(via Instapundit)   When I first started blogging, I was afraid that my blog would just turn into quote + summary of Den Beste  (and I still work mighty hard to keep that from happening).   Now, I risk turning it into just a reflector of Victor Davis Hanson.   As hard as I fight it, I sometimes just can't resist.   Today's column is no exception:

But the lethality of the military is not just organizational or a dividend of high-technology. Moral and group cohesion explain more still. The general critique of the 1990s was that we had raised a generation with peroxide hair and tongue rings, general illiterates who lounged at malls, occasionally muttering "like" and "you know" in Sean Penn or Valley Girl cadences. But somehow the military has married the familiarity and dynamism of crass popular culture to 19th-century notions of heroism, self-sacrifice, patriotism, and audacity.

The result is that the energy of our soldiers arises from the ranks rather than is imposed from above. What, after all, is the world to make of Marines shooting their way into Baathist houses with Ray-Bans, or shaggy special forces who look like they are strolling in Greenwich Village with M-16s, or tankers with music blaring and logos like "Bad Moon Rising?" The troops look sometimes like cynical American teenagers but they fight and die like Leathernecks on Okinawa. The Arab street may put on shows of goose-stepping suicide bombers, noisy pajama-clad killers, and shrill, masked assassins, but in real battle against gum-chewing American adolescents with sunglasses these street toughs prove to be little more than toy soldiers.

By the same token, officers talk and act like a mixture of college professors and professional boxers. Ram-road straight they brave fire alongside their troops — seconds later to give brief interviews about the intricacies of tactics and the psychology of civilian onlookers. Somehow the military inculcated among its officer corps the truth that education and learning were not antithetical to risking one's life at the front; a strange sight was an interview with a young officer offering greetings to his fellow alumni — of Harvard Business School. So besides a new organization and new technologies, there is a new soldier of sorts as well.

The man puts the Class in Classics. 

In my day-to-day yuppy life in the confines of Silicon Valley, I'm easily surrounded by some of the brightest, most privileged young men and women the nation, or more accurately, the world has to offer.   And it makes me angry to no end how easily some (clearly not all) of these kids -- and I use that term quite intentionally -- drip with cynicism and disbelief at the world around them.   The domestics tend to be a bit worse than the imports here.  The dotcom boom/bust only fed their perceptions that wealth (and ergo, a large part of lIfe) were get-rich-quick-schemes with spoils allocated not based on hard work but rather on who you can schmooze.  The logical conclusion of this view, more often than not, sees wealth as random and power as accidental.

Find me a group of VDH's soldiers -- folks who can easily mix high brow intellectualism, low brow culture, and a universalist belief that morality and imperative can intersect.