Sherry Chandler

Marita Sturken, professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and the author of Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero, has a devastating article at the History News Network:

Over the past few weeks we have seen another round of fact-finding assertions and denials about the fact that the United States engages in and sanctions torture. The debate is revealing not only in its déjà vu quality, but also in the stunning fashion in which it indicates an inability to reconcile such practices with our national identity as a country of moral superiority.

One way to begin to understand the broad capacity to deny not only the current practices of our government but, of course, the history of torture as practiced by the U.S. government throughout many foreign engagements over the last century is to see it in relation to the deep investment in innocence in American culture. This is an innocence that proclaims that we don’t know (even in the face of evidence), that we are not responsible, an innocence that is constantly perceived to be “lost” at various moments in American history. Thus, most national crises of recent history, from the Vietnam War to to 9/11 to the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib, have been popularly described as moments of the loss of national innocence. And, we can safely predict that any future terrorist attacks within the United States will give rise to new assertions of a loss of innocence (one that must constantly be reasserted after the fact so that it can be “lost” again). In this narrative, the United States never provokes, is never the cause of its crises, these are just events that, as was asserted about 9/11, came “out of the blue.”

…National innocence must be actively, constantly maintenanced by narratives that reinscribe it—in order to be shocked when teenagers pick up guns that they have ready access to and kill their classmates, we must ascribe their acts to popular culture; in order to be shocked about the fact that our country sanctions and engages in torture, we must think it was the work of a few “bad apples.” Innocence is a position from which such acts of aggression are easily screened out.

I urge you to read all of this post; I’d love to copy every word of it here, so true it strikes me and it strikes me where I live. I can’t resist, however, sharing one more observation about our national love for kitsch souvenir items from places like Oklahoma City and Ground Zero:

Kitsch does not emerge in a political vacuum, rather it is more often than not a style that responds to particular kinds of historical events. Milan Kundera once famously wrote that “kitsch is the absolute denial of shit” and the primary aesthetic of totalitarian regimes, in which it facilitates a false sense of community and the idea of a universal “brotherhood of man.” …In the comforting world of kitsch and in our tourism of history, torture cannot exist

Link from BAGnewsNotes

On a related note, Susan Faludi, blogging at the TPM Café remarks that, in response to the attacks of September 11:

The media declared the return of John Wayne and “manly man” masculinity and the revival of a Betty Crockeresque womanhood. A raft of trend stories prophesied a marriage boom, a baby boom, and a revival of traditional family arrangements, and instructed women that it would be “unpatriotic” if they didn’t react to 9/11 by getting hitched, pregnant, or devoting themselves to the homespun comforts of full-time nesting. Time magazine suggested women respond to 9/11 by sewing their own drapes and dresses and the fashion industry proposed women reassure the post-9/11 culture by wearing baby doll dresses and white Victorian lace outfits that convey “virginal innocence” and, in the words of Vogue, are “distinctively nonaggressive” and “not about dominance, power.”

And if you’ll allow me one more odd leap, a sort of nonsequiter, I find an associative link in this passage from John Fox Jr’s Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, as highlighted at Pocahontas County Fare:

God’s Country!

No humor in that phrase to the Bluegrass Kentuckian! There never was–there is none now. To him, the land seems in all the New World, to have been the pet shrine of the Great Mother herself. She fashioned it with loving hands. She shut it in with a mighty barrier of mighty mountains to keep the mob out. She gave it the loving clasp of a mighty river, and spread broad, level prairies beyond that the mob might glide by, or be tempted to the other side, where the earth was level and there was no need to climb; that she might send priests from her shrine to reclaim Western wastes or let the weak or the unloving–if such could be–have easy access to another land.

In the beginning, such was her clear purpose to the Kentuckian’s eye, she filled it with flowers and grass and trees, and fish and bird and wild beasts. Just as she made Eden for Adam and Eve.

…

And thus she gave the little race strength of heart and body and brain, and taught it to stand together as she taught each man of the race to stand alone, protect his women, mind his own business, and meddle not at all; to think his own thoughts and die for them if need be, though he divided his own house against itself; taught the man to cleave to one woman, with the penalty of death if he strayed elsewhere; to keep her–and even himself–in dark ignorance of the sins against Herself for which she has slain other nations, and in that happy ignorance keeps them to-day, even while she is slaying elsewhere still.

Madison wrote:

“In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. … War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war, a physical force is to be created; and it is the executive will which is to direct it. In war, the public treasures are to be unlocked; and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. … It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.”

Quoted by Anthony Lewis in his NYTimes Sunday Book Review essay on The Imperial Presidency