Diarrhea as a way of life

By this time I assume everyone has read Gerecht’s Atlantic article about why US HUMINT sucks.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200107/gerecht

A former senior Near East Division operative says, “The CIA probably doesn’t have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist who would volunteer to spend years of his life with shitty food and no women in the mountains of Afghanistan. For Christ’s sake, most case officers live in the suburbs of Virginia. We don’t do that kind of thing.” A younger case officer boils the problem down even further: “Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don’t happen.”

That’s the heart of the matter. The USA does produce men like Richard Burton, but most of them die young, gunned down the the USA’s own internal police squads. A few heroes, like Jenkins, are awarded the Bronze Star before committing suicide. The bland, acceptable men who are allowed into the state espionage apparatus are not there because they are Nietzschean adventurers, striving to Live Dangerously and to die gloriously. They are there because they can stand in line, and they need to be compensated for their conformity with salaries and suburban lifestyles.

This is why nihilism will win many more victories. The bland believers who can look past the contradictions of modern USA ideology can only do so because they have abandoned logic. The mad nihilists are willing to fight because they have embraced diarrhea as a way of life.