Some environmental tips from my buddy Brendan Koerner, making his debut on the Colbert Report. Brendan is the author of a great new book about a black WWII G.I who kills his superior officer and flees into the jungle to do drugs with Naga headhunters. Brendan is one of the hardest working men in magazines. But most of us on the web know him as The Green Lantern.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
One of the things that struck me about Koerner's book was how schizophrenic the U.S. Army was in regard to its own policy of segregation. They made a point to instruct black G.I.'s not to discuss the Army's racial stratification with the people in Burma and India, lest Axis spies learn of it and use it to sow weakness. But they were still doggedly committed to enforcing segregation.
Yet another example of the practical disadvantages of institutional racism.
@G.D. You do encourage me to want to read the book. Do we really care how many "practical disadvantages" there are? Doesn't that just open up the door to weiging them against the practical advantages?
Does anyone know how to get comedy central videos to work in Canada?
Michael: Which practical advantages? The only one I can think of is the cheap labor from slavery (a HUGE economic leg-up for the U.S.), but slavery was inherently unstable.
@G.D. Cold-blooded murder has practical advantages, depending on your perspective.
I felt pointing to the practical disadvantages was a dilution of the point of US Army hypocrisy that you were making.
what a perfect historical-political moment for this to come out!