Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines, Human Rights, North America

BOOKS-US: G.I. Joe&#39s Midlife Crisis

Daniel Luban

WASHINGTON, Sep 28 2007 (IPS) - When George W. Bush made an instantly-famous speech last month that used the legacy of Vietnam to justify a continued U.S. presence in Iraq, it marked the completion of a rhetorical journey that few would have anticipated six years earlier.

In the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks, Pearl Harbour was the dominant analogy on most U.S. citizens&#39 minds. Sep. 11 was, as many newspaper headlines had it, a "new day of infamy", and President Bush&#39s speeches were appropriately full of Churchillian echoes.

Many people here confessed to a certain degree of exhilaration at the prospect of a return from years of torpor to the clarity of World War II, the war that had marked the height of the U.S.&#39s moral confidence and military success.

But as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated, Vietnam has replaced World War II as the dominant analogy for U.S. foreign policy, so much so that President Bush felt the need to reclaim Vietnam for his own side in his Aug. 22 speech.

As Tom Engelhardt makes clear in his provocative and insightful book "The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation" (University of Massachusetts, 2007), this rhetorical journey merely recapitulated in brief the journey of the broader U.S. culture in the years following World War II.

In the book, which was originally published in 1995 but has been newly revised and re-released to take account of events since 9/11, Engelhardt charts the painful dissolution of the U.S. triumphalist myth during the Cold War.


This myth, Engelhardt argues, is what enabled the United States&#39s westward expansion and rise from colony to superpower, allowing the self-identified underdog settlers to expropriate and kill off the continent&#39s native inhabitants with a clean conscience.

In the foundational story of this "victory culture", the brutality of the Indians at the beginning of the drama – epitomised by the sneak attack on the helpless wagon train – justified their inevitable slaughter by the cowboys at the end.

The Western story also proved easily adaptable to the war story. Nowhere was this more true than in World War II, in which the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor seemed to prefigure and justify the subsequent slaughter of the Japanese by U.S. bombers. Together, the western and the war story were recapitulated in endless movies, television shows, and children&#39s games, forming the core of the U.S.&#39s patriotic self-conception.

Yet just as the U.S. triumphalist myth reached its apex in 1945, Engelhardt argues, it began to fall apart. Key to this was the atomic bomb, which threatened to turn victory into an annihilation scenario scarcely different from defeat. In response, the U.S. turned to "limited warfare," which ended not with a cathartic victory but with a bewildering and often unsatisfying political settlement.

Further undermining victory culture was the Cold War shift from a racial enemy to an ideological one. Communist agents were not outwardly identifiable, so the country&#39s self-proclaimed defenders also went underground, and the new war for the fate of the world was largely waged covertly.

The paranoia engendered by the Cold War undermined the circle-the-wagons mentality of the original victory culture, and Engelhardt traces this new culture of suspicion in manifestations ranging from McCarthyism to the irreverent "MAD" magazine and the early 1960s surreal television show "The Twilight Zone."

But it was above all Vietnam, Engelhardt argues, that served as the "graveyard" of U.S. victory culture by inverting many of the comforting dualities of the triumphalist myth.

The outnumbered cowboys always managed to slaughter the Indians at the end, but this time the lopsided slaughter of the Vietnamese failed to produce victory, and the tenacity of the Vietnamese made them seem to be the true underdogs. And at My Lai, it was no longer the Indians but U.S. soldiers who brutalised helpless women and children.

Vietnam also made it difficult to circle the wagons. At the front, there were "our" Vietnamese and "their" Vietnamese, who were not easily distinguishable, and at home, the rise of the counterculture presented the U.S. with white youths from middle-class backgrounds who had seemingly gone over to the enemy.

As ever-mounting enemy body counts failed to produce the promised victory, the U.S. withdrew and the myth of U.S. invincibility was punctured.

The post-Vietnam years saw popular culture undergo several changes. There were certainly explicit attempts to revive and update the triumphalist myth for the post-Vietnam era – think the ultra-violent "Rambo" film series.

But increasingly, sheer spectacle came to replace any coherent sense of identity. G.I. Joe no longer fought the Japanese, but the racially indistinct and ideologically vacuous COBRA terrorist organisation; the "real American hero" could now only be distinguished from his nemesis by the backstory on the toy packaging.

And this emphasis on spectacle over story, Engelhardt argues, was carried into warfare, bringing the world television-friendly and seemingly bloodless displays of firepower like the first Gulf War.

Engelhardt&#39s account of events up through the mid-1990s remains as insightful as when it was first published, but readers will likely be especially interested in his opinion of the last six years.

After all, it was precisely this history – the story of the U.S.&#39s Cold War disillusionment with its founding myth – that 9/11 supposedly made irrelevant. Many on both the right and left have claimed that 9/11 made it possible to resurrect the victory culture and turn the clocks back to 1941.

Unsurprisingly, Engelhardt does not agree. In a short afterword focusing on the last six years, he takes some shots at the Bush administration that are on-target if a tad predictable. References to Bush&#39s "cowboy presidency", which have become familiar to the point of triteness, do take on new resonance given Engelhardt&#39s thorough and thoughtful exploration of the cowboys-and-Indians theme throughout the book.

The afterword also notes the short shelf life of the post-9/11 resurgence of victory culture, and argues that the rise of a vastly expanded and increasingly omnivorous media has made any attempt at a coherent victory culture impossible.

On this point, Engelhardt takes issue with the conventional wisdom that the U.S.&#39s post-9/11 groundswell of patriotism was squashed only by the Bush administration&#39s bungled execution of the Iraq war. In his view, even a completely successful war would have been unable to reverse the fundamental dissolution of the triumphalist myth over the past 60 years.

If readers finish "The End of Victory Culture" with a complaint, it will likely be that the treatment of victory culture in the post-9/11 era – a subject that might merit a book in itself – does not receive enough attention. Even if one agrees with Engelhardt that there is no future for the new triumphalism, its content still rewards a fuller discussion.

One striking feature of the new victory culture, for instance, is its remarkable historical narrowness. The cowboys-and-Indians mythos now seems too explicitly racist and imperialist for a world in which U.S. troops ostensibly fight to liberate the natives of the frontier rather than expropriate them, and as a result World War II has become virtually the only point of reference for hawkish commentators.

Another defining feature of post-Vietnam victory culture from "Rambo" on down has been its reorientation around the "stab in the back" myth. For today&#39s hawks, the heroic soldiers must triumph, above all, over subversives at home, and the real frontier to be conquered is the U.S. will.

 
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