So, I keep thinking of 'Top Gun'... (Professor: Beware New Militarism)

So, I keep thinking of 'Top Gun.' 1988 - the American public flocked to the first overtly PRO-war movie in two decades or so (even the WWII-nostalgiafests had carried sincere or token anti-war subtexts/themes.)

'Top Gun' is romanticized adrenalized MILTARIZED glory-fantasy. Everyone in it is handsome and pristine and formulaic. And, especially significant, the protagonist is called upon to fight a NAMELESS enemy, NEVER-SEEN, one against which we, the U.S., are VICTORIOUS! It doesn't matter who the enemy is. Or even why we are fighting them! I went to this movie at the time (at the dollar theatre) and thought:

"WTF? What is happening here?" I hadn't seen anything like that for decades.

Yes, I've been thinking about 'Top Gun' the last few years. Tom Cruise! The singing of Phil Spector-Wall of Sound Righteous Brothers love song in a bar! Fast Fighter Jets! Fast Motorcycles! Sweaty Sex! Faceless/Nameless Enemies! Plot devices.

So, Thursday night I'm listening to On Point, WBUR's NPR radio show. Here is West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran Andrew Bacevich discussing the new American militarism warning that "America -- from the White House right down to popular culture -- has fallen dangerously in love with the idea of military might. It has become, he says, a country seduced by war. In his new book, The New American Militarism, the soldier-scholar describes it as a dangerous new American union of militarism and utopian ideology. A union, he says, that is turning the United States into a nation that believes, unquestioningly, in the primacy of armed power."

The President is 'OUR COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF,' we say, Bacevich points out, not the commander-in-chief of the armed forces among the many other identities/roles/jobs. Listen to the interview here.

And then Bacevich mentions 'Top Gun!' Gives it as example of the change in the zeitgeist, the collective U.S. cultural attitude, since the 60s, don't remember his exact words - and that's pretty much why I've been thinking of it the past few years. It was pointing to this NEW blind militarism of the new century. (He didn't mention the Nameless/Faceless Enemy aspect, that's still mine!)

Much more to it than just my 'Top Gun' connection, though. Worth a listen. (Sorry I don't have a transcript.)

We all got together with the German foreign exchange student to watch Top Gun at a friend's house, and he kept saying throughout the movie, "That's made in Germany. That's made in Germany, too." At first we all got mad about it, but it got really funny after awhile, and then we started wondering if it was true.

Scary to find out how true it was, actually. Beginning of the end of Republicanism in me, actually.

I came across what I believe was the show "JAG" which I have never before seen. I was astounded. It literally made me nauseated that Americans are watching this stuff.
I only saw about five minutes worth but it had all the cliches.
A squad of handsome GI's were working their way from house to house, alley to alley in the slums of Baghdad. The towel headed Muslims were stupidly popping out of every nook and cranny blindly spraying with their AK's while the Americans would take each one out with a single shot from a .45 from 50 yards. One American was hit in the abdomen but only stopped to look down at his wound and stoically mutter "It's nothing."
All the while they were being followed by an "embedded" journalist with a video camera. After the carnage was over and they were surrounded by a hundred Iraqi corpses they grabbed the journalists camera, smashed it and bravely sprayed it with bullets. I guess it was an intrusion into their private pain. Wasn't that straight out of some Vietnam movie?
I don't know how else to put it. We Americans in general are fucking stupid and childlike.

'jag' is hideous, but so is 'law'n'order' and 'fbeye' and and and....'family ties'....And 'raiders of lost arse' and 'star wars' and close encounters' and ...well, you get the pic! All this nazi style propaganda has created a vile, almost sub human animal that says 'praise rhe lard' and votes busheviki....Bushinc, say what you will, is corrupt, stupid nasty brutish and short (:)) hopefully) and they're destroying the THING from inside out ...and the destruction they're reeking isn't something a few hundred billion gonna fix!!! So,whatever these monsters thought they had achieved by their ignorance will cost them/their kids so terribly one day they all be 'flower children' again! (btw i thot 'flower children' were nasty lil pos who had no brains and used their good luck looks to pretend they were sweet'nice, which manson etal finally proved was a goddam lie)

I get the same reaction to JAG myself. I used to watch it from time to time for some simple escapism and would usually make a mental note to myself that the program was obviously being used as a tool to spread pro-military/pro US propaganda. However, ever since the Iraq war, it just turns my stomach too much to sit there and watch the Pentagon's brainwashing horseshit being fed directly into the brains of the largely zombified North American TV audiences.

The following quote is from "Brainwashing America" by Dr. Norman Livergood, a former department head at the US Army War College:

In an earlier article, I reviewed the varied aspects of personality profiling and simulation. While serving as Head of the Artificial Intelligence Department at the U.S. Army War College, 1993-1995, I conducted studies on profiling, psychological programming, and brainwashing. I explored and developed personality simulation systems, an advanced technology used in military war games, FBI profiling, political campaigning, and advertising. Part of my discovery was that:

* unenlightened human minds are combinations of infantile beliefs and emotional patterns

* these patterns can be simulated in profiling systems

* these profiling systems can be used to program and control people

Personality simulation systems are being used to create political campaigns that apply voter profiles to control their voting behavior. TV commercials and programs use personality simulation to profile viewers to control their purchasing and viewing behaviors. And sophisticated propaganda and brainwashing techniques are being used by the Bush junta to keep American citizens under control.


www.new-enlightenment.com/brainwash1.htm

I think that's why I intuitively used the word "childlike".
I've never really watched any of these network primetime shows(for the last ten years). I was shocked. It's a formula that I thought we had left behind. I could just feel the millions of spongelike brains sitting in darkened living rooms fixating on giant screen tv's.

The evil reporter cliche! Hit them in the nose! Break their camera! What a joke...

contributed somewhat. I've read (in the Village Voice, maybe it was) about these movies guys over there are making themselves, with all sorts of bloody footage intercut with camp scenes, all overlaid with a pulse-pounding soundtrack. One cineaste said that they're actually very professional looking, even though the people making them seem to be non-professionals--they're soldiers who carry digital videocameras around with them when they get into it. (Guess that shows how far consumer technology and movie-making software has come...don't know if they're doing it in iMovie or not, but certainly Apple has made movie-making accessible to just about anyone with the cash to plunk down on the equipment and software).

Annnnyywayyy... this seems to be a new way for soldiers to cope with the horrors of war. They distance themselves emotionally--I've even heard quotes from soldiers describing a battle as being like a videogame or a movie--so they can survive with their sanity basically intact.

But during the period you're talking about, not only have movies become more pro-military, they've become increasingly violent. We've also seen the rise of first person shooter videogames and many are quite gory. People are becoming more and more desensitized to at least the idea of horrible violence. This generalized culture of violence makes it easier to accept the violence of war.

Just to be clear, I'm not knocking violent movies (just saw Sin City last night, for instance) or videogames (until recently, when I got caught up in DU, I was a player--now I spend my free time here!). I'm not saying there's a direct connection.

I guess I'm saying that the stylized violence that's embedded in our culture allows us to distance ourselves from real violence and horror. However, I do believe that if we were shown the actual brutalities of war on a daily basis (and it were shown in such a way as to prove that it's part and parcel of war--not simply isolated incidents but the nature of warfare today), that ability to distance ourselves would be removed.

Oh I don't know. Anyway, thanks for your post and the link!

The one of the black GI's went home and got shot, so the other GI's stormed his neighborhood with a seal team, then outwitted and surrounded the stupid, pool playiing, rap listening gangsters while learning to speak the street language. As a result, the young child gangster that none of the others really cared about got his head right and went to boot camp.

in the public.

Top Gun was more about a boy meets girl thing with a few aircraft scenes thrown in. Not really a war movie. Guy conquering his fears type movie.

You are forgeting about:
Platoon in 1986. Very good.
Heartbreak Ridge in 1986. Blew...
Red Dawn in 1984. Good one.
Big Red One in 1980. Great movie.
Good Morning Vietnam, 1987. ok film
Apocalypse Now, I believe in 1979. Outstanding movie.
Full Metal Jacket in 1987. Not bad itself.
Hanoi (sp?) Hilton in the late 80s. Good flick.
The Rambo films, early to mid 80s. Barf.

Thats all I can think of right now.

Thanks for the link, really enjoyed listening.

Part of the fascist militaristic impulse from the popular point of view (selling militarism) has to do with the colonial mindset. Hannah Arendt points this out in the Origins of Totalitarianism. Ordinary men without means in a class society, can be empowered, even at the lowest ranks, by enduring basic training, and then being exported to foreign lands where they can lord it over the natives, in a prototypical form of despotism. The soldiers are attracted to this model of power by the impotence of their own lives at home where the opportunity for advancement is basically non-existent. One can readily observe American soldiers mistreating native peoples around the world based upon misconstrued notions of cultural superiority and general ignorance in many foreign lands. Unfortunately, some peoples view this model as a thing of the nineteenth century rendered obsolescent by WWII. These people will fight back against Americans and their proxies.

Once one assumes the power based model for social organization rather than the law or human rights oriented model, one is well on the way to fascism. Of course, American corporate elites, have no problem with the model as it suits their predatory designs at home and abroad.

I read his first book, "American Empire", and it was excellent. He's the type of person I most respect - has has an idealogical slant, in his case conservative, but does not allow party loyalty to blind him. Both sides, right and left (particularly right), need that right now.