G.I. Joe, Post-American Hero: The Long, Slow Death of American Triumphalism

from TomDispatch:



G.I. Joe, Post-American Hero
The Long, Slow Death of American Triumphalism

By Tom Engelhardt


The Prequel: In my childhood, I played endlessly with toy soldiers -- a crew of cowboys and bluecoats to defeat the Indians and win the West; a bag or two of tiny olive-green plastic Marines to storm the beaches of Iwo Jima. Alternately, I grabbed my toy six-guns, or simply picked up a suitable stick in the park, and with friends replayed scenes from the movies of World War II, my father's war. It was second nature to do so. No instruction was necessary. After all, a script involving a heady version of American triumphalism was already firmly in place not just in popular culture, but in the ether, as it had been long before my grandfather made it to this land in steerage in the 1890s.

My sunny fantasies of war play were intimately connected to the wars Americans had actually fought by an elaborate mythology of American goodness and ultimate victory. If my father tended to be silent about the war he had taken part in, it made no difference. I already knew what he had done. I had seen it at the movies, in comic books, and sooner or later in shows like Victory at Sea on that new entertainment medium, television.

And when, in the 1960s, countless demonstrators from my generation went into opposition to a brutal American war in Vietnam, they did so still garbed in cast-off "Good War" paraphernalia -- secondhand Army jackets and bombardier coats -- or they formed themselves into "tribes" and turned goodness and victory over to the former enemies in their childhood war stories. They transformed the V for Victory into a peace sign and made themselves into beings recognizable from thousands of westerns. They wore the Pancho Villa mustache, sombrero, and serape, or the Native American headband and moccasins. They painted their faces and grew long hair in the manner of the formerly "savage" foe, and smoked the peace (now, hash) pipe.

American mytho-history, even when turned upside down, was deeply embedded in their lives. How could they have known that they would be its undertakers, that their six-shooters would become eBayable relics? .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175107/the_next_war_on_screen_and_off