The Big Dick School of
American Patriotism And What We Make of It
By Nan Levinson
Let’s face it: we live in a
state of pervasive national security
anxiety. There are various possible
responses to this low-grade fever that saps
resolve, but first we have to face the basis
for that anxiety -- what I’ve come to think
of as the Big Dick School of Patriotism, or
(since anything having to do with our
present version of national security, even a
critique of it, has to have an acronym) the
BDSP.
The BDSP is based on a
bedrock belief in how America should work:
that the only strength that really matters
is military and that a great country is one
with the capacity to beat the bejesus out of
everyone else. Think of it as a military
version of 50 Shades of Grey, with
the same frisson of control and
submission (for the American citizen) and
the assumption that a good portion of the
world is ripe to be bullied.
The BDSP is good
citizenship conflated with JROTC, hosannas
to sniper kills, the Pentagon’s
commemoration of the 50th anniversary of
the Vietnam War -- what are we
celebrating there anyway? --
Rudolph Giuliani pining for a president
who loves America in Reaganesque fashion,
and the organizers of South Boston’s St.
Patrick’s Day, who wouldn’t let the
local chapter of Veterans For Peace
march with their banners because, so the
story goes, they didn’t want the word
“peace” associated with veterans.
Of course, the Big Dick
School of Patriotism isn’t new --
revolutionary roots, manifest destiny,
history as the great pounding of hooves
across the plain, and all that. Nor is it
uniquely American, even if there is
something culturally specific about our form
of national hubris on steroids. Still, there
have been times in our history when
civilians -- some in power, some drawing
strength from numbers -- have pushed back
against the military and its mystique, or at
least have demanded an accounting of its
deeds. And of course, until the Cold War
bled into 9/11, there was no national
security state on the present gargantuan
scale to deal with.
As he was leaving office,
President Dwight D.
Eisenhower
famously warned against the overweening
power of what he called “the
military-industrial complex.” As a senator,
J. William Fulbright similarly
warned of “the arrogance of [American]
power” and used his Foreign Relations
Committee chairmanship to challenge the
Vietnam War -- whereupon Fred Friendly,
president of CBS News, got that network’s
executives to agree to preempt “Captain
Kangaroo” and cover those hearings live.
On the populist side,
there was General Smedley Butler, who
campaigned against the military in his
retirement, the Bonus Marchers of Great
Depression Washington, and of course the
massive antiwar resistance and
remarkable insubordination of American
soldiers during the Vietnam War. Similarly,
some soldiers from the all-volunteer force
of our era worked to undermine the U.S.
occupation of Iraq in various (though far
less pervasive) ways, including conducting
“search and avoid missions” in which they
would park, hang out, and falsely report
that they were searching for weapons caches.
These days, no one in
America directly takes on the military. Not
the president, who just
requested $534 billion for the new
Pentagon budget, plus an additional $51
billion for supplemental war funding. Not
Congress, where the
range of debate over an “authorization”
of war in Iraq and Syria goes from “hawks,”
who want assurances that we’ll blow ISIS to
oblivion by any means, to
“doves,” who want assurances that there will
be no “boots on the ground” while we blow
ISIS into oblivion. Certainly not the
courts, which, among other things, have
consistently refused to let military
objectors invoke their right to disobey
illegal orders. And not American citizens
who are now well trained to spend their time
thanking their all-volunteer warriors
for their sacrifices before turning back to
the business of everyday life.
It seems to matter little
to anyone that, since 9/11, what is supposed
to be the greatest fighting force in the
world has been stymied by modestly armed
insurgencies -- in response to which we keep
buying our military yet newer props like the
wildly overpriced,
over-touted, and underachieving F-35
fighter plane, and sending them back to
clean up the very messes they helped produce
not so long before. There never seem to be
any consequences to this repetitive course
of action. Well, none if you don’t count the
squandering of whatever political capital
this country had after 9/11, or the way a
million or so veterans
injured in Iraq and Afghanistan will
require costly care for the rest of their
lives, or the billions spent on war rather
than the environment, infrastructure,
education, or [fill in your favorite civic
need here].
Okay, it’s true that a
tiny crew of largely overlooked politicians
like Jim McGovern of Massachusetts and
Barbara Lee of California did
try to limit war funding; that Obama did
finally resist calls for invading Syria
(before he began bombing it); and that the
Supreme Court did rule that the
Stolen Valor Act of 2005, which
criminalized lying about military awards,
was unconstitutional.
But how much attention
gets paid to all that? Massively less than
to the glories of American Sniper.
Or to Commander-in-Chief Obama
reassuring soldiers that, regardless of
race, creed, class, religion, or whom we
choose to love, “when it comes to our
troops, when it comes to you and your
families, as Americans we stand united. We
are proud of you. We support you. And we can
never thank you enough.”
And why would anyone with
political ambitions claim otherwise when
there’s no gain, no glory in it? After all,
the American public may be
weary of war, but a
widely-cited annual poll found a
majority of them in favor of taking on ISIS,
even if it embroils us in a big-dick war in
Syria.
Making the
Military into a Clique
So what gives? How do you
explain an America in which, despite the
disastrous record of the U.S. military
these last 13 years and the growth of
extremist Islamic groups in the same period,
there is essentially no pushback in this
country. One obvious answer is that it’s
easy to keep valorizing the military when
you have nothing to do with it. That big,
busy, well-funded world-unto-itself
currently includes less than 1% of the
population. Add in their families and the
civilians who work on or near military bases
(or in the
Pentagon) and, as a rough estimate,
perhaps you have something in the vicinity
of 5% of Americans who interact with the
military on a regular basis. For the other
95% or so, the rest of us, what that
military does, especially in distant lands,
is just a blip on the busy-busy screen of
our consciousness. Yet the further we get
from the military, the more beguiled we are
by it.
It helps, of course, that
young Americans don’t have to worry about
being drafted against their wishes. The last
citizen was drafted in 1973 and, despite
calls in these years for the reinstatement
of conscription, no one in the BDSP seems in
any hurry to do so. “One lesson learned from
Vietnam,” the father of a Marine told me,
“is if you’re going to start a war, don’t
even pretend to threaten the sons and
daughters of the upper middle class and the
rich.”
It isn’t just the absence
of threat that distances the public from
American war making, however. It’s also the
inbred nature of the military itself. In
the Vietnam years, when about one-third of
the troops who fought were conscripts, all
soldiers spent a year “in-country.” This
meant individuals rotated in and out of the
war zone at different times rather than as
intact units, and soldiers circulated back
into civil society regularly. This was
certainly good for civil society -- we heard
about the war directly from the people
fighting it -- but it wasn’t so great for
the armed forces.
So when the change came to
an all-volunteer service, the military made
a point of training and deploying units
together to increase cohesion. And cohere
they do, from a long, grueling period of
training and indoctrination through an
all-encompassing military world in which you
live, work, and play with the same people
24/7 to the secret handshake of shared
jargon and experience that is meant to bond
you for life.
Not coincidentally, this
makes dissent within the military ever less
likely. A number of soldiers and marines
have told me over the years that they
deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan with their
units despite misgivings about the wars they
were to fight because, if they hadn’t,
someone else -- usually someone they knew --
would have had to go in their stead. The
result of all this cohesion is the sort of
cliquishness that would make a 13-year-old
whispering in a school cafeteria blush. I’d
guess that it also makes politicians who
aren’t fully enrolled members of the BDSP
leery of challenging the military on what
may be matters of life and death. It
certainly leaves the citizenry in that
position.
Yet separate from us as
those soldiers may be, they’re still our
troops, our movie heroes, and (I
suspect) our source of guilt,
because they fought our wars while we were
otherwise engaged. Contemporary war may be
sanitized for the American public and no
longer televised Vietnam-style, but all that
shaking of our heroes’ hands and wringing of
our own hands about their victimization
comes out of some sense of responsibility
sloughed off.
The Personnel Is
Political
A draft would certainly
make a difference in this increasingly
strange civilian-soldier nexus, but its
absence is hardly the only reason that
Americans now hold our armed forces
sacrosanct in a way that once would have
seemed foreign indeed. For starters, the
military functions as a powerful lobby in
Washington, which is increasingly effective
when it comes to reinforcing a hands-off
approach to its affairs and blocking outside
scrutiny. Take, for example, the
Military Justice Improvement Act of 2013.
It would have moved prosecution of
felony-level sexual assault cases from the
military chain of command, which controls
most aspects of an enlistee’s life, to
independent military prosecutors. Trust us,
insisted the top brass, we can police
ourselves, never mind that one in five
servicewomen reported unwanted sexual
contact and 25% of them
said the offender was someone in their
chain of command. The bill fell to a
filibuster in the Senate last year.
One strategy the military
employs in dealing with Congress is
something called “jointness.”
It’s a relatively recent coinage for
cross-service cooperation in research,
planning, procurement, and operations. While
it’s focused on increasing operational
flexibility and efficiency among branches of
the military, it’s also meant to heighten
intra-service collaboration when it comes to
lobbying for funding. (The stratagem of
awarding lucrative contracts in key
congressional districts of both parties
doesn’t hurt either.)
Although the Pentagon’s
budget has decreased in recent years, that
follows
enormous growth in the post-9/11 decade
-- as much as 40% in real terms between 2001
and 2012. The administration’s new budget
request is supposed to take into account the
end of two costly wars, yet it still exceeds
the $499 billion cap called for by
sequestration, and that base budget is only
part of what we’re spending overall on
American war-making.
When you’re a hammer, the
saying goes, everything looks like a nail.
And when
more than half of the federal
discretionary budget goes to the military,
every international problem looks like a job
for them. According to the
National Security Strategy report the
White House released in February, “Any
successful strategy to ensure the safety of
the American people and advance our national
security interests must begin with an
undeniable truth -- America must lead.” And
who will be, as they say, at the tip of the
spear? “Our military is postured globally to
protect our citizens and interests, preserve
regional stability, render humanitarian
assistance and disaster relief, and build
the capacity of our partners to join with us
in meeting security challenges.”
In other words, one
attitude that increasingly grips this
country is that, if it’s going to be done at
all, it’s probably going to be done by the
military. It has been sold to us as the
best, maybe the only functioning part of the
government. Not surprisingly, then, the most
recent annual
Gallup poll found that almost
three-quarters of those surveyed had “quite
a lot” or a “great deal” of confidence in
the military. Since 2001, that public
confidence has never fallen below 66%.
In touting “Toward
the Sounds of Chaos,” its most recent
recruiting campaign for the Marines, ad
agency J. Walter Thompson claims that
enlistment “provides an opportunity to face
down everything from traditional warfare to
the natural disasters that necessitate
highly organized humanitarian assistance.”
This spreading send-in-the-Marines mentality
-- one form of the post-9/11 BDSP way of
life -- keeps us from a reasonable
assessment of the best uses of our military
forces.
Last fall, for instance,
President Obama dispatched about 3,000 Army
personnel to Liberia to build and staff
treatment facilities for Ebola patients.
Once upon a time, the U.S. was quite capable
of mounting a genuine civilian humanitarian
relief mission. Now, if you’ve got thousands
of physically able workers on the payroll
with a job description that includes risk, I
suppose that deploying them to a disease
zone makes sense. Still, if you needed
hospitals built and staffed, wouldn’t it
make more sense to send in civilian
builders, nurses, and doctors?
Be Afraid, Very
Afraid
In truth, the Big Dick
School of Patriotism is invested in keeping
only one “branch” of government functional:
the U.S. military and the national security
state that goes with it, even as it trumpets
constant terrors and threats this country
must face.
The National Security
Strategy lists terrorism,
cyber-vulnerability, climate change, and
infectious diseases as rising threats to
global security. That’s a frightening enough
quartet and hardly a complete list of actual
dangers. Amid them, our headlines fill
regularly with “threats” that are
nightmarish, but soon dissolve like bad
dreams in the morning light. The latest,
from a video by the Somali terrorist
organization al-Shabab, was to the Mall of
America in Minnesota and, farfetched as it
was, the media and the political class ran
with it. I found the Mall of America pretty
scary on a regular shopping day, but such
endless threats and the hysteria that
surrounds them do make our self-protective
instincts kick in. Jeh Johnson, the head of
Homeland Security, even
warned mall-goers to be particularly
careful because, he said, “it's the
environment we’re in, frankly.”
Is it? It’s increasingly
hard to tell in BDSP America. Fear can be a
useful political tool because people who
believe they’re surrounded by enemies are
primed to accept almost anything. When you
feel you’re losing control, the response is
often to try to get more control, which is
part of the appeal of the BDSP crew, with
their exaltation of swarms of people in
uniforms equipped with tanks and guns.
When that swarm is
reputedly the best trained, most effective
military since the Roman Legions exited the
planet, that ought to be a lot of control.
Except, of course, that it isn’t. Or tell me
that things don’t seem more out of control
now than 13 years ago, after calamity rained
from the sky and the BDSP types whooshed in
to save us all.
The eternal emphasis on
militarism, even when it’s portrayed as
triumphalism, has the effect of ratcheting
up anxiety. Security is one of the basic
things a government owes its citizens, but
security is both a state of being and a
state of mind. If security is always at
issue, how can we ever feel safe?
In the end, maybe the Big
Dick School of Patriotism comes down to
this: we embrace the idea of an all-powerful
military because at a time when the world
seems such a fragile and hostile place, if
even our military won’t keep us safe, who
will?
Unless there just might be
a better way to go through the world than by
carrying a big dick?
Nan Levinson’s new
book,
War Is Not a Game: The New Antiwar Soldiers
and the Movement They Built
(Rutgers University Press),
is based on seven years she spent
not-quite-embedded with military-related
antiwar groups around the country. As a
freelance journalist, she writes about the
military, free speech, and other aspects of
civil liberties, culture, and technology.
She teaches journalism and fiction writing
at Tufts University.
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Copyright 2015 Nan
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