I liked the crazy you

School teachers and soldiers are the same. One, they both get their stuff from the government cashbox. Two, prevailing political "reality" consider both to be indispensable. Three, the performers of these jobs are both lauded and pitied. When the God-loved folks of America exhibit or feign gratitude towards them, there is a tendency -- anecdotal, of course -- for the praiser to posit: "I sure am glad somebody does it, somebody other than me." And this makes sense. Brandishing similar strategies -- and only moderately different styles -- teachers and soldiers use force and coercion to pacify or placate unruly groups, our enemies. Who are our enemies? The insane.

If you're like me, you spend your days tasked with delivering a consignment of teenagers from insanity to normalcy: get a job, any job; follow all of those spinach-like laws; marry someone the law approves of; have a kid; send it to us; get back to work, your lunch break was over 10 minutes ago -- we'll call you if anything comes up.

If you're like a soldier, you spend your days tasked with things like getting millions of Pashtuns to do, uh, some stuff you've been hoping they'd start doing so they too can stop being insane and start being perfectly normal. (Admittedly, I'm not exactly sure what these things are, but ostensibly, whatever we're working towards is getting lost in translation, or something. Give it time).

So, why convert the insane? Surely, they are only relatively insane -- could there be another kind? Stop forcing kids to Race To The Top, why bother encouraging them to race anywhere at all? Certainly not to the top. Stop with the nation building or whatever the hell the soldiers do in faraway places. Nations are divisive, nations are insane, stop trying to make them normal, they couldn't possibly understand.

Normalcy is not accurately labeled