Barry
Stephenson
Wilfrid
Laurier University
In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the
wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization.
—Frederick Jackson Turner[2]
The war against this enemy is more than a military
conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century and the
calling of our generation.
—George
W. Bush[3]
The mythology of a nation is the intelligible mask of that
enigma called the “national character.”
—Richard Slotkin[4]
Abstract
The “war on terror” launched by the Bush administration in
the wake of 9/11 is disturbing for many reasons, not least of which is the
brutality with which this war has been carried out. A second feature of the
American response to 9/11 to draw fire both at home and abroad is the “cowboy”
swagger of President Bush and the Bush administration. A third point of
criticism argues that 9/11 offered the Bush administration the perfect excuse
to test the doctrine of “preemptive war” as a tool in the extension of American
control of territory rich in oil reserves. These three features of the war on
terror—its brutality, the cowboyism of the White House, and a context of
American empire—are interrelated phenomena, and they are the product, at
least in part, of the frontier myth that informs American popular culture and
civil religion. The rhetoric, visual, and performative culture of the Bush
Administration vis-à-vis the
contemporary war of terror has too many resemblances to earlier “wars on savagery”
to ignore. There is a new frontier to be conquered, and the Bush administration
overtly mythologizes, ritualizes, frames, and sells this new “war” with
reference to an earlier one, namely, the Indian wars.
[1] In 1630, John Winthrop,
standing on the deck of the Arbella anchored off the coast of Massachusetts,
delivered his famous “city on a hill” sermon. Puritan culture bequeathed to the
emerging nation a theologically and biblically inspired vision: the New World
was to be a New Israel. The Puritan Saints, as God’s chosen people, would bring
light to the “wilderness.” The language changed over the years and centuries,
but the fundamental vision did not. The “light unto the world motif” has long
been used to bridge religious and political spheres in American public
discourse. The country has persistently been imagined as a “Redeemer Nation,”
while simultaneously pursuing policies of territorial expansion.[5]
[2] In
the wake of the horrors of 9/11, as the Bush administration made ready for and
then invaded Iraq, the old Puritan themes of providential mission emerged, and
the President’s “God-talk” became the
object of a good deal of critical scrutiny. What journalist Jim Wallis
claimed in Sojourners—that after
9/11 President Bush, “the self-help Methodist … became a messianic Calvinist
prompting America’s mission to ‘rid the world of evil’”[6]—Bruce
Lincoln has thoroughly argued.[7] Mr. Bush’s
theology can be characterized as neo-Calvinist, with roots reaching back to the
Puritan vision for the New World.
[3] In this article, I want to add
another dimension to the discussion of the religious dimensions of the war on
terror: the intersection of civil religion and popular culture in the form of
the Myth of the Frontier.[8] If Puritan
theology laid the groundwork for the articulation of American exceptionalism, it
was their “histories” of Indian wars that provided the raw material for an
incipient national mythology.[9] In
tracking the relations between religion and the war on terror, the work of a
good mythographer[10] is as valuable as theological acuity,
the President’s “cowboy-talk” as relevant as his “God-talk.”
The
Myth of the Frontier
[4] By
mythology I mean a culturally important narrative or set of narratives
that establish convictions concerning fundamental conceptions of the world and
values of human existence. Myths constellate deep
emotions. When living, myths condense and encode the beliefs and values of a
people. Myths can unify, but they may also be the stories around which social
groups contest meaning. They may be codified (in doctrine or laws) but they
require vivid images, characters, performances, stories, and extraordinary
events and places to give them their metaphorical power. In American culture,
the “Myth of the Frontier” is arguably the longest-lived of American myths,
with its origins in the colonial period and a powerful presence in contemporary
culture. Although the Myth of the Frontier is only one of the operative
myth/ideological systems that form American culture, it is an extremely important
and persistent one.”[11]
[5] In Europe and America during
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, state nationalisms began to take on
the role of traditional forms of religion.[12] Narratives (myths),
monumental buildings and statuary (sacred places), legendary figures (gods and
heroes), charters and constitutions (sacred texts), public ceremonies (rituals),
and civic holidays (liturgical cycles) worked in unison to form the basis of a
collective set of beliefs, values, and identity structures directed at and
emanating from the nation. In part, these new nationally oriented identity and
belief structures were created by the state, but popular culture also played an
instrumental role. The study of popular culture
emerged in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Europe alongside and
contributing to the formation of the modern nation-state. As John Storey notes,
the ““discovery” of folk culture was an integral part of emerging European
nationalisms. The role of the actual folk—rural workers—was mainly
symbolic. … [F]olk culture [became] the very embodiment of the nature and
character of a nation.”[13]
[6] In
creating a symbolic framework through which to perceive and understand social
and historical processes in America, a few “actual folk”—frontiersmen, pioneers,
soldiers, Indian-fighters, cowboys, outlaws, banditos, and gunslingers—emerged
as the key symbolic figures in a national mythology. By the turn of the
twentieth century, the technological means and political and cultural networks
existed to produce and distribute alongside a growing public sphere a common
popular culture “capable of touching the lives and influencing the behavior of
communities in every part of the nation, and relating these disparate lives to
a set of central interest or concerns.”[14] Pockets of local and
regional folk cultures based primarily on ethnic, religious and labour
practices were overwhelmed by the images, narratives, and values communicated
through the mass media. Richard Slotkin argues that frontier stories and
the tales of the Indian wars and Wild West, by virtue of their repeated
retelling in this common space of modernist popular culture—especially in
the era of movies and television—rose to the level of collective myth.[15] Although they were not the only game in town, the frontier (or “wild west”) setting
and narrative was a favoured theme of the film and (later) television industries
well into the 1970s, the result being that the western genre gave shape to a
collectively shared set of beliefs and values about American history, character,
and mission in the world. To see the frontier myth at
work in the political rhetoric and performances of the Bush administration’s “war
on terror,” we need to understand some of its historical contexts and basic
features.
[7] In 1763, King George III issued the Proclamation Act, and a line was
drawn on a map and the land dotted with outposts from Quebec City to the north
Florida coast. This was the frontier line, a political and geographical
formalizing of the Anglo-European understanding (and symbolization) of their
experience since arrival in the Americas. To the east of this line was culture
and civilization, to the west, the terrors of Indian country. The line was not
to be crossed; of course, it was. The idea and experience of pushing the frontier
line west, opening up “Indian country” and making it safe for
settlers/colonists, informed both the popular imagination and national
ideology. The century following the Proclamation Act gave birth to the
legendary frontier figures of Daniel Boone and Davy Crocket, as well as the
mythical/fictional Natty Bumpo, hero of James Fennimore Cooper’s popular
Leatherstockings stories.
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[8] The phrase “Indian wars”
typically refers to a short period in the history of American colonization, the
rapid westward expansion that occurred across the Great Plains from 1850 to
1890. As depicted in John Gast’s well known painting “American Progress”
(Figure 1),[16] the final conquest of the frontier
was swathed in an aura of pious illumination. Divine Providence or Liberty,
telegraph lines trailing behind her, leads and protects the settlers, trains,
wagons, and stagecoaches, while the indigenous population, buffalo, bears, and
dark clouds flee before her radiant power. In the 1850s, as the United
States Calvary was beginning the final phase of eliminating native resistance
on the Great Plains, a secularized version of the Puritans’ “New Israel”
emerged in the form of “Manifest Destiny.” Historian Stephen
Kern traces its origins to an 1845 editorial in the New York Evening News, written by the chief editor, John L. O’Sullivan: “Away,
away with all these cobweb tissues of rights of discovery, exploration,
settlement, contiguity … [It] is by the right of our manifest destiny to
overspread and posses the whole of the continent which Providence has given us
for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federative self
government entrusted to us.”[17]
[9] In
1890, a year marked by the massacre at Wounded Knee, where more than two
hundred Lakota men, women and children were killed, the frontier was deemed “closed,”
and historian Frederick Jackson Turner began to reflect on the meaning of this nearly
three-hundred year long Anglo conquest of America. Turner’s “frontier thesis,”
delivered during the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago to the World Congress
of Historians, stamped the imprimatur of the academy on a number of central
themes found in the popular literature and stories that emerged during three
centuries of Anglo presence in the New World. Turner proposed that the frontier
line was an ever-receding border “between savagery and civilization,” and that
the “closing” of frontier marked the end of the “first period of American
history.” The frontier experience, claimed Turner, produced a new class or order
of men, a uniquely American character and set of values: the rugged,
self-sufficient and self-made man who carved a new society out of the chaos of
a wild land in struggle with its wild and savage indigenous peoples. Turner
mused about the significance of a “closed” frontier to a people who had created
their history, character, and values in relation to an endless expanse of “free”
land and resources, and the moral imperative, as well as the experience, of wresting
that land from its native inhabitants:
[T]he people of the United States have taken their
tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even
been forced upon them [sic]. He would be
a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life
has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and… American
energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. [18]
In the
decade surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, the United States annexed
Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, the Canal Zone in Panama, and
declared Cuba a “protectorate.”
[10] At
the Columbian Exposition, academic, political, and popular culture converged. Republican
Asa Matthews envisioned a republic-cum-empire
covering all of North America, including territory that was, at the time, part
of Canada and Mexico. Matthews foresaw “the greatest empire that the sun had
ever shone upon … an empire unrivaled in ancient or modern times … the most
perfect civilization and the most prosperous and happy people the world has
ever known.”[19] As Turner delivered his address and
politicians waxed eloquently and openly over the possibility of a global
American Empire, a few historians ducked out and crossed the street in order to
attend William F. Cody’s (Buffalo Bill’s) “Wild West Show,” whose fare included
a reenactment of “Custer’s Last Stand.”[20] The defeat of the
Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Big Horn became an iconic
scene of martyrdom in American civil religion, and an excuse for the brutal
suppression of the last vestiges of Native resistance.[21] In
the lecture halls of academia and the venues of popular culture, a mythic
narrative was being consolidated. Turner’s thesis quickly became a new
scholarly orthodoxy that captured the popular imagination. Graduates of the
University of Wisconsin’s new program in Western American History spread Turner’s
work around the country. Politicians incorporated the frontier myth in their
campaign speeches. Performers like Buffalo Bill enacted the story to crowds, and
the plot line of a struggle between “savagery and civilization” informed
countless dime store “Cowboy and Indian” novels and the classic television and
cinematic westerns of 1950s and 1960s—the very films President Bush
consumed as a kid, and that he would later recollect, as we shall see, in
responding to the attacks of 9/11.[22]
“Indian Country”
[11] Turner
discussed the advance of civilization in terms of successive frontier wars as
the great ball of history rolled from east to west across America. Each
frontier was “won by a series of Indian wars.” But the true frontier is located
in utopian space, that is, wherever savagery and civilization meet. “The West,
at bottom,” Turner claimed, “is a form of society, rather than an area.”[23] Through the twentieth century, the United States never
abandoned the imperial ambition articulated at the closing of the western
frontier.[24] America’s wars in the Philippines
(1899-1902) [25] and in Vietnam (1950-1973) were framed with images
and narratives of the frontier myth. Soldiers typically referred to Vietnam as “Indian Country,”
one of the American garrisons was dubbed “Fort Apache,” and the film The
Green Berets, starring the archetypal “cowboy,”
John Wayne, was released in 1968. As Geertz observes, “Thinking, conceptualizing, formulation, comprehension,
understanding, or what-have-you, consist not of ghostly happenings in the head
but of a matching of the states and processes of symbolic models against the
states and processes of the wider world.”[26] In other words, we do
not merely perceive an object, act or event as such—we perceive an event
by placing it against the background of appropriate symbols and narratives. Vietnam,
as many scholars have shown, was widely understood in terms of the myth of the
frontier, in particular, in terms of the western genre of film and television. [27] Similarly, the war in Iraq has been framed as the most
recent in a long line of battles “between savagery and civilization.”
Symbolically, mythically, Iraq is the newest frontier, the latest “Indian
country.”
[12] As
reported in the L.A. Times:
Hunkered down in the turquoise-domed Islamic Law Center, a
dozen Marines wait for the enemy to make its inevitable move. … The wait is
unnerving, but it’s better than being in the streets of this turbulent western
city. A Marine convoy was attacked here Wednesday with a roadside bomb and as
many as 100 insurgents unleashed a barrage of small-arms fire and
rocket-propelled grenades in rolling firefights that lasted for much of the
day. …"When you walk on the streets, they can hide in every nook and
cranny and you can never find them until they start shooting," said Marine
Cpl. Glenn Hamby, 26, who heads Squad 3 of Golf Company. "Here, they have
to come right to us." This is what the war has come down to in Iraq’s
Sunni Muslim heartland, where providing tenuous security harks back to America’s
19th century Indian Wars—a time when the cavalry set up outposts and
forts in decidedly hostile territory. Ramadi is Indian Country—"the
wild, wild West," as the region is called.[28]
[13] That
soldiers reared on westerns and trained in a military whose roots and character
are deeply intertwined with campaigns in the “west” reach for the “Indian war”
metaphor in making sense of their experience is perhaps understandable.[29] But when politicians trot out such metaphors and analogize the war in Iraq with
the wars on the plains, the ideological implications of frontier mythology
become clearer—and deeply problematic. In an editorial in the Wall
Street Journal titled “Indian Country,” Robert
Kaplan, a regular in Washington’s hawkish neoconservative circles, overtly
analogized the conflict in the middle east with reference to a mythic past:
An overlooked truth about the war on terrorism, and the war
in Iraq in particular, is that they both arrived too soon for the American
military: before it had adequately transformed itself from a dinosauric,
Industrial Age beast to a light and lethal instrument skilled in guerrilla
warfare, attuned to the local environment in the way of the 19th-century
Apaches. My mention of the Apaches is deliberate. For in a world where mass
infantry invasions are becoming politically and diplomatically prohibitive
–even as dirty little struggles proliferate, featuring small clusters of
combatants hiding out in Third World slums, deserts and jungles—the
American military is back to the days of fighting the Indians:
The red Indian metaphor is one with which a liberal policy nomenklatura
may be uncomfortable, but Army and Marine field officers have embraced it because
it captures perfectly the combat challenge of the early 21st century. … The
range of Indian groups, numbering in their hundreds, that the U.S. Cavalry and
Dragoons had to confront was no less varied than that of the warring ethnic and
religious militias spread throughout Eurasia, Africa and South America in the
early 21st century. When the Cavalry invested [attacked] Indian encampments,
they periodically encountered warrior braves beside women and children, much
like Fallujah. Though most Cavalry officers tried to spare the lives of
noncombatants, inevitable civilian casualties raised howls of protest among
humanitarians back East.[30]
[14] That such frontier narratives
and images make sense to readers is the result not of a shared experience.
Kaplan is not analogizing with reference to how things actually happened in the
“wild west,” but how a dominant culture remembers events, a shared memory
created through the western genre of television and cinema.[31] In
the post 9/11 world, journalists, pundits and the Bush administration have
followed historical precedent, turning to the images of the frontier cultivated
in popular culture, as they mythologize and sell this
new “war” with reference to an earlier one. Iraq is “Indian country” and the “wild
west” all over again.
Cowboy-Talk
[15] In
the days and months after 9/11, President Bush and members of his
administration made repeated use of “cowboy” and frontier imagery. One of many
examples is Mr. Bush’s invocation of the “cowboy” in his speech of February
8, 2002, the occasion being the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association meeting
in Denver:
I appreciate
being with people who love the land and appreciate open space. I realize there’s
nobody more central to the American experience than the cowboy. … You know, when
the enemy hit us on September the 11th, they must have not figured out what we
were all about. See, they thought we weren’t determined. They thought we were
soft. They obviously have never been to a national cattlemen’s convention
before. … I intend to find the killers wherever they may hide and run them down
and bring them to justice. They think there’s a cave deep enough; they’re
wrong. They think that we’re going to run out of patience; they are wrong. …
Either you’re with us, or you’re against us.[32]
The lacing of political
speeches and political performances with the frontier imagery is no doubt the
conscious choice of President Bush’s handlers and strategists. But the frontier
myth is also an “instinctual program”—that is, a cultural net of referential
symbols running in the background of American society, readily reached for when
sizing up, responding to, and communicating an understanding of a situation.
[16] An example of this is
found in Mr. Bush’s comments in the days after 9/11, during a question and
answer session at the Pentagon:
Q: Do you want
bin Laden dead?
Mr.
Bush:I want justice. There’s an old poster out west, as I
recall, that said, "Wanted: Dead or Alive"….
Q: Are you
saying you want him dead or alive, sir? Can I interpret --
Mr.
Bush:I just remember, all I’m doing is remembering when I was a kid
I remember that they used to put out there in the old west, a wanted
poster.It said:"Wanted, Dead or
Alive."All I want and America wants him brought to
justice.That’s what we want.[33]
Of course, “they” did not
really do this when Mr. Bush was a “kid”—the frontier is long gone, and
the nation is not one of Indian fighters, mountain men, hunters, banditos,
outlaws, and cowboys, but urban dwellers. Where “they” did put the poster up
was in the movies, the viewing of which is the childhood memory Mr. Bush was
recalling. Shortly after Mr. Bush’s “dead or alive” remark at the Pentagon a
wanted poster of Osama bin Laden surfaced and circulated on the internet
(Figure 2). The poster depicts the sense of “frontier justice” evoked by Mr.
Bush, and casts Osama bin Laden in the role of the “outlaw.” [34]
[17] The
event of 9/11 and the ideological formulation of the war on terror has been
placed (at times unconsciously and at times consciously) by the Bush
Administration against the background of the figure of the “cowboy” and the
myth of the frontier—and where we find the “cowboy,” the “Indian” is sure
to be lurking in the shadows. The parallels between the fusion of political
ideology and the depiction of the Indian wars in popular culture and the
contemporary selling of the war on terror are not tenuous and implicit. The
Bush administration overtly, explicitly weaves images, performances, and
rhetoric to connect the two.
[18] Fort
Carson, in southern Colorado, is named after “Kit” Carson, one of America’s
frontier heroes. When the Civil War broke out, the Navajo used the occasion to
their advantage, and launched a counter-offensive. Carson was dispatched to put
an end to Navajo military action, a task he set to work on with ruthless vigor.
The Long Walk of the Navajo in the wake of Carson’s scorched earth policy to
enforced reservation life is a tragic exemplar of the many acts of brutality
from the Indian wars. Carson became a hero in the pantheon of American civil
religion and myth; in addition to novels, movies, and stage plays valorizing
the man’s life and work, statues, heritage home museums, and a military
garrison carrying his likeness and name dot the American Southwest.
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[19] In October of 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
paid a visit to Fort Carson. “In the global war on terror,” said Mr. Rumsfeld,
“U.S. forces, including thousands from this base, have lived up to the legend
of Kit Carson, fighting terrorists in the mountains of Afghanistan, hunting the
remnants of the deadly regime in Iraq, working with local populations to help
secure victory. … Few men have been chosen by destiny to serve their country as
Kit Carson served, and fewer still have risen to the challenge.” The choreography
of the Fort Carson event paralleled the rhetoric of Secretary Rumsfeld’s speech
(Figure 3).[35] Behind Mr. Rumsfeld were seated the 3rd Armored Cavalry Guard (which served in Iraq) and behind them, in period dress,
is a performance of the historic 3rd Cavalry Color Guard which
pushed the bounds of frontier/empire into the American West in the 1860s and
1870s. The staging and speech worked together to compare and legitimate the
invasion of Iraq with reference to the ‘settling” of the west.
[20] The second Fort Carson events of note involved
celebrations and commemorations held upon the return of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Division from Iraq, during “Cavalry Week,” in May of 2004. “The
efforts of the 3rd ACR in Iraq reflect favorably on Fort Carson and the
surrounding community. Regimental leaders, in keeping with the traditions
of the 158-year-old unit, will be donning their Stetsons and spurs for the
event, and will be joined by the U.S. Army Band and the Fort Carson mounted
horse platoon, which will lead us in a traditional cavalry charge at the end of
the ceremony” (Figure 4).
[36] The message
of this performance draws on the dominant remembered history of the Indian
wars, the contemporary 3rd Division charging into Iraq just as its
ancestor rooted out earlier “insurgents.”[37]
[21] Performances of history such
as those carried out at Fort Carson are a window onto a persistent systemic
racism directed by dominate culture at native North Americans. In the Fort
Carson events, the Navajo have an implicit presence as the first frontier’s
equivalent of contemporary terrorists. From the onset of the colonial
project in the New World, native North Americans have been the malleable other
that those of European descent could mould through projective fantasy to fit
their own social, psychological, economic, political and religious needs.[38] As the Lakota scholar Vine Deloria Jr. writes: “A review of the various images
and interpretations of the Indian … will give us a fairly accurate map of the
fragmented personality that possesses the American white man. One can start at
almost any point in the list of collective attributes, attitudes, and beliefs
about the Indian and then strip away the external image to reveal the psyche of
the American white.”[39]
[22] In the Fort Carson cavalry charge, in Robert Kaplan’s
rhetoric about “Indian country,” and numerous other occasions, dominate culture
reaches again for the malleable “Indian.” In the contemporary war on terror,
native groups who resisted military conquest are refashioned as “terrorists,”
and terrorists are in turn enfolded in the images and narratives of the nation-forging
battle with “Indian” savagery. Given the incredible violence that rages in
Iraq, the horrific “collateral damage,” the scandals of Abu Ghraib and
Guantanamo Bay prisons, it is not too large a leap to Deloria’s suggestion that
white attitudes about natives tend to be projective.
[23] Through this kind of
mythological analogizing, the “present appears simply as a repetition of
persistently recurring structures identified with the past.”[40] Myth,
in other words—in particular, myth fused with ideology—has a life
of its own, an autonomous power that occludes the fact of its creation by human
agents. As Slotkin has discussed, “the invocation of the Indian war and Custer’s
Last Stand as models for the Vietnam war was a mythological way of answering
the question, Why are we in Vietnam? The
answer implicit in the myth is, “We are there because our ancestors were heroes
who fought Indians, and died as sacrifices for the nation. There is no logic in
the connection, only the powerful force of tradition and habits of feeling and
thought.”[41] In the ceremonial events at Fort
Carson, the same absence of logic and the same tradition and habits of feeling,
thought, and piety are at play.
“Top
Gun”
[24] In May of 2003, President
George W. Bush landed in a jet on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln to
announce the end of “major combat operations” in Iraq (Figure 5).[42] The President and his handlers, as subsequent
commentary revealed, were undoubtedly drawing on imagery popularized by the hit
1986 film Top Gun. The rugged,
swaggering jet fighter pilot photo-op was spun during the 2004-election
campaign; with evidence of wrongdoing in justifying the invasion of Iraq
mounting, depicting and associating the incumbent President with popular
imagery was undoubtedly a factor in his re-election.
[25] As reported by David Sanger in
the New York Times, “Mr. Bush emerged for the kind of photographs that other
politicians can only dream about. He hopped out of the plane with a helmet
tucked under his arm and walked across the flight deck with a swagger that
seemed to suggest he had seen Top Gun. … Even in a White House that prides
itself on its mastery of political staging, Mr. Bush’s arrival on board the
Lincoln was a first of many kinds.” Karen Young, staff writer for the Washington
Post, noted that the President ignored the
plans for the official navy greeting, “swaggering forward and pumping hands
with everybody in sight before they could salute. ‘Here’s a man with a
birthday,’ he yelled at a television camera as he swung his arm around a
sailor. … For a president fresh from victory in battle, who has cultivated an
aggressive, can-do image, it was a scene
![Intel(R) JPEG Library, version [1.51.12.44]](Swaggering_Savagery_images/image009.jpg)
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straight from ‘Top Gun’ that
is sure to appear in future campaign ads.” Bob Scheiffer, host of CBS’s Face
the Nation, made the grandiose claim that the president’s landing produced “one
of the greatest [political] pictures of all time… if you’re a political
consultant, you can just see campaign commercial written all over the pictures
of George Bush.” Scheiffer’s guest on the program, Time magazine columnist Joe Klein, agreed: “Well, that
was probably the coolest presidential image since Bill Pullman played the jet
fighter pilot in the movie Independence Day. That was the first thing that came
to mind for me. And it just shows you how high a mountain these Democrats are
going to have to climb.”
[26] On CNN’s The Capitol Gang, Margaret Carlson, contributing to the wave of
unnerving, hyperbolic journalism praising the spectacle, commented that “A
hurricane couldn’t have interfered with that particular parade. It was so well
done, and even though we knew that everything was choreographed down to, you
know, catching the fourth hook on the ship, it was still a pretty stirring
tableau. Cecil B. deMille couldn’t have done better.”
[27] On CNN’s syndicated radio
program Reliable Sources, host Laura Ingram discussed the event: “speaking as a
woman, and listening to the women who called into my radio show, seeing
President Bush get out of that plane, carrying his helmet, he is a real man, he
stands by his word. That was a very powerful moment.” [43] As
these examples show, mainstream media coverage of the Lincoln landing,
especially “U.S. television coverage, ranged from respectful to gushing.”[44]
[28] News media are not typically
included in the study of popular culture, but they ought to be. More than
seventy percent of all Americans regularly watch nightly cable or network news
programs, and sixty percent of all American families watch, read, or listen to
the news on television around the dinner hour. Television news programs are increasingly
fused with popular culture and the ethos of the entertainment industry.[45]
[29] President Bush’s spectacle was
deconstructed and criticized in some media, to be sure, and statistics show
that roughly half of the consuming public distrusts media,[46] but
in the initial coverage of Mr. Bush’s “Top Gun” moment the damage—at
least from the perspective of the Democrats—had been done. Where media coverage ended, toy companies took off,
producing action figures based on the carrier landing (Figure 6).
[30] It
is difficult to prove a direct correlation between staged political spectacle
and the outcome of an election, which is shaped by a variety of factors. It is
a reasonable assumption, however, that the Abraham Lincoln landing, if not
determinative of the 2004 outcome, was certainly planned to influence it.[47] The Bush Whitehouse is not alone in its use of choreographed political
spectacle, but it has taken the art to a new level.[48] They
do so, obviously enough, because the constructed images sway public opinion. In
the brief survey of the “gushing” commentary offered above, it is worth
highlighting how often a link was made between the event and popular film: Top
Gun, Independence Day, and work of Cecil B de Mille, who is known for the
dramatic, large-scale, epic spectacle, were evoked by the scene. In hindsight, the “Top Gun” landing has become part of the
fiasco called “The War on Terror,” but at the time, it “worked.”
[31] What I am suggesting here is that the President-as-fighter-pilot fighter
image worked because it was tapping into a sense of “national character,” and
this character is in turn closely connected to the frontier mythos of American
civil religion. One last example of media coverage of the carrier landing,
Chris Matthews” comments on MSNBC’s Hardball, is demonstrative of this shared sense of national
character:
And that’s the president looking very
much like a jet, you know, a high-flying jet star. A guy who is a jet pilot.
Has been in the past when he was younger, obviously. What does that image mean
to the American people, a guy who can actually get into a supersonic plane and
actually fly in an unpressurized cabin like an actual jet pilot? Here’s a
president who’s really nonverbal. He’s like Eisenhower. He looks great in a
military uniform. He looks great in that cowboy costume he wears when he goes
West. … We’re proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president,
a guy who has a little swagger, who’s physical, who’s not a complicated guy
like [former President Bill] Clinton or even like [former Democratic
presidential candidates Michael] Dukakis or [Walter] Mondale, all those guys, [George]
McGovern. They want a guy who’s president. Women like a guy who’s president.
Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our
president. It’s simple. We’re not like the Brits. We don’t want an indoor prime
minister type, or the Danes or the Dutch or the Italians, or a [Russian
Federation President Vladimir] Putin. Can you imagine Putin getting elected
here? We want a guy as president.[49]
The President is physical; a man of
action with “a little swagger;” a “high-flying jet star;” a “hero;” a guy that
“women like;” an uncomplicated man of few words—the strong, silent type.
He is a can-do kind of “guy,” an [ordinary] “guy” with a dislike for the
“indoors”—perhaps like the Marlboro man, a reasonable suggestion given
that the President hails from and walks like a Texan[50] and
“looks great” in a “cowboy costume.”
[32] For there to be a “national
character” at all requires a dominant popular mythology. The imagery and rhetoric used by Mr. Bush and his
handlers—“smoke ’em out,” “dead or alive,” “bring it on,” cutting wood on
his ranch, the swaggering walk—in playing the “cowboy” card, the Bush
Administration has been tapping deep roots in the American psyche. The “handle”
of the character played by Tom Cruise in Top Gun was “Maverick,” echoing the popular 1960s television western of the
same name. The rugged jet fighter pilot played by Cruise and Mr. Bush is the
evolution of an archetypal figure in American popular culture and national
mythology—the righteous gunfighter-cowboy of the old west. The tools of
the trade may have changed—from a Colt 45 to a supersonic jet
fighter—but the character and the plotline of his story have remained
remarkably consistent.[51] Europeans
scratch their heads over Mr. Bush’s “cowboyism,”[52] but
at home, it makes perfect sense—if not to everyone,[53] at
least to a good portion of the voting public.
Savage War
[33] One
of the fundamental tropes informing the frontier myth is that of “savagism.” The visual culture and monumental statuary of the
nineteenth century captured the notion of savagism inherent in the popular
stories. During the 19th century, Washington, as the nation’s
capitol, was constructed as a symbol to condense and project national identity,
values, and a remembered history. Narratives of discovery, conquest, and the
battle with savagery were incorporated into the east portico of the Capitol
Building. Horatio Greenough’s “The Rescue” (Figure 7) depicted a weaponless
European warrior, clad in a Renaissance
style helmet, towering over a Native man who looks helplessly up at his moment
of defeat.[54] The presence of the mother sheltering
her child or women being killed or abducted were typical motifs used to create
a sense of natives as inhuman and inhumane. In James Cooper’s The Last of
Mohicans, a Huron warrior strips a white
woman of her baby, just to possess the shawl covering the child: “The
savage spurned the worthless rags, and perceiving that the shawl had already
become a prize to another, his bantering
but sullen smile changed to a gleam of ferocity, he dashed the head of the
infant against a rock, and cast its quivering remains to her very feet." If the words were not enough, the numerous
editions of Cooper’s
popular novels were often richly illustrated (Figure 7).[55]
[34] The
notion of “savagism” allowed Euro-Americans to see Natives as radically other
than themselves, as the foil of civilization, an idea communicated through
stories and images of defenseless women and children being clubbed with a
tomahawk (Figure 7).[56] Mr. Bush, referring to those
who carried out the atrocities of 9/11, spoke of “no rules,” the willingness to
engage in “barbaric behavior,” readiness to ‘slit the throats of women,” and
how the “enemy” “likes to hit … and then hide out:” but “we are going to smoke
them out; these are terrorists that have no borders.”[57] Embedded in this rhetoric are images employed in the conquest of Native America,
and the subsequent representation of that conquest in popular culture.
[35] As
the frontier myth ran through it various incarnations over the centuries of
warfare with native peoples and then on into the Pacific, one element of it
remained constant: the frontier was a place of savage, barbaric violence, and
to meet and defeat this violence, a willingness to engage in it was required.
Slotkin calls this the idea of “regeneration through violence.” It is a notion
that informs the “logic” behind the brutality of the contemporary “war on
terror.”
[The frontier] Myth represented the redemption of the
American spirit or fortune as something to be achieved by playing through a
scenario of separation, temporary regression to a more primitive or “natural”
state, and regeneration through violence.”
At the core of that scenario is the symbol … [and] premise of the “savage war”.
…[B]ecause of the “savage” and bloodthirsty propensity of the natives, such
struggles inevitably become “wars of extermination” in which one side or the
other attempts to destroy its enemy root and branch…. In its most typical
formulations, the myth of “savage war” blames Native Americans as instigators
of a war of extermination. … The accusation is better understood as an act of
psychological projection that made the Indians scapegoats for the morally
troubling side of American expansion: the myth of “savage war” became a basic
ideological convention of [American] culture…[58]
What covered up the “morally
troubling” nature of frontier warfare is that no matter how violent it became,
that violence was understood to be in service of a higher, nobler end.[59]
[36] In the speech delivered on the
Abraham Lincoln, President Bush lauded the civility of modern, computerized
warfare: "With new tactics and precision
weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against
civilians. No device of man can remove the tragedy from war, yet it is a great
moral advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the
innocent.”[60] Nearly four years after the
(now) (in)famous fighter pilot photo-op, Mr. Bush, at the close of a speech
given in Philadelphia to the World Affairs Council (in December 2005), invited
questions from the audience. In response to a question regarding civilian
deaths in Iraq, the President replied, “I would say 30,000 more or less have
died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against
Iraqis.”[61]
[37] Implicitly, Mr. Bush was
associating the “ongoing violence” with the “insurgency,” but his comment
revealed a deeper, if unintended, truth: Iraq is a place of brutal, daily
“ongoing violence against Iraqis”—violence carried out not simply by “them”
but by “us.” As I write, there are over 40,000 killed
in the war in Iraq, and, according to one report, 650,000 “excess deaths”
(deaths caused by the invasion).[62] Platitudes about guilt and innocence delivered by those inflicting pain
and suffering do not merely test the limits of credulity—they shatter
them. The innocent, on a massive scale, are dying from and suffering the
consequences of ‘shock and awe” warfare.[63] There are
repeated reports of atrocities carried out by American soldiers;[64] surely they cannot all be brushed aside as fabrications. And the full, horrific
stories of the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay prisons
have yet to be told. Alongside tens of thousands of dead bodies, we find
tortured, humiliated, bent, and broken ones. The “war on terror” is more like a
more a “war of terror.”
[38] Among those soldiers investigated
for their abuse of Iraqi prisoners were members of Fort Carson’s 3rd Armored Cavalry Guard. There are many difficulties
with the Fort Carson events discussed earlier. One is that the “making of
legends alters or misrepresents the facts of historical cases,”[65] and
those ignorant of history are, as the saying goes, more likely to repeat its
mistakes. The historical Kit Carson was willing to direct his charge at women,
children, the sick, and the old.[66] The “attributes, attitudes, and
beliefs” ascribed to the “other,” as Deloria notes, are often one’s own. The
difference between a cavalry battle charge and the charge of a marauding horde
that indiscriminately cuts down innocents is not so fine as to be invisible.
Carson’s tactics in the American southwest were an early version of “shock and
awe.” The most recent version of this tactic has been unleashed on Iraqi
civilians; the war on terror has become a Kit Carson-like marauding and the
employment of terror in order to eliminate all resistance.
[39] Three members of the 3rd Cavalry were charged in the drowning death of an Iraqi man forced to jump from
a bridge into the Tigris. In March of 2005, one of the accused was sentenced to
45 days barracks confinement. Other members of the 3rd were charged
in the suffocation death of an Iraqi general. One of the men was court
marshaled and convicted, receiving 60 days of barracks confinement. The story
was virtually buried in the mainstream press. The 3rd Cavalry is
heavily implicated in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.[67] Mr.
Rumsfeld’s claim that the efforts of the 3rd “reflect
favorably on Fort Carson and the surrounding community” is another tough-nut to
swallow; that the 3rd Cavalry lived up to the dark side of their
legendary namesake is closer to the truth.
Conclusion
[40] My aim here has been to open up a line of inquiry that
takes place at the intersection of politics, civil religion, and popular
culture, focused on the goal of achieving a greater understanding of the mythic
roots of the current war on terror. Frontier narratives and imagery surrounding
the Indian wars are an integral part of American civil religion;[68] they were and are the product of popular culture, of writers and filmmakers,
and they have been used by political culture (implicitly or explicitly) to both
further American imperialism and to make sense of situations of conflict at
home and abroad.
[41] I write as a Canadian. I am, along with an increasingly
significant portion of the American public, against the foreign policy of the
Bush administration.[69] I identify
enough with my neighbours to the south (and am a relative to some of them,
including a cousin who serves in the U.S. Air Force), I have consumed enough frontier
stories, and I was raised on the prairies, where narratives of the “west” play
well, that a part of me identifies with the myth of the frontier. I am not
making an argument against myth. The term “myth” still carries pejorative
connotations in colloquial English and in much scholarship. The term is meant
to be descriptive, but can be wielded as a rhetorical weapon to label and
denigrate. Such is not my intent here.
[42] My main concern is to understand how violent conflict
may be perpetuated and fueled not just by policy but also by mythic images,
symbols, and narratives. One way to counter the persuasiveness of destructive
myths is to understand the complex processes and interests that contribute to
their production. But it is not that societies and groups create myths that should concern us—after all, it is
widely accepted that even academics engage in the writing of cultural
fictions—but rather what is
created. Is the myth of the frontier, in other words, a story worth telling my
kids? Is it a good (in the sense of both tall and moral)
tale? What are its liabilities? Can it be part of my moral compass?
[43] Terry Eagleton, one of the
most insightful theorists and critics of contemporary culture, recently
observed, “Among students of [postmodern] culture, the body is an immensely
fashionable topic, but it is usually the erotic body, not the famished one.
There is keen interest in coupling bodies, but not in labouring ones.” So too
with dead ones—dead bodies are not much fun (to say nothing of living,
tortured ones) and to “work on the literature of latex or the political
implications of navel-piercing is to take literally the wise old adage that
study should be fun.”[70] In my academic field, religious
studies, there needs to be more work done on the religious forces that may be
informing the production of so many dead and tortured bodies. If “their”
religion is mixed-up in the willingness to engage in the violence of 9/11, so,
too, is “ours” mixed up in shooting a handcuffed woman in the head,[71] or taping a young man’s eyes shut with duct tape and sticking him in a small
metal box in the heat of the Cuban sun.[72] The frontier myth, as
I have suggested, calls such actions into being, and may even normalize them;
it “predicts” “savage” conflict.
[44] We need more examples of how
the Bush administration has utilized themes and images from popular culture in
framing and selling the invasion of Iraq to the public.[73] We
need a better understanding of how popular, mass mediated images and narrative
scenarios influence viewer’s ideas and attitudes, and how they impinge on
global politics.[74] We need detailed and critical
analysis of more recent versions of the frontier story in films such Black
Hawk Down, Pearl Harbor, The Last Samurai, and Jarhead, examining how such films
reinforce or subvert the ideological
imperatives of the myth.[75] We need to engage in myth criticism,
assessing the moral and political implications of the stories we tell and the
metaphoric images we employ. The newest application of the myth of the frontier
in the war on terror needs to be subjected to gender criticism. We need to
continue to think across cultural domains, exploring connections between
religion, politics, economics and popular culture.
[45] Myth, as Levi-Strauss
suggests, may reconcile and unify cultural tensions and paradoxes, but
embodying myth is no easy task. As the Vietnam War developed into a political
and military quagmire, the scenario of a ‘savage war” emerged. “In movie
terms,” soldiers took on the
John Wayne role in Rio Grande … becoming savage in order
to defeat the savages. Committing massacre in order to avenge or deter
massacre. … It was traumatic to discover that one could not live up to the John
Wayne model of onscreen military heroism. And it was maddening to realize that
the moral categories by which we had identified the hero’s role were slippery
and unstable to such a degree that the roles and values of Indian-fighter and
savage, hero and enemy, could be exchanged at any moment.[76]
This “traumatic discovery” is the result of inflicting
horrific violence on a civilian population. The frontier myth as refracted in
cinema, speeches, and political spectacle was used to symbolize the meaning of
Vietnam, mobilize popular support at home, and carry out a war of attrition or
extermination. The same scenario is replaying itself in Iraq.
Notes
[1] The author’s
thanks go out to the reviewers of this article. Their close reading,
criticisms, and thoughtful suggestions were of considerable help in developing
the piece.
[2] Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American
History (1921), http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/TURNER/,
(accessed March 2006).
[3] George W. Bush, “President’s Address to the Nation,” http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/20060911-3.html,
(accessed February 2007).
[4] Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The
Mythology of the American Frontier (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 3.
[5] The intertwining of a sense of redemptive mission with
expansionism in the New World and abroad has received thorough treatment.
Classic studies include: Ernest Lee Tuvesen’s, Redeemer Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); Richard
Slotkin’s three volumes on the myth of the frontier, Regeneration Through
Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier (Middletown, CT; Wesleyan University Press,1973), The
Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization (New York: Atheneum: 1985), and Gunfighter Nation: the
Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America (University of Oklahoma Press, 1998 [1992]); and Richard
Drinnon’s Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire Building (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980). Tuvesen’s
study in particular argues that the articulation of exceptionalism and world
calling or mission distinctive to American civil culture has a basis in
Christian millennialism.
[6] Jim Wallis, “Dangerous Religion: George W. Bush’s Theology
of Empire,” Sojourners 32.5 (2003):
20-26.
[7] Bruce Lincoln (“Bush’s
God-Talk,” Christian Century, October 5, 2004) has
used post 9/11 speeches of Mr. Bush to develop an understanding of the
president’s implicit theology. Lincoln shows that “these texts
convey a sophisticated theology of history that rests on five propositions: 1)
God desires freedom for all humanity; 2) this desire manifests itself in
history; 3) America is called by history (and thus, implicitly by God) to take
action on behalf of this cause; 4) insofar as America responds with courage and
determination, God’s purpose is served and freedom’s advance is inevitable; 5)
with the triumph of freedom, God’s will is accomplished and history comes to an
end.” See also Lincoln’s Holy Terrors: Thinking About Religion After
September 11 (University of Chicago Press, 2003).
[8] Both the “religion and public life” and
the “religion and popular culture” discussions among religionists tend to be
limited to the intersection of ecclesiastical religion with ethics and
government policy making on the one hand, and mass mediated culture on the
other. Yet, in the well-known framework developed by Forbes and Mahan, we can
also think of “popular culture as religion,” exploring the structural and functional equivalencies
between popular culture and traditional forms of religion (rather than the
theological and substantive equivalencies). Here, I follow the thought of
Clifford Geertz, who defines religion in terms of the wedding of a worldview
and an ethos–a view of how things are and a corresponding, reinforcing
ethic of how one ought to act [Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books, 1973), 87-141]. From this
perspective, the “emphasis is not on traditional forms of religion, but on the
social form and purpose of religion.” Forbes and Mahan ask us to “consider
whether this cultural activity should be regarded as religious, or at least
analogous to religion” [Bruce David Forbes and Jeffrey H. Mahan, Religion
and Popular Culture in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 163]. Both the public/civil and the
common/popular spheres are part of a society’s “cultural activity,” and
contribute to what Geertz calls the ‘spiritual consciousness of a people.”
Efforts by scholars of religion to understand the role of religion in the
American march to war in Iraq have tended to focus on ecclesiastical religion,
in particular, the implicit or explicit theology of George W. Bush, and the
electoral and popular support given the Bush administration by significant
numbers of evangelical Christians. As Lincoln has argued (Holy Terrors, 30-32), Mr. Bush’s speeches “contain
biblical allusions plainly audible to portions of his audience who are
attentive to such phrasing, but likely to go unheard by those without the
requisite textual knowledge. … For those who have ears to hear, these allusions
effect a qualitative transformation, giving Bush’s message an entirely different
status. This conversion of secular political speech into religious discourse
invests otherwise human events with transcendent significance.” Religion thus
enters the discussion of the Bush administration’s war on terror in the form of
ecclesiastical religion (Christianity). In this paper, I want to take the
discussion in the direction of the intertwining of civil religion and popular
culture as religion.
[9] “The literary subject that best suited the demand of
Puritan society for a vision of its unique experience, and the requirements of
society’s leaders for an appropriate vehicle of propaganda and doctrine, was
the Indian wars. The experience itself was sufficiently unique to make it
outstanding as a characteristic of life in the New World. … In such accounts,
the Puritans could pit their own philosophy, doctrine, culture, and race
against their cultural opposites. … The Indian wars proved to be the most
acceptable metaphor for the American experience. To all of the complexities of
that experience, it offered the simplicity of a dramatic contrast and direct
confrontation of opposites” (Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, 67-69). The kernel of this myth is still operative in
American civil and popular culture. The war on terror has similarly been cast
in the Manichean mold of the Puritans.
[10] I have in mind here the work of Richard Slotkin. In a
series of works, Slotkin has examined the role of the frontier myth in American
popular culture and nation building from the arrival of the Puritans to the
Reagan era. See n 5 above.
[11] Slotkin, Fatal Environment, 15.
[12] Robert Bellah’s seminal study of
American civil religion is relevant here [“Civil
Religion in America,” Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, 96 (1967): 1-21].
Bellah’s approach is, however, limited, as he focuses on the religious
functions of political culture. I wish to expand the range of “civil” society
to include popular culture as well, or at least the points at which these two
cultural domains intersect and reinforce one another. Several American
Presidents, for example—in particular Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan
and George W. Bush—have employed a “cowboy” persona and imagery to garner
political capital.
[13] John Storey, Inventing Popular Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 2.
[14] Slotkin, Fatal Environment, 29-30. Jürgen Habermas, whose thought has had a tremendous
influence on framing and theorizing the intersection of religion and public
life, coined the term “public sphere.” Positioned between the old, hierarchical
authority of church and monarchy and the citizens of emerging Enlightenment era
nation-states, argues Habermas, was a growing common space created primarily by
print media: daily newspapers, journals, periodicals, books, and pamphlets. In
Habermas’s model, this sphere is meant to be an arena of public discourse
outside of, independent of, the state and economic powers. Academia,
journalism, and non-government organizations (the “third sector”) are the
principal social institutions that form the public sphere, although in
principle it is open to anyone. Over the past hundred years, however, this
public sphere either has been dominated by the interests of political and
economic elites, largely because of private ownership and control of mass
media, or is unable to compete on an equal playing field with the heavily
mediated forms of popular culture. A few thousand may read Richard Slotkin,
millions will see Dances with Wolves.
[15] The narrative that created a sense of
nationhood, argues Slotkin, was crafted around Indian wars, the westward
expansion of the frontier line, and the civilizing of a “wild west” by
righteous gunfighter-cowboys. A crucial point here is the autonomy of the
complex of images, narratives, places, and characters that form the frontier myth.
The myth of the frontier is not an argument, it works via symbols and metaphors
that “not only define a situation for us, they prescribe our response to that
situation” (Slotkin, Fatal Environment, 19). This is precisely Geertz’s conception of the function
of religion: it weds a view of the world (defines the situation) with behaviour
in that world (prescribe[s] our response). Here, the distance between ideology
and religion is a small one, which is why Geertz is able to speak of both as
“cultural systems.” The “function of ideology is to make an autonomous politics
possible by providing the authoritative concepts that render it meaningful, the
suasive images by means of which it can be sensibly grasped [Clifford Geertz,
“Ideology as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures, 218]. If we replace “ideology” with “religion”
and “autonomous politics” with “view of the world,” we arrive back at Geertz’s
definition of religion.
[16] George A. Crofutt. American Progress. Chromolithograph, ca. 1873, after an 1872 painting by John
Gast. Popular Graphic Arts Collection. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
Division. LC-USZC4-668, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/awhhtml/aw06e/d10.html,
(accessed March 2006).
[17] Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003 [1983]), 238.
[18] Turner, The Frontier in American History. Turner’s paper was later published as Chapter 1 of The
Frontier in American History (1921).
[19] Cited in Dave Walter (ed.), Today and Then: America’s
Best Minds Look 100 Years into the Future on the Occasion of the 1893 World’s
Columbian Exposition (Helena: American and
World Geographic, 1992), 49. The sense that with the close of the first
frontier the nation would require new frontiers to conquer was commonplace at
the turn of the twentieth century. The novelist Frank Morris, in his syndicated
1902 essay “The Frontier Gone at Last,” suggested that the “‘overplus’ of
American energy might drive the country to attempt the conquest of the world”
[cited in Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd edn. (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1982 [1967]), 147]. Manifest Destiny “meant expansion, prearranged by Heaven,
over an area not clearly defined. In some minds it meant expansion over the
region to the Pacific; in others, over the North American continent; in others,
over the hemisphere” [Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in
American History: A Reinterpretation (New
York: Vintage, 1963), 24]. “The irresistible tendency to expansion,” wrote one
commentator in a popular article of 1898, “which leads the growing tree to
burst every barrier, which drove the Goths, the Vandals, and finally our Saxon
ancestors in successive and irresistible waves over the decadent provinces of
Rome, seems again in operation, demanding new outlets for American capital and
American enterprise (cited in Kern, 239).
[20] See Joy Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity,
Memory, and Popular History (New York:
Hill and Wang, 2000), 93-122.
[21] Richard Slotkin’s Fatal Environment is a detailed study of the mythologizing of “Custer’s Last
Stand,” for nationalist and political purposes. The defeat of Custer would fuel
white-native animosity and end in the brutal massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890.
See also Kasson, 244-248.
[22] The dime-store novel emerged during the civil war and
was popular until the advent of cinema at the beginning of the twentieth
century [See Bill Brown, Reading the West (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997), 1–41]. For an introduction to the
western film, see Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor, Hollywood’s West:
the Frontier in Film, Television, and History (University Press of Kentucky, 2005). Many scholars
have advanced arguments connecting the emergence of the mass mediated genre of
the western with American imperialism, both on the continent and abroad. As
Patricia Nelson Limerick has demonstrated [“The Adventures of the Frontier in
the Twentieth Century,” in The Frontier in American Culture, ed. James R. Grossman (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994), 68-82], the frontier was a recurring motif or trope of
American culture throughout the twentieth century, and linked to an
expansionist ideology. See also Limerick’s Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken
Past of the American West (New York:
Norton, 1987)
[23] Turner, “The Problem of the West,” cited in Drinnon, 464.
[24] 9/11 gave support to an overt imperial agenda that had
been brewing in Washington before the attacks. In invading Iraq, a move
made (if not in whole, at least in part) to control a resource frontier, the
United States is acting in accord with its imperial past. In the policy document “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,”
published in 2000 by the neoconservative think tank Project for the New
American Century, we read of the group’s
desire to extend the reach of American political and economic influence across
the globe. The means for this are twofold: the development of an even more
powerful military force and the creation of a public mandate to use that force
at will. This “process of [foreign policy] transformation, even if it brings
revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and
catalyzing event–like a new Pearl Harbor” (“Rebuilding America’s Defenses:
Strategies, Resources, and Forces for a New Century,” A Report of The Project
for the New American Century, September 2000, p. 51), http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf,
(accessed April 10, 2006). Al Qaeda granted the group’s wishes on 9/11. Within
a few months, plans were set in motion to invade Iraq (see Bob Woodward’s, Plan
of Attack (New York: Simon and Schuster,
2004)).
[25] As Matthew Frye Jacobson [Barbarian Virtues: The
United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wand, 2001), 264-65] has
discussed, “not only do most Americans know nothing about the
conduct of the Philippine-American War; many do not even know that such a war
took place.” For Jacobson, the period from the closing of the western frontier
to the outbreak of the first world war is important because it demonstrates a
continuity between the expansionist visions and policies of the nineteenth
century and the modern era: “In expurgating the period of U.S. expansionism
that bridges the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Americans adopt a broken
narrative that casts Manifest Destiny and continental expansionism falsely
adrift from ‘modern’ U.S. history, and obscures the extent to which the modern
state was built, and modern nationalism generated, in close relation to the
imperialist project. The effect is to mystify U.S. involvement in global
affairs by hiding the very moment when global power was so lustily seized. …
Without the Philippines, in other words, it becomes easy to suppose a radical
historical disjuncture separating the plains wars of the mid-nineteenth century
and the Southeast Asian wars of the mid-twentieth: that U.S. soldiers referred
to areas within Vietnam as ‘Indian Country’ becomes a matter of simple
metaphor, not of deeper ideology. But our first land war in Asia was fought not
in 1950-53 [the Korean War] but in 1899-1902, and it was waged largely by
American officers who had received their practical training in campaigns
against the ‘savages’ of the Western plains in the 1870s.” See also
Walter McDougall’s Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter
with the World Since 1776 (New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 101-121. Slotkin, in Gunfighter Nation, devotes a chapter to the war in the Philippines.
Approximately 200,000 American soldiers served in the Philippines. There were
5,000 American causalities. Between 16,000 and 20,000 Filipinos were killed,
and more than 100,000 wounded.
[26] Geertz, “Ideology,” 214.
[27] “The Green Berets can be seen as the final act in [John] Wayne’s personal audition to play the
mythic embodiment of the American ideologies that went to Vietnam:
anticommunism, racism, and imperialism masked by the rhetoric of manifest
destiny and mission” [Katherine Kinney, Friendly
Fire: American Images of the Vietnam War (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 15]. Richard Drinnon, in Facing West (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980) also discusses frontier ideology in relation to American
military operations in Vietnam, as does Slotkin in Gunfighter Nation (546): “Tropes and symbols
derived from Western movies [became] one of the more important interpretive
grids through which Americans tried to understand and control their
unprecedented and dismaying experiences in Vietnam.”
[28] Patrick J. McDonnell, “No Shortage of Fighters in Iraq’s
Wild West,” L.A.Times, July 25, 2004. The
“Wild West” and “Indian Country” motifs are pervasive in this new world of war
in the Middle East. In a recent interview with Amy Goodman for Democracy Now, Sergeant Eli Painted Crow, a member of the Yaqui Nation
who served in Iraq and Kuwait in 2004, commented on the racism of imagining the
middle east as a new “Indian Country: “they called enemy territory
‘Indian country.’ And I’m standing there, just listening to this briefing, and
I’m just in shock that after all this time, after so many Natives have served
and are serving and are dying, that we are still the enemy, even if we’re
wearing the same uniform. That was very shocking for me to hear” [http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/08/1443232,
(accessed March 28, 2007)]. “Embedded” CBN (Christian Broadcast Network)
reporter Paul Strand, to give a final example, framed the early days of the
Iraq invasion with frontier imagery: “Everywhere we’ve gone we have seen
artillery ahead of us and then artillery behind and we’re getting reports that
there’s fighting in all of the cities that we’ve already been through. So I
guess if this were the Old West I’d say there are Injuns ahead of us, Injuns
behind us, and Injuns on both sides too, so we really don’t want to give the
enemy any hints about where we are.” (Reported on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club,
March 24, 2003, and cited in an online article from Indian Country Today, http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=104989802,
(accessed March 15, 2007)).
[29] The American military has a long
history of inscribing the violent propensity of the “Indian” into its own
character. Units (The Flying Thunderbirds) and armaments (“Apache” attack
helicopters and “Tomahawk” cruise missiles), for example, employ native names
and imagery. For a nuanced discussion of this issue, see Alton Carroll,
“Medicine Bags and Dog Tags: How the Military Influenced American Indian
Traditions and How the Image of Indians Influenced the Military” (University of
Arizona Ph.D. Dissertation, 2004).
[30] Robert D. Kaplan, “Indian Country,” Wall Street Journal, September 21, 2004.
[31] The western genre has undergone changes, but it
retains a hold on the collective psyche. Stanley Corkin offers some anecdotal
evidence of this claim, in discussing the reaction of students in an American
literature class to their reading of Owen Wister’s classic novel, The
Virginian (1902). “The group did not
readily recognize Wister’s misogyny. Instead, my students were captivated by
Wister’s use of the frontier as a proving ground for masculine fitness. They
found in Wister’s romance a plausible and emotionally engaging explanation of
what makes America great and what makes it America. It was at the end of the
course that I felt I glimpsed the extent to which frontier mythology defines
national identity” [“Cowboys and Free Markets: Post-World War II Westerns and
U.S. Hegemony,” Cinema Journal 39.3
(2000): 66-91].
[32] George W. Bush, “President Discusses Ag
Policy at Cattle Convention, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/02/20020208-1.html (accessed February 2005). Technically, Mr. Bush was incorrect in his Denver
speech. The “cowboy” is not central to the “American experience” per se, since the “cowboy” mythos generally
ignores the complexities of ethnicity, race, gender, and history; but the “cowboy”
has been and remains a dominant figure of American popular culture, especially
for Bush’s generation, which grew up with the western.
[33] George W. Bush, “Guard and Reserves “Define Spirit of
America,”” http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010917-3.html (accessed February 2005.
[34] For a discussion of this motif in popular culture, see
Richard Aguila (ed.), Wanted Dead or Alive: The American West in Popular
Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1996).
[35] Donald Rumsfeld, “Fort Carson Town Hall Meeting,” http://www.defenselink.mil/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=3543,
(accessed March 2005). The photograph is from the Department of Defense’s image
gallery, http://www.defenselink.mil/multimedia/ (accessed March 2005).
[36] From a Fort Carson Press Release, May 2004, http://search.carson.army.mil/pao-news/press-releases/#2004,
(accessed March 2005). The image is from the Fort Carson Website.
[37] The narratives and values attached to
the “charge of the cavalry” evoked in viewers are the outcome of more than a
century of representations of the image in popular culture. See Kasson (244-54)
for a discussion of the impact of Buffalo Bill’s performance of Custer’s Last
Stand on popular understandings of the Indian wars. Kasson notes that Theodore
Roosevelt’s “charge” during the Battle of San Juan Hill in Cuba was similarly
immortalized in Buffalo Bill’s performances, and that Filipinos, following the
war in the Philippines, were presented as “curiosities,” advertised as
‘strange People from Our New Possessions.”
[38] For a introduction to research on
this theme, see Robert Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian: Images of the
American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New
York: Vintage, 1979) and Philip Deloria Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
[39] Vine Deloria Jr., God is Red: A Native View of Religion (New York: Grosset, 1973), xi.
[40] Slotkin, Fatal Environment, 24.
[41] Slotkin, Fatal Environment, 18.
[42] Photo by Photographer’s Mate 3rd Class Tyler J. Clements.
U.S. Navy Website, http://www.navsource.org/archives/02/027228.jpg,
(accessed August 2004).
[43] David Sanger, “Bush Declares victory in War on Terror,” New
York Times, May 2, 3003; Karen De Young,
“Bush Proclaims Victory in Iraq,” Washington Post, May 2, 2003; CBS’s Face the Nation, May 4, 2003; CNN’s The
Capitol Gang, May 3, 2003; CNN’s Reliable Sources, May 4, 2003.
[44] Paul Krugman, “Man on Horseback,” New York Times, May 6, 2003.
[45] News media and journalism in general are in the midst of
crisis, driven by the transformation of news from a public service to an arm of
corporate media conglomerates. See Douglas Kellner’s recent Media Spectacle
and the Crisis of Democracy (Boulder, CO:
Paradigm, 2005).
[46] Statistics are from the 2004 Pew Research Center for the People
and the Press, “Media Consumption and Believability Study,” available at http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/215.pdf.
An excellent archive of American news programs is maintained at Vanderbilt
University, http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/.
[47] Chester Pach, in his analysis of the Lincoln landing, states the
obvious, that the event was staged for its political capital. “President George
W. Bush is no movie star, but he still knows how to be “top gun.” In a scene
that recalled the blockbuster 1986 motion picture, the commander-in-chief made
a tailhook landing in a Navy S-3B aircraft on the deck of the carrier U.S.S. Abraham
Lincoln and then shook hands with crew members who served in the war with Iraq
beneath a banner that proclaimed, “Mission Accomplished”. … Bush’s brief stint
as naval aviator in the friendly skies off San Diego provided powerful images
designed for the 2004 election campaign” (“Top Gun, Toughness, and Terrorism:
Some Reflections on the Elections of 1980 and 2004,” Diplomatic History 28.4 (2004): 549-562). Douglas Keller
makes the argument that the “Top Gun” event was a direct response to negative
images of the war and Iraqi protests of U.S. presence. “For weeks after the
fall of the Iraqi regime negative images continued to circulate of clashes
between Iraqis and the US forces, gigantic Shia demonstrations and celebrations
that precuded the specter of growing radical Islamic power in the region, and
the continued failure to produce security and stability. … Attempting to
counter the negative spectacle, the Bush administration attempted on May 1 to
organize a positive spectacle of bush piloting a naval aircraft onto the USS
Abraham Lincoln. In this carefully orchestrated media event, Bush emerged in
full Top Gun regalia
from a jet plane” (“9/11, Spectacles of Terror and Media Manipulation: A
critique of Jihadist and Bush media,” Critical Discourse Studies 1.1 (2004):41-64.
[48] Elizabeth Bumiller offered a critique of the Abraham
Lincoln event in her piece “Keepers of Bush Image Lift Stagecraft to New
Heights,” New York Times, May 16, 2003.
Kellner’s Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy analyzes and criticizes the Bush White House’s use of
“media spectacle” to subvert the democratic process. See also Frank Rich, “The
Jerry Bruckheimer Whitehouse,” New York Times, May 11, 2003.
[49] The transcript from the May 1, 2003 edition of MSNBC’s Hardball is available at http://mediamatters.org/items/200604270005,
(accessed March 2006).
[50] To be precise, George W. Bush was born in Connecticut. His
personal attire and mannerisms are the product of years spent in Texas, but
also carefully managed to project an image of the man as a “cowboy,” a style
that has been adopted by several American presidents.
[51] “The “cult of the gunfighter” is
constituted by the use of a particular character and style of action to resolve
a wide range of conflicts in a nearly limitless variety of settings. The
outward form of the gunfighter style emphasizes artistic professionalism in the
use of weapons, but what justifies and directs that professionalism is a
particular state of mind, a “gunfighter” understanding of “how the world
works.” That understanding is essentially “hard-boiled”: the world is a hostile
place, human motives are rarely good, and outcomes depend not on right but on
the proper deployment of might” (Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 402).
[52] Deep divisions in the American public have marked the
tenure of the Bush administration, and part of the debate has centered on the
“cowboyism,” of the president and his administration. I do not mean to suggest
that there is a universal “national character” in America, but that the Bush
administration has crafted speeches and political spectacles around a dominant
archetypal figure of popular culture: the “cowboy.” In Europe, the term “cowboy”
has typically been used to deride both Mr. Bush and the policies of his administration.
[See the New York Times piece by David
Sanger, “To Some in Europe, The Major Problem is Bush the Cowboy,” January 24,
2003; Natalie Yefimova’s piece in The Moscow Times (18 February 2003), titled “Experts: U.S. Must Not Act
Like a Cowboy in a Saloon”; and Kathryn Westcott’s, “Bush revels in cowboy
speak,” BBC News online, 6 June 2003]. With reference to Mr. Bush, I suggest
placing “cowboy” in shudder quotes, as we are speaking of a symbolic “cowboy,”
not the “actual folk.” I know a couple of cowboys who live north of the 49th parallel who would not include President Bush in their ranks, and I imagine
there are many south of the border with similar sentiments. Susan Faludi [“An
American Myth Rides into the Sunset,” New York Times (30 March 2003)], writes that the “President’s actions has
violated the basic terms of American Western Romance and, thereby, the terms by
which we call ourselves Americans. He’s declared war on a foundational national
myth.” While her analysis of the President’s diversion from elements of the
classic Western Romance is subtle, the fact that the President declared war in
service of a foundational national myth is
closer to the truth.
[53] Blogging
sites have argued for or against the President’s “cowboy” image, and some
cultural critics and even American politicians have taken issue with the
President’s “Cowboy Diplomacy.” Senator Christopher J. Dodd (Connecticut) spoke
at the Center for International Policy Conference in October 2003 on the
subject of "Cowboy Diplomacy: Putting the Nation at Risk,” http://dodd.senate.gov/index.php?q=node/3274&pr=press/Speeches/108_03/1021a.htm (accessed March 2006).
[54] Greenough’s “Rescue Group” was exhibited on the Capitol
Buildings steps until 1958, when it was removed and placed in storage.
[55] James Fennimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982 [1826]),
205. The image of Magua has been scanned from the SUNY edition of Cooper’s
classic text. The illustrations were made by Tony Johannot.
[56] See Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization: A
Study of the Indian and the American Mind (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1988 [1953]). Figure 5 was used in an editorial
on the abduction of the Hall Sisters in an 1832 edition of the Illinois
Frontier. See http://www.iltrails.org/nw_capture_hall_girls.html (accessed April 20, 2006).
[57] George W. Bush, “Guard and Reserves “Define Spirit of
America.”
[58] Slotkin, Gunfighter,
12.
[59] Catherine
Albanese, in her study of the numerous Davy Crockett Almanacs (written by
anonymous authors and published from 1835 to 1856) observes that the Crockett
story is not simply one of human resourcefulness in the conquest and control of
the frontier. Rather, “nature [and this includes Native peoples] was conquered
and controlled when heroic humans … lost all semblance of self-control in an
ecstasy of violence. Drinking in power from both the whiskey jug and the blood
of wild life [which included participation in the Indian wars], man conquered
the chaos of the natural world by immersing himself totally in it.” The
frontier experience pushed the hero to the limits of their own humanness. It
stripped “away all accruements of civilization,” allowing the hero to ingest
the savage power of the wild. “Civilization,” so runs the myth, calls the
frontier hero back from the brink of complete dissolution into primitivity. Davy
Crockett was simultaneously “King of the Wild Frontier,” and the “Gentleman
from Tennessee;” an “Indian fighter,” and a Congressman [‘savage, Sinner Saved:
Davy Crockett, Camp Meetings, and the Wild Frontier,” American Quarterly 33:5 (1981), 486-488]. Similarly, President Bush can use
the rhetoric of “dead or alive,” and ‘smoke “em out,” and yet remain
Presidential.
[60] “President Bush Announces Major Combat Operations in Iraq
Have Ended,” http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/05/20030501-15.html (accessed March 2006).
[61] George W. Bush, “President Discusses War on Terror,” http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/12/20051212-4.html (accessed March 2006).
[62] A report published in the fall of 2004 in the respected British
medical journal The Lancet (“Mortality before and
after the invasion of Iraq in 2003”) estimated in excess of 100,000 civilian
deaths in Iraq in the wake of the U.S. and British invasion. In the most recent
Lancet report (October 11, 2006), researchers conclude that the invasion of
Iraq is responsible for more than 650, 000 “excess deaths.´” The exact number
of civilian dead in Iraq is difficult to ascertain, and is an issue often
shaped by politics. Of the organizations tracking civilian causalities, “the
best known is the Iraq Body Count, which estimated that, up to September 26,
2006, between 43 491 and 48 283 Iraqis have been killed since the invasion.
Estimates from the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior were 75% higher than those
based on the Iraq Body Count from the same period. An Iraqi non-governmental
organisation, Iraqiyun, estimated 128 000 deaths from the time of the invasion
until July 2005, by use of various sources, including household interviews”
(from “Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq”, The Lancet, October 11, 2006). Both of these reports
are available online at http://www.thelancet.com.
[63] Even if we grant that Iraq was involved in the attacks of
9/11 or that Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction—both
assumptions, as is now painfully clear now, and, for many, including members of
the intelligence community, was clear from the get-go—the death and
destruction reigned down on Iraq is certainly not a proportional response.
Robert S. McNamara, who ought to know something about overkill (he was
secretary of defense during the Vietnam era) list “proportional response” as
one of the “11 lessons” he transmits to those engaged in modern warfare. See The
Fog of War, dir. by Errol Morris, DVD (107
min.), Sony Pictures Classics, 2004.
[64] Though seldom reported in the mainstream media, it
takes little digging to unearth daily stories of horrific, non-discriminatory
violence. Consider just one of many examples,
reported by Julian Borger in the March 21st (2006) edition of The
Guardian [http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1735748,00.html],
(accessed March 22, 2006):
After listing other incidents in the area,
the [Iraqi police] report for March 15 states: "American forces used
helicopters to drop troops on the house of Faiz Harat Khalaf situated in the
Abu Sifa village of the Ishaqi district. The American forces gathered the
family members in one room and executed 11 people, including five children,
four women and two men, then they bombed the house, burned three vehicles and
killed their animals." Among victims the report lists two five-year-old
children, two three-year-olds and a six-month-old baby.
The US military say that the deaths
occurred when US troops raided a house in pursuit of an al-Qaida suspect and
that only four people were killed. Major Tim Keefe, a US military spokesman in
Baghdad said: "A battle damage assessment, the initial reports, said that
what they saw were four people killed - a woman and two children and an enemy -
and they detained an enemy.
One “enemy” killed, another
detained, and three innocent dead (a woman and two children)—and not from
a precision guided laser bomb, but up close, in the flesh, with tactics as old
as war itself:
Both
accounts of the incident agree there was a firefight in the early hours of the morning
when US troops raided a house which an al-Qaida suspect was suspected to be
visiting. The American account said the house collapsed as a result of the
firefight, killing two women, a child, and a man believed to have al-Qaida
links. The suspect survived and was captured. But the Iraqi police report
suggests that the killings took place when the house was still standing. A
local police commander, Lieutenant Colonel Farooq Hussain, said hospital
autopsies "revealed that all the victims had bullet shots in the head and
all bodies were handcuffed.”
[65] Slotkin, Fatal Environment, 24.
[66] See David Roberts, A Newer World: Kit Carson John C
Fremont And The Claiming Of The American West (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 247-86.
[67] See the reports in the Denver Post: “Army blames leadership in Carson-linked abuse deaths,” http://v6.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~33056~2289328,00.html and “Good Guys? Military Logic Tortured,” http://www.denverpost.com/prisonerabuse/ci_0002792663.
“Ten Fort Carson soldiers have been charged with abusing or killing
Iraqis since the Iraq war began in 2003. Of those, four have been convicted and
sentenced to a total of nine months behind bars” (“Light Punishment in Fog of
War,” Colorado Springs Gazette, January
25, 2006, http://www.gazette.com/display.php?id=1314034&secid=1 (accessed March 28, 2007).
[68] The frontier myth is carried not
simply in narrative materials, such as literature and film, but in nationally
recognized historic sites, such as the Alamo, where Davy Crocket died extending
American territory in the wars against Mexico, and the Custer Battlefield
Memorial that commemorates the fall of the 7th Calvary in the wars
against the Lakota. Edward Linenthal, using a situationalist and functionalist
approach to religion, argues that America’s battlefield sites, by virtue of the
“energy expended over the contested spaces of these American battlefields,
revealed in the processes of veneration, defilement, and redefinition, offer
graphic evidence of their enduring significance as sacred ground” [Sacred
Ground: Americans and their Battlefields (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1993), 6].
[69] When the decision was made to invade
Iraq, the Canadian government, reflecting popular opinion, made the decision
not to participate. It should be noted, however, that the opposition party at
the time, the Conservative party, was staunchly in favor of the invasion of
Iraq, a position with some broad based appeal. The Conservative party has since
formed a minority government.
[70] Terry
Eagleton, After Theory (London: Allen Lane,
2003), 2-3.
[71] See note 64.
[72] For reports on prisoner abuse at Abu
Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay prisons, see Amnesty International’s “Human dignity
denied: Torture and accountability in the “war on terror”” (October 2004). [http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engamr511452004].
February 2007.
[73] For example, journalists have
suggested that the ‘saving of Private Lynch” presented in the media in 2003 was
a fabricated event [John Kampfner, ‘Saving Private Lynch story flawed,” BBC
News, May 15, 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/correspondent/3028585.stm (accessed February 2007). The title of the story was likely meant to resonate
with Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998).
[74] Cultural studies divides to some
extent on the issue of the production and consumption of mass media. Influenced
by the Frankfurt School, one camp argues that mass media and the cultural
industry is the product of elites, and used to sway a rather naïve, uncritical
mass of consumers. (This is effectively Richard Slotkin’s position.) Postmodern
approaches tend to treat the consumer as a producer. As the film and media
industries become increasingly democratized (through more affordable equipment,
the independent film movement and the internet), more narratives that challenge
dominate mythologies and the ideas and values they embody are to be expected.
[75] In religious studies, several
scholars have written on the ideological implications of myth: Robert Ellwood, The
Politics of Myth (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1999); Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and
Robert Segal, Theorizing About Myth (Amhurt,
University of Massachusetts Press, 1999). More work is needed among religionists
to extend these discussions to the analysis of the mythic dimensions and
functions of film.
[76] Slotkin, Gunfighter,
546-547.
