Holy War: Cowboys, Indians, and 9/11s

by Mark Cronlund Anderson

Following the events of September 11, 2001, then President George W. Bush doffed his cowboy hat and scuffed his boots in the dirt of his ranch as he addressed the citizens of the United States. This swagger was no accident. In donning the tropes of the cowboy, Bush evoked in the public imagination the foundational, nation-building story known as the frontier myth. The frontier myth, a creation story for a nation, is a story of war. The United States was born in war with the Indians and since then, has never stopped waging war. This perpetual war is no coincidence, argues Mark Cronlund Anderson, but should instead be understood as a pattern established at birth a pattern that the nation is compelled to symbolically reenact in the name of nation-building. Holy War contends that while 9/11 may have been a unique historical event, the narratives that describe and define that event remain far from unique. Through an examination of the media narratives surrounding the Mexican War, Custer s Last Stand, the Vietnam War and interventions in Nicaragua (with a few aliens and zombies tossed in for good measure), Holy War demonstrates that the response to 9/11 that God has decreed that we must wage a defensive war against the infidels, who are trying to destroy all that is civilized is as old as the United States itself."

176 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2014

Reviews

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Holy War is another of those books addressing what Anderson calls America's creation myth. Conflict on the American frontier, according to the myth, established a cultural framework of an energizing nation destined to expand, to embrace its sense of divine mission and realize American exceptionalism. Anderson uses chapters on the Mexican War, the Custer massacre, the Mexican Revolution, Caribbean intervention, Vietnam, and Reagan's Iran-Contra affair to explain how the myth has abided in American history as an allegorical device for explaining how culture and manifest destiny and imagined American exceptionalism support each other. Aggressive behavior in our past, he writes, exemplifies the idea of our need to not only fight but to portray our conflicts as defensive maneuvers against some Other so as to use them as regenerative stories emphasizing our innocence and sense of right. It's how America experiences rebirth--expressed by Anderson as highly religious--conceived in violence. The original seeds, of course, were the Indians. One consequence of the many Indian wars--and particularly of those in the late 19th century and after Custer could be reimagined as a Jesus, according to Anderson--is that Indians became archetypal, allowing for Mexicans, Filipinos, Vietcong, Muslims, Saddam Husseins, Manuel Noriegas, Augusto Sandinos to act as stand-ins and therefore inherit the role of America's spiritual and mythical enemies.

This isn't a new idea, this recognition of the myth of America's frontier and struggles against an Other being employed in popular culture as a way to nationalize American aggression, particularly those involving intervention or expansion. His final chapter uses 3 films as examples of what's gone before to illustrate his points: Dances with Wolves, Avatar, and The Walking Dead. They show how pervasive the idea is in our popular culture, how accepting we are to the mythic idea without realizing its hold on American imagination and attitudes.

My problem with Anderson isn't with disbelief in his arguments at all. I'm familiar with the notion of regeneration through violence and the transformation of historical events into myths which resonate in our popular culture and affect national attitudes. But it's my opinion that Anderson presents them inelegantly and in ways which cheaply stretch points and unnecessarily manipulate perspectives, therefore becoming polemic. Anderson comes across as an unhappy man. He's unhappy with America, and he lets it show.

Generally, his book, his study has value. But it's most flawed and its rhetoric most polemicized around Vietnam. His perception of the Vietnam War as another Indian war serving to regenerate America, his claim that we became involved in response to a falsified attack at sea, the branding of Richard Nixon as a criminal president who didn't have a secret plan to win the war yet later declared victory in defeat is all too pat and simplistic for such a complex arrangement of events strung across 20+ years. While the foundation myth can be seen as a component (even I've considered the Korean and Vietnam Wars as expressions of manifest destiny), I think to hang the entire history of our involvement in Vietnam on that label and to discuss the war in those terms across 24 pages is to misrepresent, misunderstand, and to mislead those less familiar with the history and with history's mutability. And admittedly I know less about other subjects he touches on (and too cynical to believe Custer was a Christ or his mission holy), but I can easily understand how his treatments of such complexities as Iran-Contra or the Mexican War might carry the same burden of oversimplification. He begins the book at the end of our history and the attack on 9/11. He writes of the cultural response to the attack symbolized "the reopening of the American frontier and the collective reinvestment in our Manifest Destiny." The beginning, or the continuation, of an Indian war. Well, maybe.

As I say, this isn't a new idea, and to try to address it in a meaningful way in a text of 225 pages subverts any grace or refinement in his arguments and creates a shallow pool rather than deeper reservoirs of rewarding substance advancing the concept of regeneration through violence and our dealings with the Other in our past.

[Noorilhuda]

If there is an important idea to take away from this book it is this fact: media has always been biased in its reporting, using derogatory, defamatory, racist labels to monster-ize the perceived ‘other’, whenever U.S. is in direct conflict with another nation or country:

e.g. during Mexican war, NYT ‘stressed the backwardness of Mexican culture as the proper context in which to place and assess villainy’, while LA Times lamented the ‘racial inferiority of Mexicans’. There’s a very interesting cartoon given in this book (dated March 15, 1916) which shows the big boot of U.S. stamping out the snake of (Mexican) anarchy, revolution and murderous people. In 1928, Mexican leader Augusto Sandino was portrayed in LA Times as a ‘bandit chief’, ‘bloodthirsty Indian’, while NYT called him ‘chief of a band of marauders’.

It reminded me of the thesis put forth in Edward Said’s book ‘Orientalism’ (how think tanks, media, art, governments are used to ‘inform’ people and ‘shape’ their perception when in pursuit of a foreign country’s resources or strategic ground). But I think the author is looking at things in isolation, and needs to appreciate the universality of the negative portrayal of ‘the other’ when the other is the enemy in combat. It happens all over the world. Indian media regularly demonizes Pakistanis and vice versa. Indian rhetoric finds more ears in the world.

The author also patches together the themes in film ‘Avatar’ (calling it a ‘white messiah fable’), TV series ‘Walking Dead’ (‘Rick is a cowboy’, ‘rugged individualism’), horror genre as a whole (‘had a resurgence after 9/11’.) American films and TV have always been full of caricatures and cliches, hackneyed pluralism, so I don’t know what the point here is, because there has been a surge in terrorism-related entertainment too (24, Homeland, every superhero movie.)

Also, the author’s main argument in the book is that Americans have a deep psychological need for warfare (!) just like an abused kid will become an abuser in adulthood; that Americans practice creationism and are deeply religious - um, is that why they are violent? (Karen Armstrong, where art thou?); And they wed capitalism and democracy with Protestant belief system to forge ahead with manifest destiny, american exceptionalism and monroe doctrine in other countries.

Can’t it just be a case of a powerful entity wanting to expand on its powers, making sure others don’t get as strong, and that its economic interests (and hence the country’s future) are preserved? That would make U.S. a very normal aggressive country because every power, super power in the history of the world has acted similarly. Psychoanalyzing a country isn’t going to stop it. It’s nothing personal, just business - or politics.