heroin now comes from our good mates in Afghanistan, as we busily go about the business of protecting warlords and the corrupt Karzai regime, which managed to make the notion of democracy such a joke that even a few Republicans noticed.

Oh they have a trillion dollars in lithium and other minerals in the ground. Jolly good, carry on number one.

Well all this cogitation and reflection was inspired by reading Miranda the Devine, who manages to send out her very own literary feather in Spirit of Anzac lives on in Gen Y.

Yep, there she stands, outside the picket fence, waving the boys off to fight in the war (what, they send women to war these days too?) without a whit or a jot of thinking about why they might be marching off, and what they might be tasked to accomplish.

When it comes to pea brain militarism and jingoistic nonsense worthy of a Colonel Blimp, the Devine shows why they wrote that dinosaur song, "on dinosaurs as big as trees dinosaur brains like peas".

The Anzac tradition, which played such a large role in forging the Australian identity, was pushed aside in the 1970s by people who believed glorifying the Anzac glorified war.

Those people - the lefties, chattering classes, hippies, pacifists, whatever you call them - were aghast when interest in Anzac was revived among young people during the Howard era in pilgrimages to Gallipoli. They could not comprehend a new generation's patriotism and embrace of Anzac, the dawn service, the flag and the Southern Cross.

Ah yes, this would be the famous gen Y. Thank the lord they're good at militarism, because due to years of screen culture, they've fucked up everything else:

The bankers, brokers and traders, mostly young and male, whose impulsive decision-making and poor judgments fuelled the collapse of financial markets last year, may very well have possessed a version of a newly evolved human brain, physically changed by prolonged time in front of computer screens. (here)

Ah but that was yesterday, back when the Devine, a classic chattering class all by herself, was wont to brood about the failures of the younger generation.

These days it's all out intergenerational warfare, and the Devine is on the side of the young, because after all, it turns out that playing first person shooter games trains you for something useful. Killing. Or perhaps getting pissed as parrots on the shores of Gallipoli:

Baby boomers on ABC radio railed against a phenomenon they didn't understand and dwelled on alleged misbehaviour of the young people who flock to Anzac Cove each year.

Anzac became embroiled in the culture wars and thus, when the National Museum of Australia opened in 2001, the Anzac tradition was trivialised and mocked, with its sole presence a bleached-out statue of a digger.

Left-wing academics, still on their "long march" through the institutions, are busily publishing books aimed at destroying the Anzac legend.

Dearie me, does militarism also lead to paranoia, along with the schizophrenic inability to remember scribbles only a year old?

Please, wheel in John Simpson, ship jumper, deserter, larrikin, ratbag, trade unionist, rampant leftie, and then let's talk a little more about un-nuanced, simple minded, idle chatter about the Anzac legend, as opposed to the much more interesting historical reality.

But it makes no difference. Admiration and gratitude for our nation's military and the new generation of soldiers is stronger than ever.

Yes, it's hard not to be moved by the incredible success of the Afghanistan opium trade. Which begs the question: is it reasonable to distinguish between those who serve in the armed forces, many with exceptional bravery, and the sometimes foolish policies they're asked to carry out?

Not if you're the Devine, who's only capable of a "military four legs good, all dissenters and dissidents two legs baaaad". Which we take as a sure sign of cretinism.

The popularity of the dawn service is a sign of a resurgent respect that stems from Generation Y, and a determination not to repeat the mistakes of the Vietnam era, when veterans were dishonoured and abused as "baby killers".

Ah good old Vietnam, another stunning success for the militarists. Thousands dead, a country ravaged, Cambodia flung into turmoil, millions dead, and what have we got to show for it? A Communist regime that acts like a capitalist one ...

Well to this day, I never take it out on the soldiers, but if I find a politician who voted for conscription in those dark days, I still have the inclination to offer them a white feather.

Meanwhile, back to that notorious new generation and their ruination by screen culture:

"If the screen culture creates a world dominated by sensation and process rather than by content, significance and narrative, it may well be that those playing computer games have brains that adjust appropriately."

Greenfield is famous for warning that we are at risk of losing identity, attention span, empathy and the essence of what it is to be human, as we spend increasing amounts of time using new technologies - from Twitter and Facebook to Google and games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft - and less time developing an interior life.

Develop an interior life? You're kidding right? The only decent interior life is an exterior one, killing things, surely, and thank the lord Gen Y knows how to do it, as they translate the world of warcraft into the killing fields:

Gen Y has grown up in a post-Berlin Wall world, and the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and Bali bombings define their time. Their generation are the soldiers on the battlefields of Afghanistan tempered through adversity.

They know what a real ''moral challenge'' is.

But do they know that the woman handing out white feathers for them is a true and complete dickhead?

And does anybody ever wonder about the way the Americans have now been in Afghanistan for nine long years. Not the longest war for the United States perhaps - after all, if we're talking technicalities, the Korean war has never been settled, and the Phillipines insurgency raged on as a kind of guerilla campaign for many years - but long enough to realise that as currently being conducted, it's an exercise in futility and certain to sow seeds of bitterness and dreams of revenge that the west will be able to chew on for many years to come.

But enough of talk of actual issues and actual policies, when it's so much easier to be off waving the flag and bleating like Colonel Blimp ...

(Below: Doonesbury is currently alternating between Afghanistan and BP in the gulf. More here).