G.I. Joe, Post-American HeroThe Long, Slow Death of American Triumphalism
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch: Given the couple of hundred years that made triumphalism a kind of American sacrament, it's nothing short of remarkable that the young are no longer willing to troop to movie theaters to see such films. If you think of Hollywood as a kind of crude commercial democracy, then consider this a popular measure of imperial overstretch or the decline of the globe's sole superpower. Only recently has a mainstream discussion of American decline begun in Washington and among the pundits. But at the movies it's been going on for a long, long time.
It's as if the grim reality of our seemingly never-ending wars seeped into the pores of a nation that no longer really believes victory is our due, or that American soldiers will triumph forever and a day. There may even be an unacknowledged element of shame in all this. At least there is now a consensus that we fight wars not fit for entertainment.
As a result, war as entertainment has been sent offshore -- like imprisonment and punishment. Hollywood has launched it into a netherworld of aliens, superheroes, and robots. Something indelibly American, close to a national religion, has gone through the wormhole and is unlikely to return.
Joe lives. So does war, American-style -- the brutal, real thing in Afghanistan and Iraq, at Guantanamo and Bagram, in the Predator and Reaper-filled skies over the Pakistani tribal borderlands, among Blackwater's mercenaries and the tens of thousands of private, Pentagon-hired military contractors who now outnumber US troops in Afghanistan. But the two of them no longer have much to do with each other.
If the Chinese, and South Koreans, and Saudis, and enough American young men vote with their feet and their wallets, there will be another Joe film. And if Washington's national security managers have anything to say about it, there will be what's already regularly referred to as 'the next war.' Film and war, however, are likely to share little other than some snazzy weaponry, thanks to the generosity of the Department of Defense, and American kids who will pay good money to sit in the dark and then perhaps join up to fight in the all-too-real world.
