Sherry Chandler

Jury sat down in the chair across the desk from Racer’s own swivel chair, occupied now by Cyril, whose head Jury could just see over the desktop. …Cyril’s eyes were on the new facsimile machine. Ever since Racer had laced Cyril’s tuna with tranquilizers and transported him to one of the pounds, Jury had imagined reprisals in one form or another, taking place in Cyril’s mind.

Cyril sat there and Jury sat there, both of them in their separate ways making plans. …The fax machine beeped twice and then started humming, and Cyril came to quick attention. Now he was on the desk, stalking the machine. Cyril and Jury watched the paper, listened to the machine spit it out inch by inch. Jury leaned over and read. The fax was from the assistant commissioner. He did not read the message, however; Cyril was on it in a flash, sending the paper fluttering to the floor. Then Cyril looked at Jury and slowly blinked, as if the cat were waiting for any suggestions Jury might have with regard to this fax. Jury shrugged.

Cyril slid down from the desk, caught up one corner of the paper in his teeth, and dragged it across the room to the outer office. …Jury moved over to the door to watch.

The fax now lay beneath the water cooler, on the little ledge that held the small paper cup, full of water. The cat did a quick, balletlike turn in the air and knocked the cup off the ledge.

They both stood there watching the water soak into the message, after which Cyril pawed and clawed it around into a soggy ball.

— Martha Grimes, The Horse You Came In On (Ballantyne 1994)

I watched “Field of Dreams” years ago and thought it a charming movie, a sentimental trifle. Well done but I wouldn’t say it had a profound effect on my life. Or much of any effect at all. So I was a little taken aback to learn that Erik Prince (what a name! No wonder the man is so grandiose.) refers to his 7,000 acre “Blackwater Lodge and Training Center” as a field of dreams: “Build it and they will come.” That Blackwater maintains a website on which it sells memorabilia such as the poster at left is just sick. It’s a video game realized.

I’m running tired this week and doing a lot of reading and writing for my poetry class with Leatha Kendrick. Difficult then to voice my outrage, I am in the mood to leave outrage behind this week.

Still, I wanted to draw your attention to a couple of posts by John Louis Lucaites and Robert Hariman that capture the pop culture nature of our war in Iraq.

I got this image from Filling “the Gap” in a Field of Dreams, posted at No Caption Needed:

“Build it and they will come.” Those are the words that Erik [the] Prince of Blackwater used in a recent interview with the Washington Post, referring to his 7,000 acres, “Blackwater Lodge and Training Center,” as a “Field of Dreams.” Field of Dreams, of course, is an endearing but not so subtle, surrealistic parable for the American dream cast in the mythic registers of Christian redemption and our national fascination with baseball. When Prince quotes from the movie he invites consideration of the darker side of the national mythos, rooted in the imperialistic pretensions of American exceptionalism and manifest destiny.

…

But there is a bigger point to be made, which has less to do with Blackwater per se than with the fantasy world within which the ad/announcement operates and the way in which it contributes to the larger normalization of a war culture. Blackwater casts itself and the problems of global instability within the fictional world of hyper-masculine, shoot ‘em up action movies in which the “hero” has access to an endless supply of high tech weaponry that he uses with impunity to destroy terrorists, aliens, and other barbarians—in addition to anything else that happens to get in his way—by day and then returns to his home and family by night, leaving a smoldering world in his wake. The only thing missing in this “mock” movie poster is the star power of a Bruce Willis or Keifer Sutherland.

Does this remind you of Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream at all?

You must click through to read the full post or at the very least to compare this Blackwater poster to one for a video game called Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction.

I’ve never been one to claim pop culture is ruining our youth. But I may start now.

The second post by the same authors, at BagnewsNotes, is Seeing the Enemy, a consideration of Prince as the public face of our national sins:

It is easy to imagine the head of Blackwater as the Prince of Darkness, and the media have done a pretty good job of that. But what if Prince is a scapegoat for our collective sins and the all too easy willingness of the American public to allow their government to fight a war on the cheap, or in a way that sidesteps accountability? What if, when we stare into the abyss that is Blackwater and all that it stands for in Iraq, the abyss stares back at us? What then do we see?

Again, this post is built around iconic images and I really urge you to go and take a look and read the whole thing.

I See Invisible People is all over mercenaries this week, too. Her posts Cowboys and Soldiers and More Pots and Kettles are well worth your time.