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Donald Trump, now preparing to lead the country into the latest version of our endless wars, recently offered this look back at American military prowess: "We have to start winning wars again. I have to say, when I was young, in high school and college, everybody used to say we never lost a war. We never lost a war, remember?... And now we never win a war. We never win. And don't fight to win." It was a curious bit of "history." Logically, his memories should have been of victory-less wars, given the ones of his growing up years: Korea and Vietnam (which he evidently avoided thanks to a trumped-up medical condition and whose massive oppositional movement he seems to have ignored).
Born in July 1944, I'm two years older than President Trump and so understand just where he's coming from: the movies. In those years of his youth and mine, sitting in the darkness catching Hollywood's vivid version of reality, we both watched Americans win wars ad infinitum. In fact, this is hardly the first time I've thought about the on-screen wars of my childhood, actual war, and an American president. Here's what I wrote back in January 2006, while considering the experiences of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney:
"In the 1940s and 1950s, when the generation of men now ruling over us were growing up, boys could disappear into a form of war play -- barely noticed by adults and hardly recorded anywhere -- that was already perhaps a couple of hundred years old. In this kind of play, there was no need to enact the complicated present by recreating a junior version of an anxiety-ridden Cold War garrison state... For children in those years, there was still a sacramental, triumphalist version of American history, a spectacle of slaughter in which they invariably fell before our guns. This spectacle could be experienced in any movie theater, and then played out in backyards and on floors with toy six guns (or sticks) or little toy bluecoats, Indians, and cowboys, or green, inch-high plastic sets of World War II soldiers. As play, for those who grew up in that time, it was sunshine itself, pure pleasure. The Western (as well as its modern successor, the war film) was on screen everywhere then.
"When those children grew up (barely), some of them went off to Vietnam, dreaming of John Wayne-like feats as they entered what they came to call 'Indian country,' while others sallied off to demonstrate against the war dressed either in the cast-off World War II garb of their fathers or in the movie-inspired get-ups of the former enemy of another age -- headbands and moccasins, painted faces, love beads... as well as peace (now drug) pipes. Sometimes, they even formed themselves into 'tribes.'
"As it turns out, though, there was a third category of young men in those years: those who essentially steered clear of the Vietnam experience, who, as our vice president put it inelegantly but accurately, had 'other priorities in the sixties.' Critics have sometimes spoken of such Bush administration figures as 'chickenhawks' for their lack of war experience. But this is actually inaccurate. They were warriors of a sort -- screen warriors. They had an abundance of combat experience because, unlike their peers, they never left the confines of those movie theaters, where American war was always glorious, our military men always out on some frontier, and the Indians, or their modern equivalents, always falling by their scores before our might as the cavalry bugle sounded or the Marine Hymn welled up. By avoiding becoming either the warriors or the anti-warriors of the Vietnam era, they managed to remain quite deeply embedded in centuries of triumphalist frontier mythology. They were, in a sense, the Peter Pans of American war play.
"...From that same childhood undoubtedly came President Bush's repeated urge to dress up in an assortment of 'commander-in-chief' military outfits, much in the style of a G.I. Joe 'action figure.' (Think: doll). It's visibly clear that our president has long found delight -- actual pleasure -- in his war-making role, as he did in his Top Gun, 'mission accomplished' landing on that aircraft carrier back in 2003..."
Only the other day, Donald Trump made his own landing on an aircraft carrier and strode its deck togged out in a USS Gerald R. Ford green bomber jacket and baseball cap, showing similar pleasure in the experience. It should have had an eerie resonance for us all as we pondered just where our next movie commander-in-chief might lead us. Who could have imagined that, so many decades after the onscreen childhood that The Donald and I shared, we'd all still be at the movies and, as TomDispatchregular and American Nuremberg author Rebecca Gordon points out today, in an American world of forever war as well? Tom
American Carnage
Fighting the Forever War
By Rebecca GordonIn his inaugural address, President Trump described a dark and dismal United States, a country overrun by criminal gangs and drugs, a nation stained with the blood seeping from bullet-ridden corpses left at scenes of "American carnage." It was more than a little jarring.
Certainly, drug gangs and universally accessible semi-automatic weapons do not contribute to a better life for most people in this country. When I hear the words "American carnage," however, the first thing I think of is not an endless string of murders taking place in those mysterious "inner cities" that exist only in the fevered mind of Donald Trump. The phrase instead evokes the non-imaginary deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in real cities and rural areas outside the United States. It evokes the conversion of millions of ordinary people into homeless refugees. It reminds me of the places where American wars seem never to end, where new conflicts seem to take up just as the old ones are in danger of petering out. These sites of carnage are the cities and towns, mountains and deserts of Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, and other places that we don't even find out about unless we go looking. They are the places where the United States fights its endless wars.
During the 2016 election campaign, Donald Trump often sounded like a pre-World War II-style America First isolationist, someone who thought the United States should avoid foreign military entanglements. Today, he seems more like a man with a uniform fetish. He's referred to his latest efforts to round up undocumented immigrants in this country as "a military operation." He's similarly stocked his cabinet with one general still on active duty, various retired generals, and other military veterans. His pick for secretary of the interior, Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke, served 23 years as a Navy SEAL.
Clearly, these days Trump enjoys the company of military men. He's more ambivalent about what the military actually does. On the campaign trail, he railed against the folly that was -- and is -- the (second) Iraq War, maintaining with questionable accuracy that he was "totally against" it from the beginning. It's not clear, however, just where Trump thinks the folly lies -- in invading Iraq in the first place or in failing to "keep" Iraq's oil afterward. It was a criticism he reprised when he introduced Mike Pompeo as his choice to run the CIA. "Mike," he explained, "if we kept the oil, you probably wouldn't have ISIS because that's where they made their money in the first place." Not to worry, however, since as he also suggested to Pompeo, "Maybe we'll have another chance." Maybe the wrong people had just fought the wrong Iraq war, and Donald Trump's version will be bigger, better, and even more full of win!
Perhaps Trump's objection is simply to wars we don't win. As February ended, he invited the National Governors Association to share his nostalgia for the good old days when "everybody used to say 'we haven't lost a war' -- we never lost a war -- you remember." Now, according to the president, "We never win a war. We never win. And we don't fight to win. We don't fight to win. So we either got to win, or don't fight it at all."
The question is, which would Trump prefer: Winning or not fighting at all? There's probably more than a hint of an answer in his oft-repeated campaign promise that we're "going to win so much" we'll "get tired of winning." If his fetish for winning -- whether it's trade wars or shooting wars -- makes you feel a little too exposed to his sexual imagination, you're probably right. In one of his riffs on the subject, he told his audience that they would soon be pleading they had "a headache" to get him to stop winning so much -- as if they were 1950s housewives trying to avoid their bedroom duty. But daddy Trump knows best:
"And I'm going to say, 'No, we have to make America great again.' You're gonna say, 'Please.' I said, 'Nope, nope. We're gonna keep winning.'"
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