This fall, the United States of America will mark a full decade of continuous war. The end of the Terror Wars, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and fuck knows where else, can only dimly be glimpsed, so we lack a clear number counting down the days the same way we have one counting up. The numbers that do count up, in dead, crippled, and traumatized, as well as dollars wasted and more worthwhile projects left undone, tell of an incomprehensible cost. This week’s fashionably staggering numbers are $20,000,000,000, reportedly the amount of money we spend each year on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan, and $3,000,000,000,000, the conservatively estimated final cost of our Central Asian adventures and domestic paranoias. That second number, a jaw dropping three trillion dollars, leaves out a number of impossible to calculate items and is almost certainly an underestimate.
For all those lengthy numerals though, we can also see cost in things that are a bit more resistant to math. These ten years have warped our culture and language, especially the relationship between the military and the rest of the country. Considered on the immediate merits alone, enlisting on the bottom rung of a grand bureaucracy that openly considers the lives of its employees disposable couldn’t be more stupid. That grim reality has been all but permanently fogged in a cloud of empty gratitude and off target patriotism.
Even more astounding, the traditional and genuinely justified gratitude accorded those who serve has been twisted into an empty pop culture reflex. Talk show audiences applaud at the mention of the military, politicians of all stripes can’t give a speech without lauding them, and even the otherwise strictly apolitical realm of football announcing takes million dollar moments of airtime to offer empty lauds. Support, thanks, honor, and otherwise meaningful verbs have become pleasantries, and just as empty.
This reflexive verbal backhand extends even to the President, who frequently apes the militaristic precedent of his wretched predecessor by happily belching the phrase “commander in chief” at every opportunity:
Nowhere did a single commentator wonder, for instance, whether an American president was really supposed to feel that being commander in chief offered greater “honor” than being president of a nation of citizens. In another age, such a statement would have registered as, at best, bizarre. These days, no one even blinks.
The overall effect is to raise “the military”, an enormous and multifaceted organization that is peopled by the honorable, the indifferent and the assholes, to the level of the sacrosanct. In a country that takes such pride in its commitments to the unquestioned superiority of its civilian authority as well as its oft raucous free speech, this is a disturbing development:
There’s something very wrong with the way Americans look at the military these days. It wasn’t like this when I was a kid, even before Vietnam. I’m not sure you could even do a TV comedy like Sgt Bilko today, it’s so “disrespectful” of the Army. Hell, maybe not even South Pacific or Mr Rogers. It’s become more of a religious order rather than a civil organization. Somehow, I doubt that the soldiers agree, but then they are only props in this ritualized military worship anyway.
Gomer Pyle,U.S.M.C., which was broadcast during the Vietnam War, would be unthinkable today. And yet, there truly isn’t much to be concerned about here. As creepy as all this is, and make no mistake it is very creepy, it’s also just an aftereffect. So long as actual Americans are in harms way in Iraq and Afghanistan, as opposed to drone pilots doing their killing from the comfort of Nevada, the fetish for things military will continue. If and when we manage to stop fighting overseas, cracking on the Army for being full of dullards or the Navy for being queerer than a three dollar bill will come back all on its own.
