21.09.1995

American war story

Danny Hammill reviews 'The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation' by Tom Engelhardt (Basic Books 1995, pp351)

TOM ENGELHARDT’S clinical dissection of the ‘American dream’ is a work of extraordinary originality. If forces the reader to radically readjust his mental map - if not throw it away altogether.

Engelhardt’s main contention is that the United States has always needed a “national narrative” of triumph, or “war story”, through which the Americans can define themselves as a distinct people. He demonstrates in almost scary detail how this national narrative progressively dis-integrated after World War II, leading to the post-Vietnam “afterlife”.

Interestingly, the author examines the Gulf War within the context of this decomposing “afterlife”. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait gave US imperialism the chance to eradicate the Vietnam experience.

As Engelhardt puts it,

“To the extent that Iraq was imagined at all, it was a desert, a sandy blank on the map on which, as with some Hollywood back lot, any facade might be erected. The single image chosen was Saddam Hussein’s face, large as a flag, mountainous as Rambo’s musculature; a dreamscape of evil” (p286).

Somewhat eerily, Engelhardt describes how the Gulf War itself became an entertainment spectacle, “calibrated for anxious thrills like an Indiana Jones film or a theme park ride” (p287).

Naturally, this attempt to recapture a childlike sense of triumphalist innocence could only work if the US government controlled the media. This it succeeded in doing. In fact, Americans saw the birth of what Engelhardt labels “total television”. This “total television” ensured that the “war proved promising exactly because the boundaries between military action and media broke down in such a way that military planning could become media reality” (p292).

Engelhardt portrays the war as a 43-day advert for American goods, particularly weapons systems. Quite correctly in my opinion, Engelhardt believes that the Gulf War was not so much a “war for oil” (the standard leftist explanation) but was more “a response to the Japanese and European economic challenges in that it emphasised the leading-edge aspects of the country’s foremost exports: arms and entertainment” (p295).

The author’s account of the “original myths of the war story” (p23) is extremely harrowing. He details how the first wave of people to the New World viewed it a boundaryless and overwhelming wilderness.

The only method by which the European settlers could construct a City of God amongst this great emptiness was by viewing the native peoples of the Americas as part of ‘pre-history’. The dark-skinned ‘others’ were not part of the New World human landscape.

The natives were systematically portrayed as the invaders, violently intruding on a settled world. The new settlers became the victims, as the endless horror stories (some true, many not) about women being held captive by “the savages” demonstrate.

The main strength of this book is the astonishing, and dazzling, range of source material it draws upon - from films, comics and toys to government reports and scientific works. Somehow, the author manages to keep such a disparate and apparently unrelated body of material under control. He also employs, very effectively, his own childhood memories and experiences, which give the book a very human, compassionate quality.

This book is required reading for anyone who wants to get to grips with the ‘American nightmare’ and the peculiar ‘national psychology’ of that country. Engelhardt vividly outlines the dangerous nature of the beast, which is wounded but still wants to maintain its mastery of the world. The “war story” might have another chapter yet - if we are unlucky.

Danny Hammill