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

Escape From Freedom [1941] of citizens' self-driven furtherance of imposed regressive changes in open societies) takes advantage of peer sentiment to normatize perpetual foreign conflict and rolling military service in the minds of a post-9/11 generation which has never had the chance to know anything else.

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

Implicit in Max is the seriously warped message that to grow up means not so much graduating from wayward self-indulgence to thinking and acting responsibly in consideration of oneself and others, but to submit unquestioningly to state authority, without weighing individual responsibility of the greater human cost; at first blush, a rather pious prescription from Alloy (a Warner Brothers subsidiary [8]), which previously created the narcissistic teen fiction line Gossip Girl by Cecily von Ziegesar (later a series on CW, also Warner's), yet largely in keeping with the Mars/Venus stereotypes embodied by the spat of recent playing field marriage proposals to be discussed later.

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 engagement ring while kneeling before Potter--

Venus and Mars symbols--stylized
pictograms of a woman's mirror
and a soldier's shield with spear

in a sense, defined by a uniform of her own (12), instilling in both the rest of the dancers and a packed stadium an inflexible, almost archetypally sexualized perception of what constitutes the ultimate American couple—the groom as stalwart Warrior, the bride as comely Maiden.

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.

So, in response, a complex of useful substitutions for (or diversions from) social values and commonplaces, be it manipulative media, or public stunts that cheapen honest affection and purpose, emerge as cynical palliatives, for as long as the collapse drags out.

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

___

Sources:

1. https://www.longislandpress.com/2013/05/14/u-s-military-power-grab-goes-into-effect/

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/

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. https://deadline.com/2017/05/the-brave-seal-team-valor-trend-patriotic-dramas-military-heroes-upfronts-1202093571/

10. https://www.npr.org/2017/11/02/561334010/sadr-city-attack-on-u-s-troops-retold-in-the-long-road-home

11. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/11/29/titus-in-space/

12. https://thejewelerblog.wordpress.com/2017/04/10/returning-airman-proposes-to-blindfolded-rockets-dancer-during-halftime-stunt/

13. https://www.military1.com/air-force/article/539167-airman-brings-cardinals-cheerleaders-to-tears-with-marriage-proposal/

Thursday, September 6, 2018

"When Eden Was So Near“: The Surrender Of Love and Filialism To Imperial Fealty