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Our Morbid Gaze

2016; Duke University Press; Volume: 31; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-3447000

2164-0041

Ron Hirschbein,

Rhetoric and Communication Studies

At a state dinner in 2012, President Obama confided to the actor Damian Lewis, one of the stars of the Showtime drama Homeland: “While Michelle and the two girls go play tennis on Saturday afternoons, I go in the Oval Office, pretend I’m going to work, and then I switch on ‘Homeland.’” On the show, Lewis plays Nicholas Brody, a war hero who’s not what he appears to be.The president’s guilty pleasure is intriguing, given that Obama is commander in chief of the most powerful armed forces in the world and personally oversees U.S. terrorism policy. George W. Bush referred to this policy as the “War on Terror”; Obama does not, for reasons that have much to do with my subject, as I will explain. The president presumably has little time to spare for television, so his choices are significant. His endorsement of Homeland matters much: Obama has always been considered savvy about his self-presentation in the media. The Homeland anecdote thus prompts my central concern: the role of entertainment in terrorism policy.In many ways, terror became a lucrative industry after 9/11. The media didn’t miss out: captivating terrorism-themed entertainment became quite popular. In addition to dramas such as Homeland and 24, the entertainment industry produces films, miniseries, cop shows, and spy thrillers about uncovering nefarious plots—you can hear time bombs ticking. The public joins the president in binge-watching dramas like Homeland, which enjoys both critical and popular acclaim. Even news coverage is accompanied by musical scores, suspenseful timing, choreographed scenes, animated simulations, and other tropes of terrorism entertainment. Interviewed on Meet the Press (Aug. 16, 2015), presidential candidate Donald Trump cited these programs as his source of insight into military affairs: “I watch the shows,” he told Chuck Todd, who had asked where Trump gets military advice, “I mean, I really see a lot of great— you know, when you watch your show and all of the other shows and you have the generals and you have certain people that you like.”I’m troubled by the evil of banality that denatures terrorism, reducing it to entertainment. However, I’m more concerned about the possibility that terrorism entertainment actually promotes the evils of violence and repression endemic in U.S. terrorism policy—whether this is intentional or not. Could the slow creep of terror entertainment promote unaccountable conflict beyond the pale of international law, as expressed in overt and covert military operations, secret prisons and torture chambers, and unprecedented domestic repression and surveillance? The answer is yes. The episodes analyzed here reflect and promote public opinion regarding terror policy.Unlike during World War II, no federal bureaucracy, such as the Office of War Information, now produces and oversees wartime entertainment—there’s no need. A Google search of “U.S. Military and Hollywood Propaganda” returns about 1,320,000 hits. The corporate entertainment media voluntarily promote U.S. policy—especially if they desire access to government officials and military sites, weapons, and troops. As Senator Gerald Nye remarked in 1941, Hollywood movies “drug the reason of the American people, set aflame their emotions, turn their hatred into a blaze, fill them with fear …” Look no further than the recent blockbuster American Sniper for proof that Nye’s comment still applies today. Military contractors like Boeing also partner with Hollywood to produce self-serving terrorism narratives such as NCIS (Naval Criminal Investigation Service) and the Avengers comic fantasy.In the aftermath of 9/11, the corporate media profitably pander to an anxious public obsessed with terrorist threats, even if it means broadcasting terrorism’s signature message: be afraid, be terribly afraid! Thanks to the media, Americans just can’t get enough terrorism: news coverage of terrorist threats is exaggerated, stripped of historical context, and ignores the terrorists’ grievances. Meanwhile, American innocence is taken for granted: America is truly exceptional—it behaves better than other nations. Even so, this narrative continues, Americans are victimized by evildoers who hate our virtues. Thus the formulaic fictional narratives lead to the same conclusion: diabolical plots demand violent retaliation—you can’t negotiate, let alone compromise, with evil. Only the naive or terrorists themselves would think otherwise. Ensuing casualties in faraway places with strange-sounding names are ignored, dismissed as collateral damage, or treated as a laughing matter.The media promotion of the War on Terror began with the 1972 Munich massacre—a wakeup call that revealed that they —America’s nonstate enemies—could do to us what we do to them. Palestinian members of Black September invaded the Olympic compound and killed nine Israeli athletes. The atrocity marked a turning point: following the West’s first modern confrontation with Middle Eastern extremists, terrorism became an idée fixe.Sociologist Lisa Stampnitzky’s Disciplining Terror reveals that, prior to Munich, terrorism was rarely discussed; when it was—primarily in scholarly journals—it was in the context of state terrorism. Not surprisingly, governing elites regarded their terrorism as necessary, even laudable. As I illustrate in The United States and Terrorism: An Ironic Perspective, elites praised strategic terror bombing for assuring victory in World War II and celebrated threats of nuclear terror for keeping the peace during the Cold War. Thucydides’ observation seemed like a law of nature: “The strong do what they have the power to do, and the weak must endure the consequences”—a natural and desirable state of affairs for Athenian and American elites. However, in the corporate media it is not politically correct to refer to the United States as a perpetrator of terrorism.Terrorism became the most loathsome evil when nonstate actors defied the states’ monopoly on violence and used violence for their ends. Black September stood Thucydides on his head: the weak did what they had the power to do, and the strong had to bear the consequences. This shocking development captivated worldwide audiences. Sports reporter Jim McKay kept millions glued to the radio and television during his sixteen-hour, live broadcast. Writing in the Hollywood Reporter (July 24, 2012), his son explains:A captivated public vicariously experienced the suspense and horror. Governing elites and defense intellectuals put out another message: nonstate actors were intent on terrorizing the strong through “asymmetrical warfare.” “Terrorism” thus became a watchword. As Stampnitzky explains, indices of the New York Times and London Times rarely mentioned terrorism prior to 1972. But by 1977 it took eleven catalogs to track proliferating terrorism studies in books, journals, and op-ed pieces. She notes only one terrorism conference in 1972 but 591 in 1978. Cadres of counterterrorism experts emerged advocating robust responses to what they do to us while turning a blind eye to what we do to them.In Munich’s wake, as many feared, hijackings, hostage-takings, and murders began to target Americans. Rather than explore the grievances motivating terrorists, the corporate media scripted morality plays, encomiums to American innocence, and strident calls for retaliation. The Iranian hostage crisis provides a prime example.In July 1979 revolutionaries deposed the American-backed Shah Pahlavi and celebrated the ascendancy of radical cleric Ayatollah Khomeini. President Carter permitted the hated Shah to enter the United States for medical treatment. In November, enraged students raided the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held Americans hostage for 444 days. The crisis warranted its own show—Nightline. ABC executives wouldn’t allow a good crisis to go to waste. They hoped the drama would draw viewers away from Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.Coverage encouraged the public to personalize the crisis by vicariously suffering humiliation and anger fomented by events far removed from their lives. Televisions flashed “America Held Hostage” every evening. Talking heads demonized Iranians if not all Muslims. Iranian mobs cooperated by screaming “death to America.” Suspenseful speculation hooked viewers. And public sentiment reverberated in Vince Vance’s popular song “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran.”Once again, the networks reassured viewers of American innocence and victimization. Only the marginalized left put the episode in context, reminding readers that, in 1953, the CIA had overthrown Mohammed Mosaddegh, a democratically elected leader who thought Iran, not Western interests, should control Iranian oil. Iranians were painfully aware of the Shah’s secret police and the U.S. support of Iraq in its war against Iran.Carter called his failed military efforts to rescue the hostages “a partial success.” Apparently, Reagan’s campaign staff, along with Colonel Oliver North, secretly negotiated with the Iranians and offered weapons for hostages. Iran released the hostages shortly after Reagan’s January 1981 inauguration.In contrast to the media obsession with the Iranian hostage crisis, coverage of what America does in the name of protecting its interests is limited—but usually entertaining. Real-life terrorism dramas feature ironic twists: former ally Saddam Hussein became a terrorist when he betrayed the United States and invaded Kuwait. The first Iraq War became prime-time entertainment, a televised video game—Lawrence of Arabia meets Star Wars. Glued to their televisions, viewers throughout the nation reportedly shrieked approval as smart bombs flashed down chimneys, demolished tanks, and severed bridges—much cooler than Super Mario Bros, one of the top-selling games of the day. There’s no need for World War II-style propaganda when war is fun.But the war didn’t amuse Iraqis, who suffered immensely. On May 12, 1996, Lesley Stahl questioned then-Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright about the war and its aftermath during a 60 Minutes interview: “We have heard that a half million [UN estimate] children have died.… Is the price worth it?” The ambassador responded: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.” The warfare was indeed asymmetrical, but in Albright’s estimation, fair and necessary.After Munich, Hollywood began to mass-produce films that sensationalized the sort of threats that the hawkish elites repeated in their justifications for a war on terror. But we’ll never see the climax of Nosebleed on the big screen because we witnessed the reality. The martial artist Jackie Chan starred in the film, and was scripted to save the World Trade Center from terrorists boasting that those who “bring those two buildings down would bring America to its knees.” According to the Guardian (Sept. 20, 2001):Eyewitnesses to the New York attacks reported that, for an instant, it was just like television and the movies—unreal, it couldn’t be happening. But it was happening. What could be done to apprehend and punish the evildoers? In A Just Response, Shawn Wallace captures the frustration: “Those who committed this unbearably cruel act … designed their crime in such a diabolic fashion … because they arranged to be killed themselves … and they are now all dead.” Numb and powerless, ordinary Americans could get satisfaction only in fantasy. The entertainment industry complied.Stunned Americans communicated in a familiar language: the language of entertainment consumption. As communication theorist Neil Postman observed in his prescient 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, “Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities, and commercials.” Similarly, in The Terror Dream, journalist Susan Faludi listened closely to this lingua franca of entertainment: Americans, she wrote, “reacted to our trauma … not by interrogating it but by cocooning ourselves in the celluloid chrysalis of the baby boom’s childhood.” The chrysalis offered comfort food for anxious souls: cinematic images imbibed along with stale popcorn and sugary drinks at those long-ago matinees.Bush thus became our entertainer in chief, dutifully playing the part of a Saturday matinee idol when he vowed to “smoke ‘em out—bring it on!” According to Faludi, Republican speechwriter Peggy Noonan wrote that she almost expected Bush to “tear open his shirt and reveal the big ‘S’ on his chest.” Inspired by Bush’s post-9/11 rhetoric, UPI analyst Peter Roff likened the president to Batman, Bulletman, and the Shadow. Roff explained: “This is just the kind of hero America needs right now.… Comic book language rallies the nation to even greater accomplishments and sacrifice, bringing forth great leaders to rescue the country.” Time effervesced about our latter-day Lone Ranger, while Newsweek fawned over their newfound dragon slayer. A paraphrase of Brecht’s Galileo comes to mind: woe to the land that needs heroes.Officials, of course, could do something—they did have access to superpowers, or at least the military resources of the world’s premier superpower state, which they used to act out their fantasies. Bush attacked Afghanistan but failed to capture bin Laden. Having already fantasized about regime change in Iraq, his fantasies then took a different direction. Noonan’s Superman vowed to deliver us from evil. Iraq became the avant-garde in the comic book hero’s War on Terror—never mind that according to Richard Clarke, Bush’s principal counterterrorism advisor, attacking Iraq made as much sense as attacking Mexico after Pearl Harbor.But Superman didn’t deliver us from evil: absent weapons of mass destruction, evidence of evil machinations were suddenly in short supply. The administration didn’t even bother to lie or to plant WMDs. There’s no need to avoid cognitive dissonance in a culture encouraging cognitive insolence: the truth wasn’t merely ignored; it was ridiculed by the Supermen who put themselves in charge of state terror.The terror suffered by Iraqi civilians and American troops became a laughing matter as Bush pretended to look for those pretend weapons at the 2004 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The March 25, 2004, issue of The Nation features David Corn reporting on the high-tech, big-screen production featuring a forlorn Bush gazing out a White House window with a plaintive sigh: “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere.” Bush clowned amid the laughter of corporate media elites and Hollywood celebrities. He looked behind curtains, peered under a desk, and checked drawers—all in good fun. “Shock and Awe” became “Aw Shucks.”If a real president of the United States can’t deliver us from evil, perhaps the fictional Jack Bauer can. This, at least, is Hollywood’s wager in promoting the precepts of Bush’s War on Terror. In the March 3, 2010, issue of the New York Times, Brian Stelter writes: “If any one show has represented the post-9/11 era on television, it is ‘24,’ the Fox drama that has offered counterterrorism as entertainment for nine years.” In the world according to Bush administration officials, presidential candidates, and Justice Scalia, Rush Limbaugh’s favorite show vindicates the necessity of practicing torture, disregarding civil rights, and treating all Muslims with suspicion. Stelter concludes that the show provides militarist wish fulfillment on the cheap—the justification of the War on Terror. The Fox Network hero stops at nothing to protect the American people: “‘24’ is part sum of all fears, part wish fulfillment in an age of shadowy enemies.”Turning at last to Obama’s guilty pleasure, we find Homeland’s creators, Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa, atoning for their contributions to 24 by scripting Homeland— envisioned as 24 for grown-ups. The president requested copies of his favorite episodes. Mocking right-wing claims that Obama is a Muslim terrorist, Lewis gave him autographed copies at a state dinner, and joked that they were gifts “from one Muslim to another.”Lewis’s character, Nicholas Brody, is a Marine returning to America after a long imprisonment by jihadists. The Stockholm syndrome turns him into a Muslim and a latter-day Manchurian candidate: an all-American closet terrorist. Predictably, the script depicts exigent circumstances justifying worldwide American intervention, if not Islamophobia, and increased domestic surveillance. The intervention involves the plot twists of secret agents, not massive military campaigns.Suffering from bipolar disorder, CIA agent Carrie Mathison, the show’s protagonist, dramatizes the show’s mood swings regarding U.S. policy. Quoted in The Huffington Post (Oct. 20, 2013), Lewis laments: “It’s … bleak that the one person who represents hope [Carrie] is a broken-down, polarized person who represents a broken, polarized America.” Driven by her demons, Carrie struggles to stop Abu Nazir— a bin Laden avatar—from visiting another 9/11 catastrophe (or worse) upon the United States. Initially, the drama portrays Abu Nazir as the cartoon-like caricature of the evil Arab. But then a depressing realization emerges—sympathy for the devil. Abu Nazir and Brody—his co-conspirator—are not evil incarnate: They want to avenge the drone attack that murdered Abu Nazir’s son, whom Brody befriended. This is the attack that radicalized Brody and drove him to terrorism.Homeland (whether by accident or design) seems to showcase Obama’s reformulated terrorism policy, a National Security Strategy that reflects his mood swings: disillusionment with Bush’s War on Terror, leading to uncritical enthusiasm for his new approach. Chastened by policy failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, in order to distance himself from his predecessor, Obama abandoned the “War on Terror” in favor of another rubric: “Overseas Contingency Operations.” Quoted in U.S. News & World Report (May 23, 2013), the president urged: “We must define our effort not as a boundless ‘Global War on Terror,’ but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.” Homeland dramatizes such operations.Obama’s strategy doesn’t abandon hegemonic aspirations; it simply offers a more streamlined, less obtrusive approach. Rather than massive infliction of state terror, such as the Iraq War, Obama practices terrorism lite, complete with drones and covert operators like Carrie. Obama doesn’t promise to rid the world of evil; like Homeland’s CIA operatives, he merely wants to eliminate some of the Abu Nazirs of the world—including some American citizens—who would harm the homeland.Homeland doesn’t seamlessly represent Obama’s policy; it is a cautionary tale. His favorite show depicts American leadership striding the world as a source of resentment. By way of contrast, his strategy lauds the U.S. imperium: according to Janine Davidson’s Foreign Affairs discussion (March 2, 2015), “American leadership” is extolled no less than ninety-four times in Obama’s 2015 National Security Strategy document. However, like the show, the strategy relies on drones, assassinations, and disregard for civil liberties. True, for now terrorism lite results in fewer casualties than Bush’s Shock and Awe in Iraq. However, as General John Abizaid and Rosa Brooks warn in the “Final Report of the Task Force on U.S. Drone Policy,” even relatively few casualties “can anger whole communities, increase anti-US sentiment, and become a potential recruiting tool for terrorist organizations.” Indifferent to enemy grievances, Obama may well provoke what he would prevent. The time is long overdue to recognize that what we do to them and what they do to us are not unrelated.