American Militarism on Steroids

 
Abroad, the US has developed a unique global presence in which our military is both everywhere and nowhere. This is the case because our version of imperialism is focused not on acquiring colonies, but on building scads of military outposts, notes Tom Engelhardt.

 
Here's what Cheryl Bartholomew, described as an "Omaha Early Childhood Parenting Examiner," wrote recently about an event happening at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Nebraska, for the local affiliate of the national web portal Examiner.com:

"The Offutt Air Show, Defenders of Freedom '09 looks to be a great outing for the younger kids this year... Performers include the US Navy Blue Angels, US Army Golden Knights parachute team, an assortment of US Air Force aircraft, fake dog fights, and Tops in Blue will perform Saturday at 4pm. Static displays from the Air Force, Navy, and retired aircraft will be available to the public. There is even a B-2 Motorcycle crafted by Northrop Grumman to celebrate 20 years of the B-2 Stealth Bomber. Units from local organizations and military presenters will have booths set up around the flightline. The Fun Zone will be set up for children including 17 inflatables, glitter temporary tattoos, and photos in a[n] F-4 Phantom Cockpit are offered at the event. There will be food and drink vendors available throughout the event."

This little blurb catches something larger -- the way military displays of every sort have increasingly been woven into the interstices of our everyday lives as spectacle in movies, video games, ever more militarized ceremonies surrounding the country's honored dead, and in so many other ways. Americans largely prefer not to notice. On our own militarism, we are generally in denial. We seem to take it all in not as a reflection of a more militarized country with a Pentagon budget unparalleled in history, but as so much passing entertainment, in part because the militarized land we live in conforms to no notions we hold of militarism.

Abroad, the US has developed a unique global presence in which our military is both everywhere and nowhere. This is the case because our version of imperialism is focused not on acquiring colonies, but on building scads of military outposts, what Chalmers Johnson calls "our empire of bases." We may literally garrison the planet (and patrol its seas and oceans), fighting constant wars in distant lands, and yet it all makes only a minimal impression on what is these days regularly referred to as "the homeland" (a word now inseparable from its companion "security").

Similarly, the creeping militarization of this society in these last decades has followed an unfamiliar route. No massed parades of troops, no vast, visible military presence in the streets, nothing we would recognize as typically militaristic is in evidence. And yet an in-your-face, militarized version of patriotism filled with threat, fear, and an almost tangible desperation has enveloped the society, a style of patriotism that would have made past generations of Americans deeply uncomfortable.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

---

Print

Printer Friendly Version