Better people… better
food… and better beer!
Why rule around the world
When Eden was so near?
“Territories"
Rush
lyrics by Neal Peart
One of the
more ignominious episodes of the Obama years was the government's
unconstitutional response to the 2013 bombing attack of the Boston Marathon.
Nearby Watertown was placed under lockdown for several hours while a
door-to-door search for the
surviving alleged perpetrator was conducted by black-clad,
armed stormtroopers marching through the streets astride military vehicles,
hustling families and seniors from their homes (1).
Embarrassingly enough, the historically ironic import of the violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 in the Boston area—a legal stricture against military enforcement of domestic law originally inspired by the nation's Colonial experience—seemed lost to residents who came out en masse to applaud the departing occupation force when "its work was done" (as it turned out, the surviving perpetrator was located by a civilian, David Henneberry, after the lockdown was lifted [2]).
What makes this so eerie, however, was not so much the overt threat of state violence, but its attempted softer conflation with the priorities of family life when early on the media glorified the decency of Brookline police officer John Bradley for delivering milk to a family imprisoned in their own home (3); in a sort of stateside example of Noam Chomsky's "military humanism".
Seward's Sculptural Follies
Exploiting the universal social veneration of the family in
order to make war and authoritarian goals a part of day-to-day domestic
experience doesn't just serve Pentagon or State Department needs, but also
finds its place as part of the sentiment-infused self-image of a society that
is frequently at odds with reality.
Such is the
case with sculptor Seward Johnson,
whose pieces (thirty-six of which comprise the “Timeless” exhibit in Stamford, Connecticut this summer) evoke historical/pop-cultural tropes of
twentieth-century Americana with all the undemanding appeal of over-sized
Danbury Mint keepsakes, like the iconic 3-D rendering of the elative sailor
embracing a nurse on VJ Day in New York City, or a 25-foot-tall
skirt-blown Marilyn Monroe from the 1955 romantic comedy The Seven Year Itch.
A piece from 1992, “Coming Home” attempts to squeeze the more recent
wave of imperialist conflicts into the same nostalgia box, in its depiction of
a Gulf War soldier hugging his grade-school daughter while in camouflage uniform (4).
A familiar scene popularized on the news
and via countless home video uploads to Youtube for years now involving faithful pets, flag-waving ecstatic spouses and partners, to be sure; what's
disturbing about Johnson's
interpretation is that, contrary to most real-life examples, “Coming Home”
depicts the soldier,
not his daughter, clutching the stars-and-stripes on a stick, as if to suggest that he is so
righteously devoted to his sense of duty, that he can't bear to relinquish it, even while suffused with the relief of
reuniting with those whose safety justifies his tours abroad.
Entraining
a New Generation
A more
recent wrinkle on the wartime homecoming
theme extends to the school setting, where, besides capturing traditional
functions, smartphones now record returning service fathers and mothers
surprising their children before their peers in the middle of a game, in class (5)
and elsewhere. As with the previously-mentioned public's "Boston Strong" fawning over the suspension of their civil liberties, this trend in public
schools (so reminiscent of Erich Fromm's observation in 
On the
surface, the lunch room playfulness of a returning military mother dressed like
a school mascot may be endearing, but it also implies institutional endorsement not
just of the emotional impact such public encounters might have on the
classmates of a student with a parent in the armed forces, but what their
father or mother is being called upon to do (6).
By
contrast, when was the last time the media reported on such a surprise pulled
on behalf of a child whose father or mother was away on relief work for something like Habitat for Humanity, or freshly-returned from a cross-country trucking run? As for children of
military families, how many are living hand-to-mouth because of „stop loss“
extended deployments; how many reunited families shown online and on
television may have to face the suicide of a veteran parent (a loss of 20
daily, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs [7]) down the
road?
First
Blood--By Way Of Lassie?
Entertainment
has been part and parcel of such propaganda for as long as there has been mass
media, but with 2017's Max,
youth marketing/book packaging company Alloy Entertainment (responsible for both the 2015 young adult novel by Jennifer Li
Shotz and its film
version) struck a new low by perversely purveying the enobilization of conquest
through a boy-and-his-dog coming-of-age storyline.
Much to his
mom's frustration and his Gulf War veteran dad's outrage, Justin Wincott is an
insolent early-teen whose older brother, Kyle, has just died in Afghanistan. Although
his heroism stemmed from his service uncovering caches of enemy weaponry, as
well as threatening to expose gun-running in his own Marine unit, back home,
Justin spends his summer competitive biking and selling bootleg video games. Softening the absurdly unfair comparison between this petty mischief with Kyle's self-sacrificing character in order to sell, however obliquely, young viewers on the supposed justness of the graver criminal act of illegal foreign occupation is Max, Kyle's gun-sniffing German Shepard.
Though
combat-trained like his human counterparts, Max returns home with PTSD,
where Justin reluctantly agrees to look
after him. Kyle’s gun-runner comrade returns home, too,
enmeshing Justin and his family in his efforts to destroy all evidence of his activities, which includes Max. The plot makes for a rather desperate
twist on the guilt-ridden convention of a parent or older family
friend favoring one
son over another, based on which one served in war and which remained home--a theme played out from the 1959 Cold War
potboiler Atomic Submarine and Norman Lear’s 1970s sitcom All In the Family, up through 2013's politically obsequious The
Butler, with Oprah Winfrey.
 |
| Just a few titles from the expansive Gossip Girl YA series |
Military Bigamy and the Citizen Soldier
Following
the outcome of the 2016 presidential election and the success the same year of American Sniper, the
biopic about the late Chris Kyle, co-founder of the mercenary contractor Craft International, a
new crop of network and cable TV military dramas came on the scene last year,
including the History Channel's Six, NBC's The Brave, Seal
Team from CBS (9), as well as National Geographic's mini-series, The Long Road Home
(10).
In these
programs, typical of the genre, there are customary threads of boredom trading
with fear, frustration with military bureaucracy and corruption (a reliable
narrative evasion from confronting the underlying legitimacy of global
hegenomy), punctuated by an Odyssean longing for loved ones and the comforting
familiarity of even the most prosaic conveniences and commonplaces of the
stateside life civilians take for granted, while the protagonists risk their
lives in thwarting regional opposition the world over.
All the
more unsettling because it is directly based in fact, the eight-part National
Geographic effort from ABC News journalist Martha Raddatz's account of a 2004
ambush near Sadr City, Iraq costing the lives of eight US soldiers (wounding 65), however, stakes a semi-totalitarian equivalence between the sanctity of family with
military affiliations, almost giving
voice to Johnson's "Coming Home" through a quiet, homey moment between a father and son, wherein Dad explains to his child that, in essence, his platoon mates constitute a second family, whom he has to go to Iraq to support.
While the profound bonds shared by soldiers in active duty are
undeniable, it’s also hard to ignore the visceral warning of where such competing
obligations could lead, as exemplified in
Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare's first (and most brutal) tragedy set in an
historical composite of pivotal events covering the Roman era (not to mention a personal favorite of
former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, who executive produced a futuristic film version [11]). In its unflinching depiction of the titular Roman general, we see the folly of how his conditioned allegiance to his decadent emperor and a flagging empire override his
loyalty to his family, in the end, costing the lives of almost all of his 25 conscripted
sons and resulting in rape and mutilation for Lavinia, his one daughter.
Martialization
Of Romance
For those
still single, the recent fad of returning service men proposing in crowded
sports arenas to cheerleader girlfriends readily serves. Here, the attempted merging of
military devotion with civilian custom and relationships is more overt and
aggressive, given the long-standing utility of professional and college sports
as a means of nationalistic conditioning of the populace toward a simplistic,
polar perception of multi-layered political and foreign policy
issues.
In the case
of airman Travis Ross and Houston Rockets Power Dancer Casey Potter, however, a
two-dimensional idealization of gender identity is also being projected.
Secretly returned from active duty in 2017, Ross snuck onto the basketball
court as part of a prank pulled on his future wife during the half-time show,
wearing camo coveralls and bearing an  |
| Venus and Mars symbols--stylized pictograms of a woman's mirror and a soldier's shield with spear |
Now, an
innocuously romantic comparison might be drawn with teenage couples christened
King and Queen of their senior proms every year in high schools across the
country (and one wonders if this is, indeed, one of the comparisons meant to be
invoked), but considering we are talking about adults in this example, among
others, these gushingly-covered episodes nevertheless come off as somewhat demeaning
by comparison, not to mention potentially doubly coercive for the prospective
(or "targeted") bride—it's one thing to receive a marriage proposal in a public
space like a crowded elevator; who would dare spurn an active-duty GI's appeal,
projected to hundreds via Jumbotron (Military1.com's coverage of Air Force
Captain Eric Straub's own dramatic proposal to his cheerleader girlfriend
during a 2014 Arizona Cardinals football game pointedly credits the officer, as
a 2010 graduate of the Air Force Academy, for "apparently gain[ing] enough
intelligence before the mission to ensure its success" [13])?
Conclusion
The
catabolizing contradiction of extended wars of aggression has always stipulated
one way or another that other nations and cultures must be subjugated in order
to preserve „our way of life“--even as the vicious gouging of the very things
that help define it (civil liberties, education, labor rights, health care and
more)--are sacrificed to perpetuate terminal conflicts.
However
long that may be, it behooves us to be alert, to critique and challenge
changes to that which define our universal humanity--be it love,
filialism, friendship, conviction); for such things, there is never too little time.
--Rolf Maurer
___
2.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/09/29/man-who-found-boston-marathon-bomber-has-died/gptc5fZNG7C8yLBWbJvr4N/story.html
3.
https://www.inquisitr.com/631020/brookline-cop-delivers-milk-to-boston-family-during-manhunt-photo/
4.
stamford-downtown.com/events/timeless-the-works-of-seward-johnson/#.W2ZEJvZFzmQ
5.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/air-force-mom-surprises-son-13-basketball-game-article-1.1583543#
6.
https://www.inspiremore.com/mascot-military-mom/
7.
https://www.militarytimes.com/veterans/2016/07/07/new-va-study-finds-20-veterans-commit-suicide-each-day/
8.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alloy_Entertainment
9.
11.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/11/29/titus-in-space/
--Rolf Maurer
___
Sources:
2.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/09/29/man-who-found-boston-marathon-bomber-has-died/gptc5fZNG7C8yLBWbJvr4N/story.html
3.
https://www.inquisitr.com/631020/brookline-cop-delivers-milk-to-boston-family-during-manhunt-photo/
4.
stamford-downtown.com/events/timeless-the-works-of-seward-johnson/#.W2ZEJvZFzmQ
5.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/air-force-mom-surprises-son-13-basketball-game-article-1.1583543#
https://q13fox.com/2013/02/08/returning-military-dad-surprises-daughter-in-class/
