30 May 2004ACEPHALE.ORG REVIEW OF "THE FOG OF WAR: ELEVEN LESSONS FROM THE LIFE OF ROBERT S. McNAMARA" (directed by Errol Morris; produced by Julie Bilson Ahlberg and Errol Morris; cinematography by Robert Chappell and Peter Donahue; music by Philip Glass)
Toward the end of Errol Morris's Academy Award winning "The fog of war", an interview with former US Defence Secretary and World Bank President Robert McNamara, the film's subject remarks, seemingly off the cuff, that one of the most important lessons he has learned in politics is "never answer the question that has been asked of you; answer the question that you wish had been asked of you". If one assumes, reasonably enough, that the filming proceeded chronologically from one of McNamara's lessons to the next, one might think that McNamara was dropping a big hint to Morris about how he thought the interview had gone. Be this as it may, it seems that Morris failed to appreciate the value of this extra little lesson, since he allows McNamara, still a politically authoritative voice, to tell his own story as he sees fit, without critical intrusion. The documentary is presented as a portrait of a jaded old man at the end of his life, confessing his sins and conferring his hard-earned wisdom to those who will take his place. McNamara is supposed to have learned from his mistakes. It takes the form of eleven "lessons" -- vignettes of the man, spliced with historical footage -- introduced by pithy summaries of his teachings. From start to finish, however, the film presents a picture of an inveterate political manipulator doing what he has done best since he was a schoolboy: touting the "noble cause" of America and rationalising his own behaviour. This is not necessarily to impute to McNamara a particular connivance in sitting for this interview. Undoubtedly, much of his apparently boundless capacity for putting himself in a good light, even if history has to undergo radical cosmetic surgery for his benefit, is deeply habitual; if there is just one thing that is clear in the film about McNamara's ethical disposition, it is that he is fiercely competitive and immodestly arrogant. He remembers fondly being the little "Irish boy" in class, who set out to surpass all the Jews, Italians and Chinese. And so he did. It is therefore curious that we are introduced to the man with what looks like a quotable commendation from the journalist and author Walter Lippman, who was one of the "liberal" opponents to McNamara's conduct of the Vietnam War. Lippman said, "The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on". One should recall that Lippman was father of a peculiarly American school of government and business propaganda and was a stout believer that, with the exception of intellectuals such as himself, the vast majority of society was a herd that had to be guided by "necessary illusions" and the "manufacture of consent". Such techniques, he thought, might cause a "revolution ... in the practice of democracy". He once declared, "There is only one purpose to which a whole society can be directed by a deliberate plan. That purpose is war, and there is no other". Incidentally, concerning the Vietnam War, Lippman, in his moderation, thought the use of nuclear weapons against China should only be a last resort. What kind of character are we dealing with then? I do not mean to suggest that McNamara's performance on screen fits the caricature of a shameless warmonger. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending upon one's aims, such figures exist only for those who live in political fantasylands, a kind of extended childhood nurtured by Lippman's "necessary illusions". On the contrary, McNamara is very charismatic, even in his worried, weather-beaten, depilated octogenarian flesh: his gaze is still sharp, he looks straight through the camera and into your eyes, he is articulate and he tells a good story. Nor are all of his stories what is euphemistically called "spin" these days -- that is, misinformative propaganda -- but rather some of them are anecdotes that lend a personal dimension to a figure who for many of us is abstractly political. As far as that goes, the film is an interesting character study. Listening to him, it is hard to doubt that like so many of his and the current generation, he loved his family, thought he had a duty to serve his country, and believed that America was the land of opportunity. At the same time, it is obvious that his wife played an ancillary role, he has no doubt of his nation's Manifest Destiny, and he seems to have no sense of the immensity of the power which has accrued to him, let alone the proportion of his to anyone else's. Even in old age, with the possible benefit of many years of reflection, he speaks of people as if they were playthings, and he seems to think the decisions he took in government or at the World Bank had the same material consequences -- intentional of otherwise -- as those of a Midwestern shopkeeper, a waiter in a New York café or a Vietnamese peasant. His coarse sociological distinctions, such as that between "peoples" and "nations" make his mantra "Nuclear war will destroy nations" sound shallow. One wonders precisely what he means by his Lesson 5, "Proportionality should be a guideline of war". Der NebelwerferMuch has been made of the film's revelations -- and certainly the snippets of tape recorded conversation with Lyndon Johnson are new -- but the documentary is more full of admissions of things that are more or less well documented elsewhere, which McNamara may no longer think it useful to seek to hide. What is perhaps ultimately more interesting than McNamara's admissions (or quasi-admissions) per se is the use to which he puts them. For example, while explaining Lesson Two ("Rationality will not save us"), he alludes to the fact that during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962, the US had a seventeen-to-one nuclear advantage over the USSR -- quite the opposite of President Kennedy's alarmist "missile gap". This ratio was no historical accident, being due in large part to the US having MIRVed [1] its missiles earlier than the Soviet Union in its constant effort to maintain nuclear strategic superiority [2]. In the course of teaching Lesson 1 ("Empathize with your enemy"), he mentions the CIA's repeated attempts in the 1950s and 1960s to assassinate the Cuban president Fidel Castro, which came to public notice during inquiries by Congressional committees in the 1970s (though still little-discussed), and to which he insists he was not privy. He also mentions the US-led invasion of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in 1961 under Kennedy, an event that is rarely mentioned as much because it was an embarrassing failure as because of its illegality and illegitimacy. He contends that the reason the US succeeded in forcing the Soviet Union to withdraw its missiles from Cuba was because the American leadership "empathised" with Krushchev. While he admits that the confrontation was a deadly gambit (they could have "destroyed nations") and asserts that Castro himself told him in 1992 that 162 nuclear warheads had been transported to the island, he thinks that the US calculated correctly that it could get its way and still allow Krushchev to save face by claiming that he had saved Cuba from destruction by the United States. In hindsight, "rationality" might have saved us after all. By the same token, this explanation makes the enemy look irrational, the tactic appearing to be an appeal to Krushchev's fears and vanity more than to his reason. McNamara fails to mention that the emplacement of missiles in Cuba might have seemed quite reasonable to the Soviet leaders, not only because of the aforementioned US nuclear superiority, but also because the US already had missiles on Turkey's border with Russia. Although these missiles were being replaced by submarine-launched Polaris missiles, Kennedy refused Krushchev's offer of mutual withdrawal, thus making a point about who had a right to stick his missiles where [3]. It is difficult to imagine that McNamara failed to regard how both the Soviet and Cuban governments could reason to themselves that the US was an imminent threat. Presented with this evidence, some of which McNamara himself provides in small doses, I think McNamara is trying to insinuate that the "luck" that he expressly says saved us from nuclear conflagration in 1962 was a quality of Russian and Cuban decision taking, as opposed to careful American calculation: Krushchev was timid and vain, and Castro never chose to authorise the use of the putative warheads for reasons we can at best guess at. At the very least, he seems to imply that American reasoning is for the Greater Good, Russian and Cuban reasoning narrow and selfish. Someone so powerful as Robert McNamara can shift the premises of discussion and change the rules of the game to suit his or her purposes without putting his or her position in immediate danger. Under such conditions, questions of right and wrong, rationality and irrationality become matters of definition. It seems that our rationality alone will not save us from the likes of McNamara. The Vietnam WarNowhere does McNamara put his admissions (and omissions) to better use than in the account of the war in Vietnam that he gives to Morris. He says that the US leadership failed to empathise with the Vietnamese, as they did with Krushchev [4]. He emphasises, as if astonished and troubled, that the Vietnamese "thought the US was a replacement of the French as a colonial power". Of course, "Nothing could be farther from the truth!" American intentions being what they may, one might forgive the Vietnamese for having thought so, since by the time of the disastrous siege of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the US was paying 80 percent of the French war costs, a total of $2.6 billion. However, we have already seen how the US leadership's immaculate philosophy of first principles gives short shrift to empirical evidence. Besides, McNamara deftly covers the period from the end of the Second World War till 1962 entertaining the filmmaker Morris with stories of his years at the Ford Motor Company. There he put the skills be applied to calculating kill indexes while in the Eighth Air Force’s B-29 command in the Pacific to the improvement of the safety of passengers in cars. He thereby furthers the myth not only that the war was a terrible mistake (since "we" did not understand the Vietnamese), but also that the American role in it began with good intentions in 1962 (or late 1963, if you are inclined to let Kennedy off the hook). In "The fog of war", McNamara also puts some the problems in Vietnam down to "excessive firepower", a term that should have a familiar ring to anyone following world news. Curiously, during the war, McNamara seems to have thought that this was a form of tough love. Perhaps he thinks in retrospect that he smothered the Vietnamese with too much of it. Rather than failing to understand the Vietnamese, McNamara feigned that he cared a great deal about their plight. He appeared constantly frustrated by their inability to comprehend the good that was being done to them by the dropping of hundreds of thousands of tonnes of high explosives on them in "pacification" efforts and then offering them "asylum" in select parts of Vietnam, far from their homes, including "strategic hamlets" that looked remarkably like prison camps. Again in the film, McNamara himself describes the bombardment during Operation "Rolling Thunder" as two to three times as many bombs as were dropped on Western Europe during the whole of World War II [5], while delivering Lesson 7 ("Belief and seeing are both often wrong"). He told Congress during the war that successful bombardment forced civilians "to move where they will be safe from such attacks ... regardless of their attitude to the GVN [South Vietnamese government]" [6]. To indulge in his clinical language, by the end of this "operation" in 1966, the CIA estimated that about 30,000 civilians had been killed by the bombing. This was Rumsfeld's "shock and awe" 1960s-style. However, it apparently comes nowhere near "destroying nations", to McNamara’s mind. Indeed US officials prided themselves on not crossing the genocide line, since it would "appall allies and friends", according to McNamara at the time. This is a point that Noam Chomsky highlights in his analysis of "the mentality of the backroom boys" (1973), who included McNamara, an interpretation of the 7000-page "Pentagon papers", a study of decision making during the war, commissioned by McNamara and leaked to the New York Times by Rand Corporation employee Daniel Ellsberg in 1971. During the war, Assistant Defence Secretary John McNaughton said of the destruction from the air of locks and dams in populous places,
"Pacification programs" did not end with bombing or with publication of the Pentagon's chronicle of the war. Operation "Speedy Express" was carried out in the Mekong Delta in early 1969, one of several such programmes. It is worth mentioning both because it is unusually well recorded, outside of government archives, and because it gives lie to McNamara's claim that "we" failed to empathise with the Vietnamese. Rather, the Vietnamese, it seems, failed to understand what was good for them. McNamara testified before the US Senate that no North Vietnamese -- that is to say, Communist -- regular, armed units were deployed in the Mekong Delta. Instead, the area was full of home-grown members of the National Liberation Front (known pejoratively as "Viet Cong"), who, as well as fighting US forces, were running schools, hospitals and a profitable sugar cane cooperative. Conversely, during the course of "pacifying" this region, US officials were particularly keen to avoid killing too many civilians, lest it "precipitate" the intervention of China or the Soviet Union. Hence on the one hand, McNamara's insistence that the US was fighting real or imagined international Communist imperialism is undermined, and on the other, it is revealed that, contrary to his assertions, the US leaders knew full well that the Vietnamese saw their war as one of national liberation. "Speedy Express" employed high-altitude B-52 saturation bombing, air strikes with napalm, high explosive and anti-personnel bombs, and 24-hour artillery shelling. In its wake were left 120,000 refugees from "Viet Cong controlled areas". The official six-month body count was 11,000, in contrast with the official figure of 748 weapons confiscated [7]. I cannot help but think that those running the war were either monstrously incompetent or, knowing that the VC had a popular base, even though not every Vietnamese was armed, they decided that the only good Injun was a dead Injun. Of course, as McNamara does in "The fog of war", the corporate media and critics in government preferred to promulgate the former hypothesis, blaming "indiscriminate use of firepower", much as they rarely go beyond commenting upon "heavy-handed tactics" in southern Iraq today. However, evidence seems to support the contrary hypothesis. We have already heard comparison made in the media between the recent American siege of Al-Fallujah and the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. The My Lai massacre, which happened before "Speedy Express", during Operation "Wheeler Wallawa" in 1968, was exceptional in that it received such detailed coverage in the military and civilian press [8] and resulted in two courts martial. Of "Speedy Express's" body count of 11,000 (cited above), some 5000 were killed in Kien Hoa alone -- virtually the entire town. While the destruction of My Lai is notoriously grisly [9], its death toll of around 500 was just one tenth of that at Kien Hoa. We should bear this in mind when attending to reports from Iraq: we hear only tales of those atrocities to which the media are alert or that get past the censors, such as the massacre of the wedding party in Makr ad-Dib near the Syrian border with Iraq, and, even then, like the torture at Abu Ghraib prison, the stories reveal part of a wider pattern of deliberate design. For instance, in addition to killing villagers during the "pacification" efforts in Vietnam, US soldiers regularly rounded up civilians, beat them, questioned them and sent them off for safe-keeping in some "hamlet" under US control. This too finds a parallel in recent events in Iraq. Reporters in Vietnam were inevitably led to the conclusion that the problem of US "tactics" was not "indiscriminate use of firepower", but rather "discriminating use -- as a matter of policy, in populated areas". I hope that their colleagues will be so astute in their observations of Iraq. Whether in Vietnam or Iraq, it seems that when people fail to empathise with the good intentions of American invaders, McNamara's kindly Lesson 5, about "proportionality" is superseded by his Lesson 9 ("In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil"). Again, the lessons prove felicitously easy to negotiate. Lessons learned?Discussion of "The fog of war" turns inevitably to the question of whether McNamara's insights should be taken to heart by politicians involved in the Iraq or the "war against Terrorism" today. To the extent that McNamara comes across at times as an advocate of the "precautionary principle", touted mainly by liberals these days -- as in his case against nuclear armament or his reminder that US bombing of Japanese cities met the criteria of a war crime but was not tried as such, only because the US was victorious -- his lessons are salutary for politicians. The war in Iraq is rife with negligence and incompetence, without mentioning its incautious premise that the ends justify the means (including lying about the necessity for war in the first place). One might also hope that the leading politicians really will learn to empathise with Iraqis, rather than simply insisting that they know what is best for them, though this may be giving politicians' repeated public pronouncements about "staying the course" and delivering "democracy" (usually made with a hand gesture that makes me think the message is tattooed on the palm of their hand) more benefit of the doubt than they deserve. It is probably vain to try and calculate the measures of ignorance, deceit, self-delusion and bad faith that make up their thinking. The precautionary principle is well and good when confronting, for example, potentially catastrophic new technologies. All the same, talk of the problems of "unintended consequences", "systemic failure" and "risk assessment and management" is very trendy in the intelligentsia today. As the renowned anthropologist Mary Douglas has pointed out, such abstract discussions can lead to the "depoliticization of risk", in which no account is taken of the unequal magnitude and distribution of its causes and consequences across society. In such circumstances, it is easy to reduce discussion of the war in Iraq to whether it is being prosecuted correctly or not, without considering the power relatively few people have to see their political decisions realised or of the ethical implications or their destructive effect on others. The film's title reflects exactly such a preoccupation with risk. Granted that what happens in war is always nebulous -- full as it is with unforeseeable disasters, breakdown in communication in the clamour of battle, and the succumbing of reason to an intoxicating mixture of blood, testosterone and adrenaline -- it is only aggravated by the copious fog emitted by McNamara and his kind. The latter sort of fog, at least, is conscious and preventable. I think, therefore, that the most important lessons of the film are not those that McNamara spells out, but rather those that come from how he spells them out and what he leaves unsaid. They are not for promoters of "good wars", but for anyone who wishes to avoid wars in the first instance. Among them might be the following. Firstly, always insist that they answer the question you have put to them. Secondly, let your questions be informed not by the priorities of people like McNamara, but by the experiences of people at the sharp end of the consequences of such policy-makers' decisions. Thirdly, if you want to escape the endless return of the same grim, though increasingly dangerous realities, then you should constantly inquire into your own history, stay true to your memory and talk to others who likewise care. As for McNamara's final lesson (no. 11), "You can't change human nature", given that he has experienced so such of humanity from the cockpit of a B-29 or in the meeting rooms of the Pentagon, as well as his evident inability to empathise with anything except someone else's vanity, I am inclined not to accept his credentials to speak wisely on the subject. Footnotes1. That is, each missile was given "multiple independent re-entry vehicles" for its warheads. The Polaris submarine-launched missiles carried three such as of September of 1960. [Back] 2. In the nuclear arms race, the Russians only briefly had the jump on the Americans in the development of cruise missile technologies. [Back] 3. See R.J. Walton's Cold War and Counter-Revolution (Penguin Books, 1976), as well as Yale University's "Avalon Project". [Back] 4. Of course, the Vietnamese did not have nuclear weapons, which presumably would have made them easier to empathise with. [Back] 5. We can partly thank Hollywood's having turned the Vietnam War into a strictly American experience for the fact that this, along with the death toll of over one million Vietnamese, normally passes without mention. [Back] 6. This and the other quotation from Congressional hearings are from Chomsky and Hermann's The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism. The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume I (South End Press, 1979). [Back] 7. Figures from Kevin Buckley's "Pacification's deadly price", Newsweek 19 June 1972. Incidentally, the US is quite overtly not taking body counts of any Iraqis. Evidentally, the manifest good of the United States' invasion is such that this need not even figure in the moral arithmetic anymore. [Back] 8. Army photographer Ronald Haeberle took scores of pictures of the destruction of the village of My Lai and its inhabitants. [Back] 9. See Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim's Four Hours in My Lai (Penguin, 1993). [Back] Feedback should be sent to me, Michael Lane, at mflane@acephale.org 22 May 2004CINDERELLA AND TRAILER TRASH: A TALE OF TWO WEST VIRGINIAN SOLDIERS IN IRAQIt has already become a media cliché: the photograph of Private Lynddie England pulling a naked, anonymous man across the floor of Abu Ghraib prison on leash has been touted as the singular symbol of the illegal, ruthless and brutally incompetent American-led war in Iraq. The depiction is startling in its simplicity. England is looking expressionlessly at the man under her control, in contrast with his pained countenance. The figures are backlit, adding an air of mystery, and the lines of their bodies form an off-centre right angle. The figure of the tortured man stretches to the right beyond the frame, like an impressionist touch. Colourful clothes are draped through the door grilles in the background. Besides composition, it probably also helps the symbolism of brutality that by most conventional standards for women in Western society, England is more homely than her fellow female conspirators, such as Specialist Sabrina Harman, who also appears among the 100s of photos of US soldiers torturing and degrading the living and dead bodies of Iraqi prisoners in their charge. The picture of Harman, complete with little girl forehead curl and immaculate all-American smile, leaning down to the unbreathing face of an Iraqi packed in commercial ice bags and giving the thumbs up is, if not so nicely framed, at least as palpably wicked as the already notorious photo of England. Yet England, who comes from Fort Ashby, West Virginia, has been branded "trailer trash" not only by the American press, but also, particularly, by the British. The reactionary tabloids The Sun and The Daily Mail are notable examples of the latter, while that Etonian idiot Boris Johnson MP wrote of "smirking jezebels from the Appalachians" in the Daily Telegraph. Harman, in contrast, has not been singled-out for the pillory. Sadly, England fits the bill too well: short, as though stunted, hair cropped tomboyishly close, pug-nosed, shown with a cigarette clenched between her teeth (perhaps insinuating other unhealthy habits). Such unfair treatment should in no way exonerate Private England. Her television confession that she was just following orders, as if against her will, was not only muttered with eyes averted in a manner that smacked of insincerity, but also that the incriminating evidence shows her leering in a way that makes Harman's toothy grin look cosmetic. She appears to be enjoying herself too much. Yet all the soldiers' smiles in the various pictures are sickeningly reminiscent of certain photographs of lynchings in the American South, with the body of the victim reduced to an object for the inscription of pent-up hatred. England may indeed be, as they say in Britain, a nasty piece of work. However, I am in danger here of encouraging the stereotypes that contribute to the symbolic value of Linddie England and would separate my "gentle readers" from the "rednecks". I wish not to do so, since the presentation of the issue is, I maintain, all about the uses of gender, race and class stereotypes [1]. To begin with, it should also be clear to anyone who has been paying attention to recent events in Abu Ghraib prison for longer that an advertisement break that England, Harman and the handful of others who have been implicated were in fact following orders, just as England says. While certain sadistic touches may have been their own brainchild, I think that Seymour Hersch is right when he says that someone charged with analysing Iraqi social norms much more closely has his or her hand in this (see his New Yorker articles). Again, this should be no surprise, given the reports that have been trickling out of US-controlled Camp X-ray in Cuba and the prisons of Bagram and Kandahar in Afghanistan. These tales range from the bizarre -- likely to make the comfortably cynical, urbane newspaper reader chuckle -- such as forcing Afghan prisoners into submission by blasting them endlessly with Barney the Dinosaur's "I love you" song, to such twisted forms of retribution as specifically permitting US women soldiers to kick suspected Taliban half to death (see HRW's report on Operation "Enduring Freedom"). Such oppressive and exploitative objectification of persons is not limited to prison guards. Indeed, I suggest that it cannot be, if we are to explain with any nuance how women in such traditionally male roles as soldier and warden are themselves still subject to masculinist media manipulations. In his more didactic press conferences, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has enthusiastically shown his delight in testing new military hardware and strategies on convenient populations. Doubtlessly, this extends to forms of "coercive interrogation". After all, the US "scientised" many of these, the best known work being that of psychologist Edgar Schein of MIT in the 1960s, which was derived in part from debriefing US POWs of the Korean War, who had suffered at the hands of North Korean warders and their Chinese minders (as ironic as that may seem given the rhetoric first of Anti-communism and then against the "Axis of Evil"). Some of the methods developed were applied experimentally during the "lockdown" of the federal penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, in the 1970s and 1980s (see the AFSC's "survivor's manual" [2]). As has been pointed out in some press commentary, the influence of high-ranking US government and military officials must include not just ordering such programmes but also having created a context in which they are permissible. George Bush has famously spoken of the "evil-doers" who are our enemies and of how the peoples of the world are either "with us or with the enemy". I need not mention the stereotypes of Arabs in particular, promulgated by books and films. How else could Donald Rumsfeld feel he can get away with saying glibly about the pictures of dead and dehumanised Iraqi inmates, "That's life. We need to move on", as he did the other day in front of cameras. I expect that most moral people would call so enormously perverse and shameless a statement simply "evil". However, the objectifying attitude of Rumsfeld and his ilk goes beyond the usual callous treatment of people as pawns or dominoes on a world game board, an attitude that comes with being well insulated against the consequences of one's political decisions; it extends to actively making those close to the ground absorb the effects of risks, and to exploiting people for both material and ideological capital. Take as a case of the last point the government's and media's treatment of Private Jessica Lynch, in marked contrast the pervasive portrayal of Lynddie England. Lynch is from Palestine, West Virginia, the same state from which England comes. After her capture by the Iraqi army on March 23rd of last year, together with a half dozen of her comrades in the 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, she magically became the darling of the mass media and the Washington regime's own propaganda machine. Fortunately for them, Lynch is blonde and blue-eyed, one adulatory website saying of her, "the face of courage in Iraq is a pretty mountain girl". Stories of her courage and bravery became more and more exaggerated, some versions having her single-handedly fighting off a squad of armed soldiers, despite having a compound fracture of the leg and bullet and bayonet wounds. All of this was framed in the manufactured context of Arab men all being wife-beating, sheep-molesting "camel jockeys" -- the very racist premises that almost certainly informed in part the kinds of abuse meted out in Bagram and Baghdad. Lynch's rescue by US special forces in a night-time raid was almost made to order. I fitted into the moulds of both the Hollywood "no man left behind" military moral fable and the post-Medieval "damsel in distress" tale of chivalry. Of course, most of her comrades who survived that fateful day suffered much the same injury and physical trauma, and though they may have been more difficult to rescue dramatically, no tales of derring-do were invented about them. This in no way diminishes Lynch's real courage and perseverance under extraordinary conditions. However, among the "damsels" in her company that day was Shoshana Johnson of Fort Bliss, Texas, who also had limbs broken and was left emotionally battered. Unfortunately, Williams, like England, suffers from the "homeliness" factor. Besides, she is black -- which says so much about the relative values of social currencies in the United States even today [3]. To Lynch's apparent credit, she has publicly denied many of the wilder allegations concerning her captivity, venturing dangerously, from the perspective of the media, toward thanking some Iraqis for their kind treatment of her. Furthermore, she has decried the US government's use of her ordeal for patriotic celebration. Lately, the government and its admirers in big media have had to fall back on insinuating that her memory is bad. Just as in the war of firepower and torture in Iraq, not everything works according to plan in the war of words and images back home, as the investigation instigated by a certain worried and somewhat lesser-known soldier proves (Joseph Darby, from the mining town of Jenners, Pennsylvania) . However, when there is less than perfect conformity to the homecoming queen or "white trash" types, when pretty girls pose with corpses and unpretty persons become heroes, the mouthpiece of the powerful often becomes suddenly silent. None of these obstacles has kept the powers that be from trying to exploit both Jessica Lynch and Lynddie England for their different ideological potential. It helps when constructing the appropriate symbolism that they are both women, for their respective stories have been turned into variations on the dual "madonna or whore" theme that persists in stories of suitable roles for women in at least Western society. Women who display bravery under extreme duress are more angelic than men, since bravery is a masculine virtue, so we are told. Men who make a bloody mess of something -- whether in war, politics or business -- are "ham-fisted", even "loveable rogues", if they are on our team. Women in the same circumstances, as we are supposed to know, are "bitches" and "jezebels". Moreover, I think it would be wrong to downplay the "trailer trash" aspect of this differential treatment. All of the women I have discussed come from the rank-and-file working class of America, that sector of society that does not exist by definition in official US political doctrine. England is a reservist who worked in a chicken processing plant. Harman was the manager of a Papa John's pizza restaurant in her hometown, for whom the Reserve was a bit "more money". Johnson is a single mother, career soldier (like her father Claude) and a cook [4]. As for Lynch, she had aspired to be a pre-school instructor, but she could not afford the tuition fees for the necessary qualification, so she went into that seemingly securest of jobs, soldiery. Her ordeal "earned" her a university education, granted by the governor of West Virginia. Evidently, she had not deserved it before. If ever there was a case for arguing, against the prevailing doctrine, that there is an oppressed and exploited class in the US, it is to be found not only in the "poverty draft" that drew these persons into the armed forces, but also in the uses to which the heads of government and the corporate media have put their life stories [5]. They would have us believe there is no working class in America, nor that they have any role in repressive racial, sexual or gender discrimination. There are just the worthy and the unworthy poor, whose relative merits and demerits change according to political expediency and emergency: Cinderella and trailer trash. The Man giveth, and the Man taketh away -- life, liberty and one's place in posterity. This, it appears, must be accepted as a core article of faith by both Iraqis and Americans for sake of building George Bush's Kingdom of Heaven on earth. Footnotes1. I think there is rather more ambiguity about class identity in the United States, especially since the "white flight" to the suburbs after the Second World War, than there is in Britain. In the former, the prevailing ideology of the Protestant elite has been one of economic meritocracy, pure and simple. In the latter, aristocratic values, for example, have been so long refined as to be presentable, at least, as timeless. However, whenever constitutive concepts of class -- that is, those by which class identities are effectually reproduced -- are concerned, race, ethnic identity and indeed gender are rarely far away. While spoken accent is a more salient characteristic of class identity in Britain than in the US, the number of inhabitants of "North-east Corridor" and Californian urban agglomerations who habitually slip into a "redneck" accent when imitating someone foolish or prejudiced should still, I think, be cause for alarm. It is not incidental that the urban elite was once mainly WASP, the settlers of Appalachia Scots-Irish. Nevertheless, this ambiguity allows some room for play: many Yankee liberals no doubt never regarded Bill Clinton's frequent Arkansanisms as a cause for derision, but they readily derogate George Bush's manner of speaking (wider problems of intelligibility notwithstanding) as "hokey". [Back] 2. I myself helped to launch an investigation of the "super-maximum" Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center in Baltimore, from which had emerged repeated allegations of deliberate sleep deprivation and exposures to extremes of hot and cold, inter alia. [Back] 3. A remarkable collection of news articles on Shoshana Johnson is kept, for reasons mysterious to me, on a Greek tourist agency website. [Back] 4. As far as I know, the only commentaries in a major newspapers on the economic circumstances of both England and Lynch, as well as other soldiers in Iraq who have made the news, are Gary Younge's opinion in The Guardian (London) and Naomi Klein's column in the Globe and Mail (Toronto; reposted here), neither of which, I think, sufficiently addresses the propagandistic use of double standards, as good as these pieces are. [Back] 5. Unfortunately, I have no time now to address sufficiently the issue of individuals deliberately exploiting Americans' ambivalence about class identity (not to mention race and gender) in the marketplace of consumables that passes for culture. Britney Spears (Cinderella, in her first avatar) and Eminem (trailer trash) come to mind. (Bear in mind that "white trash" has always been an implicitly racist epithet.) Some culture mavens tout such commercial behaviour as subversive. While I think that playing with ambiguities and contradictions in dominant ideologies in order to hybridise new and complex resistant strains of social identity is desirable, I urge people to remember that much of what we see on TV requires working hand-in-glove with the same people who bring you Britney, Pepsi, Jessica Lynch and the CBS Evening News. [Back] Feedback should be sent to me, Michael Lane, at mflane@acephale.org | ARCHIVESMarch 2006November 2005July 2005May 2005February 2005October 2004September 2004August 2004July 2004June 2004May 2004 |