A Seven-Step Program to Return America to a Quieter, Less Muscular, Patriotism

Cross-posted with Tomdispatch.com .

I have a few confessions to make: After almost eight years of off-and-on war in Afghanistan and after more than six years of mayhem and death since "Mission Accomplished" was declared in Operation Iraqi Freedom, I'm tired of seeing simpleminded magnetic ribbons on vehicles telling me, a 20-year military veteran, to support or pray for our troops. As a Christian, I find it presumptuous to see ribbons shaped like fish, with an American flag as a tail, informing me that God blesses our troops. I'm underwhelmed by gigantic American flags -- up to 100 feet by 300 feet -- repeatedly being unfurled in our sports arenas, as if our love of country is greater when our flags are bigger. I'm disturbed by nuclear-strike bombers soaring over stadiums filled with children, as one did in July just as the National Anthem ended during this year's Major League Baseball All Star game. Instead of oohing and aahing at our destructive might, I was quietly horrified at its looming presence during a family event.

We've recently come through the steroid era in baseball with all those muscled up players and jacked up stats. Now that players are tested randomly, home runs are down and muscles don't stretch uniforms quite as tightly. Yet while ending the steroid era in baseball proved reasonably straightforward once the will to act was present, we as a country have yet to face, no less curtail, our ongoing steroidal celebrations of pumped-up patriotism.

It's high time we ended the post-Vietnam obsession with Rambo's rippling pecs as well as the jaw-dropping technological firepower of the recent cinematic version of G.I. Joe and return to the resolute, undemonstrative strength that Gary Cooper showed in movies like High Noon.

In the HBO series The Sopranos, Tony (played by James Gandolfini) struggles with his own vulnerability -- panic attacks caused by stress that his Mafia rivals would interpret as fatal signs of weakness. Lamenting his emotional frailty, Tony asks, "Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?" Whatever happened, in other words, to quiet, unemotive Americans who went about their business without fanfare, without swagger, but with firmness and no lack of controlled anger at the right time?

Tony's question is a good one, but I'd like to spin it differently: Why did we allow lanky American citizen-soldiers and true heroes like World War I Sergeant Alvin York (played, at York's insistence, by Gary Cooper) and World War II Sergeant (later, first lieutenant) Audie Murphy (played in the film To Hell and Back, famously, by himself) to be replaced by all those post-Vietnam pumped up Hollywood "warriors," with Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger-style abs and egos to match?

And far more important than how we got here, how can we end our enduring fascination with a puffed up, comic-book-style militarism that seems to have stepped directly out of screen fantasy and into our all-too-real lives?

A Seven-Step Recovery Program

As a society, we've become so addicted to militarism that we don't even notice the way it surrounds us or the spasms of societal 'roid rage that go with it. The fact is, we need a detox program. At the risk of incurring some of that 'roid rage myself, let me suggest a seven-step program that could help return us to the saner days of Gary Cooper:

1. Baseball players on steroids swing for the fences. So does a steroidal country. When you have an immense military establishment, your answer to trouble is likely to be overwhelming force, including sending troops into harm's way. To rein in our steroidal version of militarism, we should stop bulking up our military ranks, as is now happening, and shrink them instead. Our military needs not more muscle supplements (or the budgetary version of the same), but far fewer.

2. It's time to stop deferring to our generals, and even to their commander-in-chief. They're ours, after all; we're not theirs. When President Obama says Afghanistan is not a war of choice but of necessity, we shouldn't hesitate to point out that the emperor has no clothes. Yet when it comes to tough questioning of the president's generals, Congress now seems eternally supine. Senators and representatives are invariably too busy falling all over themselves praising our troops and their commanders, too worried that "tough" questioning will appear unpatriotic to the folks back home, or too connected to military contractors in their districts, or some combination of the three.

Here's something we should all keep in mind: generals have no monopoly on military insight. What they have a monopoly on is a no-lose situation. If things go well, they get credit; if they go badly, we do. Retired five-star general Omar Bradley was typical when he visited Vietnam in 1967 and declared: "I am convinced that this is a war at the right place, at the right time and with the right enemy -- the Communists." North Vietnam's only hope for victory, he insisted, was "to hang on in the expectation that the American public, inadequately informed about the true situation and sickened by the loss in lives and money, will force the United States to give up and pull out."

There we have it: A classic statement of the belief that when our military loses a war, it's always the fault of "we the people." Paradoxically, such insidious myths gain credibility not because we the people are too forceful in our criticism of the military, but because we are too deferential.

3. It's time to redefine what "support our troops" really means. We console ourselves with the belief that all our troops are volunteers, who freely signed on for repeated tours of duty in forever wars. But are our troops truly volunteers? Didn't we recruit them using multi-million dollar ad campaigns and lures of every sort? Are we not, in effect, running a poverty and recession draft? Isolated in middle- or upper-class comfort, detached from our wars and their burdens, have we not, in a sense, recruited a "foreign legion" to do our bidding?

If you're looking for a clear sign of a militarized society -- which few Americans are -- a good place to start is with troop veneration. The cult of the soldier often covers up a variety of sins. It helps, among other things, hide the true costs of, and often the futility of, the wars being fought. At an extreme, as the war began to turn dramatically against Nazi Germany in 1943, Germans who attempted to protest Hitler's failed strategy and the catastrophic costs of his war were accused of (and usually executed for) betraying the troops at the front.

The United States is not a totalitarian state, so surely we can hazard criticisms of our wars and even occasionally of the behavior of some of our troops, without facing charges of stabbing our troops in the back and aiding the enemy. Or can we?

4. Let's see the military for what it is: a blunt instrument of force. It's neither surgical nor precise nor predictable. What Shakespeare wrote 400 years ago remains true: when wars start, havoc is unleashed, and the dogs of war run wild -- in our case, not just the professional but the "mercenary" dogs of war, those private contractors to the Pentagon that thrive on the rich spoils of modern warfare in distant lands. It's time to recognize that we rely ever more massively to prosecute our wars on companies that profit ever more handsomely the longer they last.

5. Let's not blindly venerate the serving soldier, while forgetting our veterans when they doff their spiffy uniforms for the last time. It's easy to celebrate our clean-cut men and women in uniform when they're thousands of miles from home, far tougher to lend a hand to scruffier, embittered veterans suffering from the physical and emotional trauma of the battle zones to which they were consigned, usually for multiple tours of duty.

6. I like air shows, but how about -- as a first tiny step toward demilitarizing civilian life -- banning all flyovers of sporting events by modern combat aircraft? War is not a sport, and it shouldn't be a thrill.

7. I love our flag. I keep my father's casket flag in a special display case next to the very desk on which I'm writing this piece. It reminds me of his decades of service as a soldier and firefighter. But I don't need humongous stadium flags or, for that matter, tiny flag lapel pins to prove my patriotism -- and neither should you. In fact, doesn't the endless post-9/11 public proliferation of flags in every size imaginable suggest a certain fanaticism bordering on desperation? If we saw such displays in other countries, our descriptions wouldn't be kindly.

Of course, none of this is likely to be easy as long as this country garrisons the planet and fights open-ended wars on its global frontiers. The largest step, the eighth one, would be to begin seriously downsizing that mission. In the meantime, we shouldn't need reminding that this country was originally founded as a civilian society, not a militarized one. Indeed, the revolt of the 13 colonies against the King of England was sparked, in part, by the perceived tyranny of forced quartering of British troops in colonial homes, the heavy hand of an "occupation" army, and taxation that we were told went for our own defense, whether we wanted to be defended or not.

If Americans are going to continue to hold so-called tea parties, shouldn't some of them be directed against the militarization of our country and an enormous tax burden fed in part by our wasteful, trillion-dollar wars?

Modest as it may seem, my seven-step recovery program won't be easy for many of us to follow. After all, let's face it, we've come to enjoy our peculiar brand of muscular patriotism and the macho militarism that goes with it. In fact, we revel in it. Outwardly, the result is quite an impressive show. We look confident and ripped and strong. But it's increasingly clear that our outward swagger conceals an inner desperation. If we're so strong, one might ask, why do we need so much steroidal piety, so many in-your-face patriotic props, and so much parade-ground conformity?

Forget Rambo and action-picture G.I. Joes: Give me the steady hand, the undemonstrative strength, and the quiet humility of Alvin York, Audie Murphy -- and Gary Cooper.

William Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), is a TomDispatch regular. He teaches History at the Pennsylvania College of Technology and can be reached at [e-mail].

Copyright 2009 William J. Astore

 

 

Comments

[johnsopinion]

Sir, I give to you all of the blessings that are mine to give.

Sincerely- 'Thank you.'

[been2there]

Real patriotism always requires strength, especially when facing a weakness. The chicken-hawk metality is diametrically opposed to real patriotism, which puts our country's welfare before our person wants. Chicken-hawks want to feel big and powerful, but do not have the moral fortitude; they try to substitute the blood of other people's children for their own spines.
As a patriot, I do bless (as much as I can) our troops; I also urge their immediate withdrawal from theaters they should never have been deployed in.
And, yes, I have a personal stake. My son is in Iraq.

[RRonin]

"Those who wear their patriotism on their sleeve usually have very little left inside." - Vincent Bugliosi

I heard that pithy observation many years ago and it has stuck in my head ever since. I remember the "flag race" following September 11. When cars flying a flag became ubiquitous, you started seeing cars flying TWO flags. Then when you saw a lot of cars flying two flags, the TWO flags got BIGGER and BIGGER. The end result was a lot of flag "corpses" strewn along the freeways. What a way to treat Old Glory.

[Chuck Lovell]

OK, I find it a bit judgmental to say that people who show their patriotism by displaying the American flag are faux patriots. There have always been people who have displayed the flag. Nobody on the right holds any negative views about those who display the flag.

It has been a fact for ages that the left really doesn't care for any kind of patriotism. You all hold a more "world" view and look down on those who love their country. I posted on Digg that I thought America was the greatest country in the world. Pretty much was buried beyond belief.. I really think you guys just really think you are showing the rest of the world how above it you are. You are the enlightened ones. You side against family members in a neighborhood disagreement so your neighbors will think you are fair. It doesn't even matter if your family is right. It is the appearance of unbiased that you are after.

And Aaror, buying a Prius is not going to stop terrorism. How do you explain all the world terrorism coming out of the middle east before cars? When you blame America for terrorism how do you explain the terrorism before America existed? When you only find fault with your country then you are no better than those who only find fault with others. But then again, you guys see America as the terrorists.

[Rogan]

You're doing your job wrong. You're supposed to stick to the topic pretty closely, because when you start bringing in off-topic talking points, it becomes rapidly obvious that you're a trained shill, and most of us assume you aren't smart enough to get yourself paid for that work, making errors in process like that.

Don't make me report you to that RNC cut-out you're auditioning for...

[Denman59]

Excellent essay; thoughtful comments from readers.

Weren't sunshine patriots also called "summer soldiers"?

[Aaror]

First, I should admit that I am in the military, so perhaps I have a conflict of interest, that said:
1. We spend more on the Military than we spend on highways, Justice, Homeland Security, Agriculture, well, heck, this list is getting long. If you take out social security, medicare, and unemployment insurance (all paid by dedicated funds), the military is more than half of what is left. If we had no military, we would not have had a deficit in my lifetime.
Of that spending, over half goes to "research and development," and "aquisitions." In other words, if we stopped worrying about being the most technologically advanced force, and halved that spending, we would only be spending more on R&D than the rest of the world combined. We would then save about what we spend each year on interest on the national debt.
2. We are fighting people who are funded by oil. If you drive a big vehicle, especially a pick up truck, and have those little flags sticking up from your side windows reducing your fuel economy, you are not supporting the troops, no matter how many stickers you put on your bumper. Sell the truck and buy a prius if you want to support the war effort. Every Hummer pays for an IED, think about that next time you pass one of their dealerships.

[Rogan]

You're so right in every point.

[KungFuFan]

When I read this it immediately made me think of the relatively new story of Heather Lawrence in Florida who accosted a fellow high school student for wearing a hajib. She's in ROTC and can't wait to get over to the Middle East to kick some butt. A girl on racial roid rage. Here's what I think. I believe, the root of Heather's racial hatred is our continuing wars in the Middle East. As long as America is fighting over there, the young, inexperienced and uneducated will fight over here. Our mility men and women are brainwashed to think of "the enemy" as less than human so that when the time comes they will kill them. I voted for Obama because he promised to get our troops out of the Middle East, and he has not fulfilled this promise. In an indirect way, this perpetuates racism toward those of Middle Eastern descent. How about if we all evolve and stop thinking if we just kill all those ethnic groups we don't like, or, if we enslave them, that we'll be happy. We won't be happy until we all work together to find ways to produce resources for us all that will not hurt us or the earth. We need to take a national valium, a deep breath, and quit letting the Military Industrial Complex lead us around by the nose. I won't be voting for Obama next election cycle if he doesn't get us out of the Middle East.

[larry278]

It continues to amaze this peace time veteran about the faux patriotism of life long feather merchant, REMF's. The display of extremely large American flags & covering their vehicles with faux symbols of support of GI's on active duty is the refuge & a kind of cammo for those who won't risk military service.
These people spring from ancestors who threw away & ignored the veterans who returned from Korea & 'Nam. I find discarding a generation of combat veteran like trash to be an obscene waste. These individuals were called sunshine patriots in late 18th & early 19th America.