I got an email from one of the high school teachers I work with the other day entitled “Bomb.”  It was about the frenzied excitement with which some of his students greeted the news that we dropped the “MOAB” on Afghanistan. The teacher was worried that, for a generation raised on violent warlike video games, real war had lost its horror. He planned to show them his selective service registration card to remind them that this is something real that could affect them.

I am not sure this is a just an artifact of the video game generation. I remember the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, when I was in grad school and working as an Associate Instructor in an Intro American Politics class (the class I am teaching now.)  I have a vivid and visceral memory of talking about Iran in discussion section one day, and my students consensus position…