Warrior Dreams explains how the gun culture relates to the absense of a
clear delineation between good and evil in this post-modern era. It also
challenges the common belief that we lost in Vietnam because we didn’t fully
commit — which Gibson proposes is a convenient lie to justify modern militarism.
I’ve always been an anti-gun-control Original Intenter, though my steadfastness
has been getting thin. This book has given me more to think about.
It is with that compound caveat that I offer the following few comments
challenging some points it makes. I do this not to be contrary, but because
I think that the book paints an overly negative picture, one that was not
justified at the time it was written, but especially is not now. I realize
I can do this with hindsight that Gibson did not have. But I know I would
have had the same conclusions at the time he wrote the book. Leftists tend
to be negative about our culture’s redeemability. I am more of a utopian.
And I worry that Gibson’s take on a few things feeds that negative view. So,
here are a few key challenges to the bleak picture that Gibson paints.
While there are plenty of stories that fit the New War model, there are
plenty that don’t. In his desire to make a neat academic argument, Gibson
glosses over differences and misrepresents works (probably accidentally) to
make them fit the mold. The glaring example of this is his inclusion of Clancy’s
Jack Ryan novels. Yes, I’m a fan. But that leads me not to blindly defend
them but to know enough about them to know that he’s wrong about them. Ryan
is not a New War bad hero, but a fundamentally good person. It is quite explicit
in the novels that when he is involved in killing, even thoroughly justified
killing of evil people, he is extremely uncomfortable and is repulsed by those
who aren’t. In Patriot Games, when a terrorist base is taken out while the
CIA people in Washington watch on infrared, one of the young CIA suits says
cockily, “That’s a kill.” Ryan looks at him in horror and with total disdain.
Further, Ryan has a powerful and equal wife who is a world-renowned surgeon.
He is full of flaws and good intentions. Yes, he gets outraged at terrorism
and embodies our frustration with a world out of control, but there is nothing
unhopeful about him or the message of these novels. Trying to rope this series
of stories into the myth is necessary because it’s the most commercially popular
in the genre by far. But by attempting to keep his academic points pure, Gibson
blows it here. (It’s also evident by a remarkable number of factual errors
of detail that he’s never read the novels, but is working from other academics’
writings.
Women
There’s a kind of startlingly naked attempt to dismiss an obvious trend
— one that is close to my heart. At the end of the chapter about how women
are always energy-sucking distractions or worse for the new warrior, Gibson
includes two paragraphs that begin, “Finally, a few words must be said about
a very rare character in the New War, the heroic woman warrior.” He goes on
to say that there have only been a few and that they aren’t really women anyway,
because they act like men. He says, “a New Warrior, regardless of genitalia,
is obviously incapable of sustaining serious relationships outside the war
zone. Thus, although these films portray women as powerful, they maintain
a strict gender dichotomy between those who fight the enemy and those who
nurture, live, or have a distinct erotic presence.” Before I address the number
and type of female heroes, I’ve got to observe that this comment is kind of
shockingly sexist. In a way that is common among a certain sect of modern
academics, he locates women’s power in nurturing, life-giving and emotional
openness, while equating men’s power with killing and rationality. A fair-sized
minority of academia have rejected this variety of post-modern feminism in
favor of a nearly polar opposite philosophy, to find power in the balancing
of both forces within anyone, male or female, and to reject the idea that
women are genetically closer to the earth or that men can’t think emotionally.
Of course stereotypes are supported by reality, and there are tendencies towards
these personality traits, but why not celebrate when people grow by breaking
out of them. Gibson observes that Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 was an inattentive
mother, and thus not really a female role. Amazing! How about interpreting
it, as I did at the time, as saying that at that moment she recognized saving
humanity from total destruction was more important than being a perfect mother.
Her behavior is exactly the same as all the male characters throughout literature
who know that by doing their important work they are neglecting their family,
and know that’s a bad thing, but decide the work was more important. This
was a theme on The West Wing last year when the Chief of Staff’s wife walked
out on him. But apparently because Hamilton is a woman, she’s not allowed
to make the call that way.
More importantly, though, Gibson identifies “only three” story lines with
female warriors: Alien, Silence of the Lambs and Terminator 2. First, I have
to point out that these three are among the most successful of all new warrior
stories, while many of his examples are marginal self-published trash read
only by mercenary lunatics. Second, two of them occurred in 1991. Though the
book was published in ‘94, I’m guessing he was working on it in 91/92. So,
while he says three total, two occurred while he was writing this. Of course
three is too few to identify a trend, but he didn’t even acknowledge the potential
that there was a trend just emerging. It did. In the years since, the female
warrior has become ubiquitous. It’s now one of the most common forms in action/adventure.
He ignores La Femme Nikita, released in 1990, a new warrior tale about a
female assassin working for a quasi-governmental operation. Later in the 90’s
this was turned into an extremely popular TV series. Also on TV in the 90’s,
Xena is a quintessential warrior characters. She is always struggling against
her killer instinct (which according to Gibson is a male trait.)
Also crossing from movies to TV, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a 1992 movie
he also ignores. But the real story is the TV series. Well, what to say about
Buffy: a normal kid converted through personal hardship and the training of
a mentor into the adult warrior that stands between us and all the darkness
of Hell. Many of the themes in Buffy revolve around her internal struggles
over whether she is turning her own soul dark by all the killing she does
as the ruthless defender of humankind. The conclusion is always the same:
she is, but her duty to defend normal people is greater than her own sacrifice.
The central theme around which this entire year of episodes revolved was
that Buffy was told, “Your gift is death.” This year Buffy’s mother died and
she learned that her little sister wasn’t really her little sister. She also
said goodbye to her second partner, who left her because she was never fully
present with him since she was too busy being a warrior and because he never
felt he could keep up or interest her enough. After this happened, she reflected
on the fact that she was doomed to be alone because she couldn’t ever really
be with regular people. Especially with these latest developments, Buffy seems
to fit almost all the rules Gibson lays out. But she’s a woman, has sex with
men, has a good heart, has no weapon fetishes, has friends who love her and
for whom she will do anything.
(Star Trek) Voyager’s Captain Janeway is a tough-minded leader who sometimes
gives too much weight to the rules, to duty, and occasionally to revenge,
and neglects her personal life, love life and health in the name of the mission.
It’s the Native American and Vulcan characters, two men, who act as her counterbalances.
The Laura Croft movie, based on the video game, presents another powerful,
aggressive hetero female hero. I wonder how Gibson would or could address
these female characters if he dealt with them honestly.
Racism
Gibson’s attempt to tie racism to this genre is particularly weak. There
is no doubt that some extremists in the gun culture are also racists, since
they are also fundamentalists and traditionalists, but as far as the genre
is concerned I see lots of evidence to the contrary, as did he. Gibson’s desire
to make racism a central issue in his case reflects a fear among many on the
Left of the Christian Identity theology embraced by a trivial minority of
right-wing wackos. This gives it far more power than it deserves. These idiots
should just be ignored, which is what most people do with them. He tries to
dismiss or explain away the fact that many of the warriors are minority and
that the groups of them are almost always multi-racial by suggesting that
the writers do this to confuse us, “to make race appear even less of an issue.”
Huh? He starts from the premise that the creators of this work must be racist,
then explains the fact that the material shows direct evidence of non-racism
as trickery. Come on! He tries to argue that there’s racism in the fact that
most of the enemies are not white, when obviously the issue is that most of
the enemies are not American, and most non-American enemies of the United
States are not white. In fact, the bad guys in all of Clancy’s novels except
the one about the drug war are “white”. In Patriot Games, for example, they
are IRA. In Xena, the enemies are usually white, and the most sacred warriors
are the Amazons. Is there racial stereotyping in these stories? Of course.
There’s plenty, as there is in all pulp fiction. It’s the easy way to tell
stories. Bad writers of all stripes do it.
In my humble opinion, what all this adds up to is that there is a post-post-Vietnam
era that was emerging around the time Gibson wrote this book. He doesn’t recognize
it partly because it wasn’t fully realized when he wrote the book, and partly
because he didn’t want to see the evidence of its beginnings. Since the early
90’s, the gun nuts and other types of fundamentalists have returned to the
fringes of society. It takes a long time for things like this to dissipate,
as each generation of parents is only partly successful in passing on their
beliefs to their children. Cultures that value independent thought and inclusion
change much faster, thus private college students have been virtually universally
anti-gun, pro-choice, pro-environment, and homophobia- and racism-free for
about a decade. It will just take longer for the less educated, but the trend
is undeniable. Some politicians continue to pander to the fundamentalist interests,
including our current President, but the power already shifted. People like
Trent Lott are anachronisms, holdovers from another time. They only manage
to retain power today because of quirks in our system that give small aggressive
minorities disproportionate power. Their days are numbered without any further
action.
(Addendum in 2003: I’m quite pleased with the bit at the
end of this article written in June 2001 where I said: “People like Trent
Lott are anachronisms, holdovers from another time. They only manage to retain
power today because of quirks in our system that give small aggressive minorities
disproportionate power. Their days are numbered without any further action.”
Of course, despite my prescience there, 9/11 a few months later tipped the
balance in our country towards the militarists and jingoists and also brought
out some of the current President’s borderline-Christian Identity theology-type
roots. Despite the events going on today, I maintain what I say in this article
— that the NRA/Christian Right nexus is fading as a relevant national political
and cultural force. It peaked in Reagan and has been dying ever since. Unfortunately,
the American people gave little enough attention to the last election that
they mistakenly elected a fundamentalist extremist as President. He was behaving
himself until 9/11 radicalized him; now we can only hope to minimize the damage
he and Ashcroft do before he’s booted out in the next election.)
© 2004 Philip F. Rose
