March 23, 2003, 9:32 a.m.
Please re-read Transnational Feminist Practices Against
War and the column I wrote for
Punk Planet early last spring to see where I am going with the
this.
I've been trying to think through some of the issues brought up by
the war, most immediately the tenor of public debate (or its lack) about
political practices, democratic models and historical conflicts. Bear
with me as I try to work out these narrative themes in public.
So far, it seems to me that the admonition to "support the troops" -invoked in the midst
of debates about the legitimacy of this war and the U.S. unilateralist
stance- is the functional equivalent of a show-stopper, a plug in the
hole, whether it appears as a warning ("You're undermining our boys,
traitor!") or a platitude ("Can't we stop politicizing the war and all
agree that our boys need our support right now?").
Its roots lie in the Reagan-era invention of the
Vietnam Syndrome -- conventionally understood as a loss of nerve, the
shameful emasculation of U.S. military prowess, and a despised
hesitation on the part of the "American public" to support another war
of invasion or intervention. In an inverted projection of aggression,
this discourse of wounded (masculine) pride produced the famous,
plaintive monotone, "Do we get to win this time?" (Sly Stallone at his
non-emotive best, no less.) This is a "we" that takes no account of
the Vietnamese
. The recuperation of the
symbolic American soldier as the real innocent of the war in Vietnam -a
"good man" doing his job, betrayed by the people and politicians he left
behind- removes the Vietnamese and their civil conflict from the
landscape of war.
What also goes unremarked in the so-called Vietnam Syndrome is the
implicit state violence that transforms citizens into expendable soldiers for
the war machine in the first place. The anti-war appropriation
of the slogan, arguing that real
support for the troops would "bring them home," comes
closest to enabling a possible critique of state violence and the nature
of the "necessary sacrifice" on behalf of the administration's
geopolitical aspirations.
Reiterated and often adjusted to appeal to various positions, this
popular slogan -even when uttered in the spirit of conciliation -is
nonetheless ideological, and seems to work at several, interrelated
levels:
First, it takes form as an antipolitical
gesture that refuses disagreement or meaningful contestation. It operates to short-circuit the political (and
specifically the democratic) with a moral authority assumed to transcend
all
political stances. It is
a fantasy of disengagement that undermines a necessary sociopolitical debate about nationalism and militarism, international relations
and geopolitical power.
This approach emphasizes the familiar "human
interest" angle, which is then limited to the point of view of the
soldier who is produced as both an individual ("Joe loves his dog Muffy,
a stray he's raised since he was a kid") and an abstraction ("Joe
is the typical soldier, doing a job for love of his country"). This consensual space of
political transcendence is emptied of debate, as if how some populations or
individuals are able to be (or not) in the world is not a matter of
politics.
Second, in doing the first, it reinforces an
"us versus them" principle, a possessive patriotism which claims "our
boys and girls" as "ours" and delineates -even by way of notable
absence- a monolithic "them."
It traffics in the active disavowal of the political and
historical conditions of the conflict, its implications for targeted
populations, and the ethical debates involved.
Third, the slogan produces a very specific
language of containment that forecloses critical debates for managerial
and therapeutic discourses of support.
The managerial
language of professionalization renders the conflict hygienic, a matter of proper allocations,
collateral damage and statistical models, locating war outside
history or politics.
The slogan also removes the scene of pain from
the battlefield and away from what is done there, to others,
and relocates the scene of pain to the psychological interior of the
soldier-patriot and what is done there, by "us."
If we condemn civilian deaths in the march through
villages and cities, we are traumatizing "our troops." If we discuss the
doctrinaire fundamentalism of the administration in its pursuit of war,
we are hurting "our troops." The therapeutic language of support reduces
the range of acceptable terms and categories with which to discuss war
to nonpolitical and sentimental ones.
We see this happening in the news media as the war coverage is split between the managerial
language and imagery of allocation and deployment and the sentimental
language and imagery of loved ones (most often represented by tearful
wives) left behind, promising faithfulness and domestic stability (which
has multiple implications when so apparently gendered):
"By employing conventions taken from narrative TV melodrama
(including a focus on the family - the news 'family' and the families
investigated), news programs can achieve the emotional intensification
and moral polarization associated with dramatic serials." (Lynne
Joyrich, 1988, "All that Television Allows: TV Melodrama, Postmodernism
and Consumer Culture," Camera Obscura 16, p. 133)
These other entries about national
sentimentality, the tyranny of "right feeling," and the politics of
"feeling badly" also
apply to this discussion about the regulation of feelings on behalf of the nation-state.