Ideology of America in the 21st Century and Militarization

Before delving into the ideological waters of present day Americanness, it seems appropriate to examine the theoretical framework in which this thesis approaches the concept of ideology and its functions. The first part of the framework’s approach stems from Jameson’s view of ideology in the Political Unconscious, in which ideology is approached in Althusserian terms (Dowling 83). Althusser defined ideology as having two crucial components. First, it

represents “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence”

(Althusser 123), and that it has a material existence (125). This material existence is found in the form of ideological apparatuses, which are social functions such as a “small Mass in a small church, a funeral, a minor match at a sports club, a school day, a political party meeting, etc.” (Althusser 127).

In other words, ideologies such as Americanness are enacted, performed, and realized through ritualistic events and their discourses. We have already seen a concrete representation of a material signifier of an ideological apparatus in the quote from the Yellow Birds at the end of the last chapter. The use of yellow ribbons first originated from a folk song titled “Round Her Neck She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” and was heavily featured in the John Ford film She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) but has in recent years become to represent a demonstration of support for soldiers and veterans (Parsons). Furthermore, ideology does not exist as false consciousness, but rather as a fundamental and “necessary illusion produced by the operations of the system itself” (Dowling 82; emphasis original). This also necessitates approaching ideology as “less as some static ‘set of ideas’ that as a set of complex effects internal to discourse” (Eagleton 198). Ideology therefore is a process of constant shift and renegotiation.

The second part of this thesis’s approach to ideology concerns the way in which ideology serves to as a function of legitimizing some power structures, while seeking to suppress others that might challenge it. What are crucial at this point are the notions of hegemony and hegemonic discourses. Hegemony does not refer to just ideology, but rather to the “ways in which a governing power wins consent to its rule from those it subjugates”

(Eaglestone 112). Hegemony can be further “discriminated into its various ideological, cultural, political and economic aspects” (Eaglestone 113). Like ideology, hegemony is not a monolithic structure, but rather a complex and dynamic process. This characteristic of

hegemony was noted by Raymond Williams: “A lived hegemony is always a process [...] It is a realized complex of experiences, relationships, and activities, with specific and changing pressures and limits,” and that hegemony “does not just passively exist as a form of dominance. It has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified. It is also continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures not at all its own” (112).

Hegemonic discourses serve as a way of reinforcing and renegotiating hegemonic ideologies, which have an “inherently” hidden nature: “the very logic of legitimizing the relation of domination must remain concealed if it is to be effective”, and that the fact that it is “easily possible to lie in the guise of truth” has to be acknowledged (Žižek 8; emphasis original). Finally, ideology is also considered as a strategy of containment, a Jamesonian concept explored in the first chapter of this section, suggesting that ideology viewed this way “is one crucial way in which the human subject strives to ‘suture’ contradictions which rive it in its very being, constitute it to its core” (Eagleton 198).

Having explored briefly the theoretical concepts used in this thesis, I now move to address the ideology of Americanness, and the form it has taken in the 21st century. While other national ideologies certainly display all the characteristics of ideologies explored in the previous paragraphs, the essence of Americanness is uniquely suited for the object of this thesis. As with hegemonies in general, Americanness can be viewed as a process of constant re-negotiation, “a movement along the spectrum of contradiction,” the essence of which must be “continually claimed and reclaimed through polemic and counter-attack”

(Ward 8, 15). The way in which in Americanness is enacted also makes it eminently suited for analysis in these terms. As Ward points out, America has a certain culture of performance, which highlights the “performative aspects of politics, group and individual identities, and the inculcation of behavioural norms [...] America equals theatre” (9;

emphasis original). Ward’s use of America versus as opposed to United States in this context

is telling, as it forces the perspective from the country as a political entity towards the cultural characteristics of its ideology. This performative nature of Americanness provides us with a plethora of examples of ideology in action, as the yellow ribbons that briefly above show.

It also makes American culture especially receptive to the conflation of military imagery and solutions with entertainment. War is theatrical by its nature, necessitating a certain linguistic distancing by its participants (Fussell 192), while combatants fight in

“theatres of war” and wear costumes in the form of uniforms. The ideology of Americaness cannot be discussed without its troubled relationship with race, and whiteness as the default.

As Bush and Feagin note, whiteness is the state from which “all ‘others’ depart” (89). As such, it forms a core tenet of the hegemonic American ideology and informs the formation of cultural representations and discourses that reinforce hegemonic Americanness. Much like race, the masculine also provides American ideology with another point of departure.

The male and masculinity that flow from the American frontier experience form a core part of Americanness as this chapter shows. The present day American masculine ideal still follows Goffman’s characterization of it as a “young, married, white, urban, northern heterosexual Protestant” (128). Goffman further notes that “Any male who fails to qualify in any of these ways is likely to view himself — during moments at least — as unworthy, incomplete, and inferior” (128). Both statements still hold largely true despite having been written in the early 1960s (Holmberg 2).

Of interest to this thesis are the characteristics of Americanness, or American ideology, that make it particularly fertile ground for the ongoing process of merging of the political unconscious and the imagery of the military unconscious. Perhaps the most important of these characteristics is the relationship between violence and the American mythos of justified expansion and conquest of the continent. The American frontier experience highlighted “regeneration through violence” as a core part of modern Americanness (Slotkin

11-12). It is from this experience that the archetypal image of the present day American masculine ideal gained its characteristics during the early 20th century, when the rapid pace of social and economic change saw the old masculine ideal of the “genteel patriarch” give way to a new “rough frontier-inspired masculinity” (Holmberg 9). Holmberg defines this version of American masculinity as the “American Macho” (9) who is defined the possibility of “remasculinization” of the American male that gauged the manhood through conquest and violence (9). The newly born American masculine ideal found his natural calling in war, which became to be seen as a redemption for masculinity, and the warrior became the ideal American man” (Holmberg 43). The warrior as the new American masculine ideal is clearly visible in the discourse of the era. In Gunfighter Nation, Slotkin quotes senator Albert Beveridge who, following the American invasion of the Philippines in 1898, went on to proclaim that the war meant “opportunity for all the glorious young manhood of the republic

— the most virile, ambitious, impatient, militant manhood the world has ever seen“ (108).

It is no wonder, then, that the archetypal American hero would evolve to take on other masculine forms in cultural texts such as the “individualistic detective, sheriff, or villain”, whose solutions to problems did not arise “out of ratiocination or some scheme of moral order but out of ready and ingenious violence” (Hofstadter). Slotkin notes that the

“pragmatist” and individualistic nature of this “quintessentially American” heroic archetype found one of its purest form in the gunfighters of the late 1940s and 1950s Westerns the same time as the US government was starting to engage in counter guerilla warfare against nascent communist movements in the Third World (427). The characteristics of what is considered supposedly proper American masculinity are found in the archetypal gunfighter.

He is a “professional man of arms, cool, isolated, self-sufficient, capable of self-defense under any circumstances” (Slotkin 438).

Through the re-telling of American myths, the frontier and the character of the gunfighter of 1950s American cinema can be seen as a staging ground for the ideological anxieties that stem from the American political unconscious: the communist insurgent becomes the Indian, while the newly formed Special Forces (SOF) that advise local forces becomes the gunfighter or the cavalry regiment. Slotkin also connects this development of the SOF mystique in the guise of the gunfighter to the American martial tradition of irregular warfare, which dates as far as back as the colonial period when independent and self-sufficient American units such as rangers, served as auxiliaries and scouts for the British, marking their style of warfare “distinctly American” (454; emphasis original). Therefore, the hegemonic soldier can be viewed as a logical evolution of this development of the archetypal white American hero, as the example of John Wayne as a link between the tradition and the now of Vietnam used in the previous chapter demonstrates: the hegemonic soldier is closely linked to a long chain of violent and masculine American heroes.

The discourse of violence serves as prime example of the non-transparent way in which a hegemonic ideology of Americanness constantly reinforces itself through cultural representations. Ward considers the Civil War as another seminal historical moment in the formation of American gun culture (110), not only because it gave birth to the National Rifle Association (NRA), but also because it resulted in the formation of what is now a fundamental trait of American ideology, paranoia and distrust of the Other:

The war defined the American as a man carrying a gun. Like all war, it never ended, but was carried on by other means. NRA culture is rooted, unconsciously, in the indelible anxiety generated by the knowledge that the neighbor, the brother, the fellow-citizen had been, and therefore must at some level still be, the enemy. (111)

These historical factors of a culture of self-reliance and individuality, distrust of the Other and government, and the view that gun ownership is a fundamental right all come into play as we chart the development of American ideology in the 21st century. This development is characterized by a militarization that has entrenched itself in every almost facet of American culture (Boggs and Pollard 566). War changes societies, and American society and culture have become increasingly militarized after 9/11 and the following imperial anxieties resulting from almost a generation of continuous war in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention smaller military operations around the globe (González 28). The generational ‘forever war’

has had a profoundly marked effect on American society at all levels, leading some military leaders to wonder “whether the war on terrorism will blur militarization into militarism”, with society’s “emphasis on freedom and individualism displaced by obedience, discipline, hierarchy, collectivism, authoritarianism, pessimism, and cynicism” (Kohn 181-182).

While the American military and the entertainment industry have always been joined at the hip, but the relationship has been strengthened even further post 9/11 with the gradual transformation of war into light entertainment, stemming from cultural militarization and geographical distance from war. They have experienced a sort of conflation, giving rise to an “intimate” relationship between the two entities, which has been given names such as

“the military-industrial-entertainment complex” (Höglund, The American Imperial Gothic 118) and “Fantasy Industrial Complex” (Fountain 3). An example presented by Johan Höglund illustrates this relationship and its implicit hegemonic discourses: “when landing on the aircraft carrier, Bush not only performed a scene from a seminal movie, he simultaneously condoned and inhabited the intimate relationship between the military, the military-industrial complex and the entertainment industry” (The American Imperial Gothic 118). The hegemonic ideology of American military supremacy and imperial ambition embedded within the two levels of discourse (Top Gun and the political photo op) become

conjoined in a way where one simultaneously reinforces the other. They are further entangled due to the unique position the military-industrial-entertainment complex inhabits in 21st century America:

Because of the ability of the military-industrial-entertainment complex to commodify military practice, to generate (new and more modern) tools of war in the form of actual hardware, and to produce the narratives that make these tools seem essential, it can be described as part of the most recent stage of modernity in the US. (Höglund, The American Imperial Gothic 121)

In other words, not only does this complex produce and reinforce the ideological form of militarized Americanness through video games, movies, and television, but it also produces the material signifiers of the ideology, such as guns and military hardware, that serve to reinforce that very same ideology (Höglund, The American Imperial Gothic 119). The internal logic of this complex rests on the process of reification, resulting in the reinforcement of action figure-like representations of the hegemonic soldier.

It is no coincidence that the semi-automatic rifle AR-15, a civilian version of the assault rifle M16 used by the American military, has become a grim symbol of 21st-century America through which this new, militarized American ideology is enacted through video games, movies, and mass shootings. With its sleek black form, the AR-15 does not differ greatly from its military grade counterpart, the only major difference being the removal of automatic fire. Thus, it provides its users both a sense of belonging to the military unconscious entering the political, as well as harkening back to the tradition of the American

“citizen soldier” of revolutionary times, and the historical continuum of archetypally violent American heroes.

Ironically, while American culture seems to become more and more militarized, Americans find themselves increasingly disconnected from the realities of military life. The

non-conscript nature of the modern American military and economic realities have led to recruits being drawn from families with long service histories, leading Martin L. Cook to point out that the US military has essentially become “a family business” (ix), while the geographical distance and relative safety of the American mainland from conflict zones gives ongoing American wars a certain disconnected nature. The disconnect exacerbates the mythologizing tendency seen in hegemonic discourses, resulting in a rift between the imagined and the real. The result of the factors discussed in this chapter resembles a simulacrum, an ideological entity constructed entirely out of representations and images drawn from the military unconscious and filtered through the fantasy industrial complex, one that emphasizes the militarized nature of the new Americanness, while also linked to a national history of masculine regeneration through violence: the hegemonic soldier.