Trump Has Exposed The Leaking Guts Of The US War Machine
I can run the tapes backward to a moment in my own childhood, riveted to the black and white TV absorbing the 1955 Disneyfied tale of Davey Crockett at“The Alamo.” There is Davey outsmarting a gambler, beating up an“Indian,” and bringing both along as conscripts to fight for an Independent Texas. Crockett met his end at the Alamo, but the manner of his death will never be resolved.
Did he surrender to Mexican forces (and face execution) or did he die fighting to the death, wielding his exhausted rifle like a club, and falling from a bullet while standing on a hill comprised of Mexican corpses?
Of course, the Disney version has Davey Crockett swinging his rifle madly against a vast onslaught of faceless Mexican soldiers as the background song plays out:
The film ends with the inscription:“March, 6, 1836, Liberty and Independence Forever.” Regarding the Alamo, Raul Ramos wrote (in the context of the 2019 effort to remove confederate monuments):
The Alamo became a rallying cry, a foundational component of the emerging concept of“manifest destiny”-the ideological core of the most expansive colonial settler state in all of history.
But for me it is personal - Davey Crocket at The Alamo inducted me into US war culture at the age of 7. I had my faux coon skin cap, my“smoke gun” that emitted a loud crack and a puff of smoke. The cocking mechanism on this“toy” sometimes snapped shut violently, and many children endured a trip to the ER to have a few stitches to repair a bloody thumb. I remember that well 71 years later.
Every child in the US has a story of this sort, a rendezvous with military propaganda (disguised as amusement) at a defenseless early age. War is implanted into our fragile subconscious at the very dawn of our awareness. But we are not largely destined to embrace warrior culture in the sense of the mythical Davey Crockett, but, rather, we have been trained to get out of the way.
American warfare since Vietnam has aspired to be fought by gadgets that attack civilians from the sky. For most of us military patriotism means politely deferring to veterans with a muttered,“Thank you for your service.” We who do not enlist balance personal fear with the idea that war participation manifests the purest virtue.
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