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Bush's Mythic America: A Critique of the Rhetoric of War

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 75; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10417940902807091

1930-3203

Larry Williamson,

Intelligence, Security, War Strategy

Abstract This article offers a mythological critique of the Bush Administration's war rhetoric from Citation2003 through April Citation2006. I argue that during this period the administration adapted America's war myth into one shaped largely through opposition to the dissonant narrative known as "the Vietnam Syndrome." This critique demonstrates how the Vietnam Syndrome functioned as the oppositional narrative premise for a revisionist war mythology composed of three central mythemes: righteous war, democratic salvation, and shock and awe. This critique further explicates rhetorical myth's form and function by revealing how the iconic agents, acts, and sacred scenes of this war myth served to transform the material complexities of the Iraq war into a negation of the cultural dissonance of the Vietnam Syndrome. Notes Others have described the generic qualities of American war rhetoric. See for instance, Burke (Citation1969, pp. 332–335); Kathleen Jamieson and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell (Citation2000); and Robert L. Ivie (Citation1980). In his critique of George W. Bush's war rhetoric, Ivie (Citation2005) pointed out that this is not the first president to rationalize war as a reluctant act motivated by self-preservation and a paradoxical desire for peace (pp. 1–9). This rhetoric reflects our unique cultural inclination to imagine ourselves as the nonaggressive protectors of human dignity and freedom who employ military power with righteousness and self-sacrifice. Or as Ivie summarizes, ours has always been a civilization of the "rational" and "pacific" who resort to force only when provoked (Ivie, Citation2005, pp. 280–281). Slotkin's otherwise articulate and well-argued treatment of mythic discourse ignores its foundational rhetorical intellectual tradition. He conceptualizes "myth" as a "basic constituent of linguistic meaning" without referring to its rhetorical integrity as practically the primal tropic form (see, for instance, Burke Citation1947, p. 200). This oversight is clear in his provincial view of the relationship between the epistemological function of "myth-making" and "metaphor" where he ignores the implications of the Neo-Aristotelian theory of associative meaning and metaphor as a specific type of analogic trope (For a discussion, see Burke, Citation1969, pp. 505–517). Martha Solomon, Michael Osborne, Barry Brummett, and Janice Hocker-Rushing (Citation1990) all responded to Robert Rowland's, "On Mythic Criticism" in a special edition of Communication Studies. Here I am borrowing from Hariman's critical interpretation of the significance and function of the allegorical. Hariman's description of the historicism inherent in allegorical rhetoric can easily be extended to characterize the same function in myth. See Hariman (Citation2002, p. 269). It is tempting to abandon a constructivist position and claim that the WWII myth and its powerful historicisms were simply debunked by the material truths of defeat in Vietnam. In other words, embrace the dualism of myth versus truth as evidenced by the syndrome's displacement of the romantic WWII myth, thereby accepting that all myth is subject, ultimately, to rational demythification (a critical position similar to Barthe's, 1957). This position however ignores the epistemological significance of mythic rhetoric that reads this more as a historic displacement and (as rhetorical history now clearly shows) a temporary reshuffling of competing war myths; both of which contained (and still contain) contiguous and dis-contiguous truths; exactly the type of "quasi-temporal combat" that Burke describes in Language as Symbolic Action (Citation1966, p. 387). This type of historicism is an enduring quality of postmodern political rhetoric in which, as Hariman put it, the "world [is] encoded allegorically" such that a "vast encyclopedia of fragmentary images" can be drawn upon to render all history "contemporaneous with the attitude of the present" (Hariman, Citation2002, p. 269). My use of this label is influenced most by Steele and Redding's (Citation1962, pp. 83–91) timeless cataloging of the American value system.