University of Wisconsin – Madison doctoral student Jason Morgan says that American military prowess has been hollowed out by academia and the culture of irony.

….Universities have the market cornered when it comes to theorizing a society free from the tired old “half of us are men and the other half are women” constraints (Yawn!), but hipsters have turned silliness against itself to form an expression of cowardly nihilism that professors can look upon only with envy: irony.Irony is the essence of the hipster. Even his (or her! Hipsters don’t judge…) world-weary countenance is an ironic pose, a refusal even to invest one’s inner being in so emotionally undemanding an emotion as ennui. Indeed hipsters take nothing seriously (except, in the most pointed irony of all, themselves).

Everything is a joke, but only because hipsters can find nothing mirthful or meaningful enough to evoke anything more than a wry grin.

…On June 6, 1944, men of considerably more substance than Bowe Bergdahl or Barack Hussein Obama leapt from Higgins Boats into a wall of Nazi machine gun fire so that men and women that didn’t even live in their own country might be free. For many of those men, the salt air in their nostrils, the steel of fear in their throats, and the determination in their guts were the last sensations they knew before leaving this life. They were the Greatest Generation. They gave their lives for others. They saw evil, knew it, and fought back.

Bergdahl’s generation, by contrast, is the Worst Generation….

If there’s a Tibetan organic vegetable farmer who’s being unfairly treated by a Singaporean capitalist, or a bovine rights activist imprisoned in the Sudan, you can rely on Bergdahl and his ilk to “like” the denunciation of such horrors on Facebook. But when real evil–such as one might find amongst, say, serial child rapists and wife beaters whose idea of a good time is slaughtering three thousand innocent people by flying airplanes into buildings–goes abroad in the world, Bergdahl, et al., size up the situation and then decide that the terrorists probably have a good point.

We’ve been hollowed out by academia and the culture of irony.

The universities, especially the gender wing of those once-storied institutions, teach that identity is a spectrum, and that no fast choices need be made. One should adjust one’s ontology until one feels comfortable and “safe.” Hipsters revel in this freedom from allegiance. Why make hard decisions about good and evil? Why not just forego the tuning in and turning on and just get right to the dropping out?

This nihilism has now reached the ranks of our military, infecting many and confusing many more. How long will it be before the brave souls who continue to serve this country out of love and honor are outnumbered in their own ranks by college-educated hipsters incapable of understanding why they’re fighting in the first place?