The Shrub doesn't grow far from the Bush.
Spotted a depressing -- and, in the event, minatory -- passage while browsing through Richard Slotkin's endlessly fascinating Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (NY: HarperPerenniel [a division of HarperCollinsPublishers], 1993; originally published in hardcover in 1992 by Athenaeum, a division of Macmillan Publishing Company; ISBN: 0-06-097575-X; 850 pps.); turns out that our current president ("Bush 43") isn't as different from his father ("Bush 41") as perhaps either of them would care to admit these days:
"The mythic scenarios that rationalize and perhaps govern policy no longer take their language primarily from Western movies. They draw as well on the vocabularies of the vigilante-cop film and the Vietnam War rescue-revenge fable. Terms and images derived from Vietnam are used to interpret the 'drug crisis' and to project a scenario of response.....The invasion of Panama in January 1990, which literalized the metaphor of the 'War on Drugs,' was framed by the classic rationales of the Frontier Myth: the tyrannical Manuel Noriega (formerly a paid agent of our own CIA) was characterized not only as a dictator but as a physically repellent man (with pocked face and 'Indian' blood), a sexual deviant and a drug addict; and the immediate pretext for the invasion itself ('Operation Just Cause') was the need to rescue American civilians from abuse by Noriega's forces and to avenge the assault on an American officer and his wife.
"The most triumphant, and the most disturbing, of these exercises in mythography is the Gulf War of 1991. In justifying the largest deployment of American military force since the Vietnam War, President Bush invoked the classic elements of 'captivity' and 'savage war' mythology. Saddam Hussein's potential dominance of the Gulf oil fields was seen as a danger to the future of 'bonanza economics'; defeating Saddam would facilitate long-term development and save American jobs in the present. Hussein himself was the perfect enemy for a modern Frontier-Myth scenario, combining the barbaric cruelty of a 'Geronimo' with the political power and ambition of a Hitler. This characterization was made credible by the oppressive character of the Ba'ath regime, the murderous occupation of Kuwait, and Saddam's ill-managed attempts at hostage-holding. The vivid symbolism and the passions it aroused effectively masked the questionable aspects of American policy in the region, including our earlier complicity with Saddam in his war with Iran. [emphasis added]
"More disturbing still is Bush's assertion that the violence of the Gulf War has regenerated the national spirit and moral character by expiating the defeat in Vietnam. Mythopolitical exercises of this kind are of course inimical to the successful conduct of affairs, to the extent that they palliate or even justify badly conceived policies. But their most harmful effect may be their distortion of the language and logic that inform the discourses of our political culture. By treating the Gulf War as a ritual of regeneration through violence, and asking us to receive it as redemption for our failure in Vietnam, Bush asks us to conceive our political and moral priorities in exclusively [italics in original] mythic terms -- with primary reference to the conflicts, needs, desires, and role-playing imperatives that are exhibited in mass-culture mythology, and with secondary or negligible reference to the realities of public and political life. By assuring us that the sentiments we feel when watching a movie-captivity like Rambo II or Missing in Action are a sufficient basis for engaging in war, the President authorizes the shedding of blood, not as a cruel means to a necessary end, nor as a defense of vital interests or principles, but as a cure for the illness of our imagination -- to erase the discomforting memory of our historical experience of error and defeat, and to substitute in its place the lie of 'symbolic victory.' [emphasis added]"
-- pps. 651-52
As if this isn't bad enough, here's another father/son parallel:
"The magical effects of Reagan's performance began to dissipate with the departure of the performer and with the discovery that some rather costly 'due bills' were left behind. Although the economy had revived between 1982 and 1990, the Reagan 'boom' was followed by a prolonged recession, by some measures the longest since 1945. Nor has the refurbished myth/ideology of the Reagan Revolution functioned as a unifying or consensus-making tool. On the contrary, as the 1988 presidential campaign made clear, it has helped to polarize political discourse by reviving (in more polite form) the old symbols and codes of racial prejudice, anti-intellectualism, and red-baiting. Reagan sailed into the presidency by smiling and waving Old Glory; his successor won by brandishing the flag, playing 'the race card,' and deriding his opponent's Americanism."
-- p. 653
"Excelsior," my Aunt Suckwad....
"The mythic scenarios that rationalize and perhaps govern policy no longer take their language primarily from Western movies. They draw as well on the vocabularies of the vigilante-cop film and the Vietnam War rescue-revenge fable. Terms and images derived from Vietnam are used to interpret the 'drug crisis' and to project a scenario of response.....The invasion of Panama in January 1990, which literalized the metaphor of the 'War on Drugs,' was framed by the classic rationales of the Frontier Myth: the tyrannical Manuel Noriega (formerly a paid agent of our own CIA) was characterized not only as a dictator but as a physically repellent man (with pocked face and 'Indian' blood), a sexual deviant and a drug addict; and the immediate pretext for the invasion itself ('Operation Just Cause') was the need to rescue American civilians from abuse by Noriega's forces and to avenge the assault on an American officer and his wife.
"The most triumphant, and the most disturbing, of these exercises in mythography is the Gulf War of 1991. In justifying the largest deployment of American military force since the Vietnam War, President Bush invoked the classic elements of 'captivity' and 'savage war' mythology. Saddam Hussein's potential dominance of the Gulf oil fields was seen as a danger to the future of 'bonanza economics'; defeating Saddam would facilitate long-term development and save American jobs in the present. Hussein himself was the perfect enemy for a modern Frontier-Myth scenario, combining the barbaric cruelty of a 'Geronimo' with the political power and ambition of a Hitler. This characterization was made credible by the oppressive character of the Ba'ath regime, the murderous occupation of Kuwait, and Saddam's ill-managed attempts at hostage-holding. The vivid symbolism and the passions it aroused effectively masked the questionable aspects of American policy in the region, including our earlier complicity with Saddam in his war with Iran. [emphasis added]
"More disturbing still is Bush's assertion that the violence of the Gulf War has regenerated the national spirit and moral character by expiating the defeat in Vietnam. Mythopolitical exercises of this kind are of course inimical to the successful conduct of affairs, to the extent that they palliate or even justify badly conceived policies. But their most harmful effect may be their distortion of the language and logic that inform the discourses of our political culture. By treating the Gulf War as a ritual of regeneration through violence, and asking us to receive it as redemption for our failure in Vietnam, Bush asks us to conceive our political and moral priorities in exclusively [italics in original] mythic terms -- with primary reference to the conflicts, needs, desires, and role-playing imperatives that are exhibited in mass-culture mythology, and with secondary or negligible reference to the realities of public and political life. By assuring us that the sentiments we feel when watching a movie-captivity like Rambo II or Missing in Action are a sufficient basis for engaging in war, the President authorizes the shedding of blood, not as a cruel means to a necessary end, nor as a defense of vital interests or principles, but as a cure for the illness of our imagination -- to erase the discomforting memory of our historical experience of error and defeat, and to substitute in its place the lie of 'symbolic victory.' [emphasis added]"
-- pps. 651-52
As if this isn't bad enough, here's another father/son parallel:
"The magical effects of Reagan's performance began to dissipate with the departure of the performer and with the discovery that some rather costly 'due bills' were left behind. Although the economy had revived between 1982 and 1990, the Reagan 'boom' was followed by a prolonged recession, by some measures the longest since 1945. Nor has the refurbished myth/ideology of the Reagan Revolution functioned as a unifying or consensus-making tool. On the contrary, as the 1988 presidential campaign made clear, it has helped to polarize political discourse by reviving (in more polite form) the old symbols and codes of racial prejudice, anti-intellectualism, and red-baiting. Reagan sailed into the presidency by smiling and waving Old Glory; his successor won by brandishing the flag, playing 'the race card,' and deriding his opponent's Americanism."
-- p. 653
"Excelsior," my Aunt Suckwad....