August
14, 2003, 2:30 p.m.
The Elite Force
War and masculinity
and the pundits and thinkers who don’t get it.
By James Bowman
ow
splendid that Hasbro is to bring out a new version of its G.I. Joe doll
meant to look like George W. Bush in his flight suit after landing an
airplane on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln
last May. Called an "Elite Force Aviator," the action figure
representing "George Dubya himself in all his glory and flight equipment"
will be available in KB Toy Stores in September and will make a great
Christmas present for little boys, with or without a Jihad Joe for him
to do battle with. And, as a side benefit, it is sure to make the anti-Bush
Left apoplectic with rage.
This is not only
because they hate and despise the president and can't bear that anyone,
particularly impressionable children, should regard him as a hero but also
because the military trappings themselves are an insult to their view of
the world — part of what Maureen Dowd called at the time of the carrier
landing "the myth of masculinity." Judging only by the number
of books that have been written lately to debunk it — another one by
Leo Braudy amusingly titled From
Chivalry to Terrorism is due out from Knopf at about the same time
that the George W. doll appears this fall — this is a pretty powerful
and pretty scary myth. That, at any rate, is presumably why Maureen Dowd
sometimes seems to have devoted her life to belittling it, and shrilly insisting
that it's all a fake.
In her column last
May, for example, she compared the carrier landing to the male-stereotyping
in The Matrix Reloaded, noting that Karl Rove had "cast Mr.
Bush, who officially declared his re-election bid on Friday, as a G.O.P.
Neo: a reluctant hero, a man of few words and one true- blue woman, who
must battle enemies and forge alliances in a strange world, building strength
and character as he rescues humanity." What could be more ridiculous?
Unless, I suppose, there were some significant numbers of humanity that
he had rescued. Say in Iraq. Or Afghanistan. But to Miss Dowd,
the ridiculous male hero-pose is by definition only a pose. "Testosterone
as a campaign accessory," she concludes. "Because some things
never change."
She speaks truer
than she knows. Not only does male "stereotyping" never change,
neither does the reason for it, which is war and the threat of war. A
useful corrective to the bland assumption that seems to be shared by Miss
Dowd and Mr. Braudy — namely that warlike-posturing is what produces
wars rather than being produced by them — is to be found in Constant
Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage by Steven A. LeBlanc
(with Katherine E. Register) (St. Martin's Press, 272 pages, $25.95).
The book is as much a critique of academic anthropology's willful blindness
to the centrality of warfare in human experience as it is an adumbration
of the reasons for accepting that centrality.
Steven LeBlanc and
Katherine Register do not go into the matter, but there is also an anthropological
investigation to be made into the reasons why feminists, like Miss Dowd,
and intellectuals, like Mr. Braudy, cling to their belief in a mythical
matriarchal world without war and therefore without swaggering presidents
dressed up as G.I. Joe. Because that world is a hypothesis, a fiction,
it takes a large army (you should pardon the expression) of writers and
pundits and wits and English professors (Dr. Braudy's trade) furiously
scribbling away around the clock to keep our belief in it alive in spite
of bitter experience. Or rather not-so bitter experience, since the sheltered
life purchased for our leisured classes by American wealth and power is
the first requisite for those who would ridicule and belittle that wealth
and power.
By coincidence, I notice that one of the "four cardinal principles"
enunciated by Michael J. Lewis, head of the art department at Williams
College, in the Wall Street Journal for the memorial to the victims
of September 11th at the World Trade Center site is that it must portray
"No violence."
The memorial must
not perpetuate the violence of the attacks, nor imply it by fractured
form. It must heal the wounds, not pick at the scab. Most of us experienced
9/11 on television and have a storehouse of visual horror to draw on.
As vivid as those visual images were, they have no place in this design.
Ah, yes. Shades of
the "cycle of violence" that those Middle Eastern primitives,
unlike our very clever American columnists, haven't the wit to escape
from. It's all very well their taking the high moral ground about somebody
else's quarrels, but I wonder if the widows and orphans of 9/11 will be
equally keen on refusing to "perpetuate the violence of the attacks"?
They, at least, will be harder to persuade that "violence" is
not a perpetual feature of the human condition — like the masculine
virtues (and vices) which it has always elicited.
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ow
splendid that Hasbro is to bring out a new version of its G.I. Joe doll
meant to look like George W. Bush in his flight suit after landing an
airplane on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln
last May. Called an "Elite Force Aviator," the action figure
representing "George Dubya himself in all his glory and flight equipment"
will be available in KB Toy Stores in September and will make a great
Christmas present for little boys, with or without a Jihad Joe for him
to do battle with. And, as a side benefit, it is sure to make the anti-Bush
Left apoplectic with rage.
