My favorite contemporary writer is Dan Neil. I think he pays his bills by writing car reviews for the LA Times, but that earns him the option to write a column labelled “Pop Culture.” Neil is literate; nearly every column includes some deliciously offbeat word that gives me pause.
While I enjoy almost everything Neil writes about contemporary culture, I especially appreciate his take on our war-culture. I’ll let him speak for himself here, but if this excerpt doesn’t impress you, seek him out — he’s worth reading. mjh
[mjh: In a column titled “Bomb Mots,” Neil writes about cable TV shows devoted to military weapons. I’ll resist the urge to highlight a few choice phrases. I think you’ll see them for yourself.]
God knows I love to see things blow up. A proper gentleman’s education cannot be considered complete unless he has, at some point, shot a watermelon with a high-powered rifle. But I have a major problem with a lot of this programming, the first being its clinical and morally vacant fascination in killing. You know that familiar wing-camera footage of white-orange napalm blooming in the jungle canopy in Vietnam? There are people under there. At the other end of every smart bomb is some poor dumb bastard who is about to be blown to bits. When I hear some narrator crow about America’s precision bombing, I just cringe. There is nothing precise about a 1,000-pound bomb.
I had a similar reaction to media coverage of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Grand Challenge, DARPA’s annual open competition for autonomous ground vehicles. How many people registered that this was a program to develop robotic weapons? Did anybody even see “The Terminator”?
It’s not about the necessity of armed conflict, or morality of a particular weapon. All of that is, as they say in the military, above my pay grade. It’s about making glib entertainment out of mechanized death. You couldn’t blame a visitor from another country watching this program and concluding that Americans have slipped into a nutty late-Roman fascism.
[mjh: I cut from this Neil’s exchange with one of the hosts of such a show, but here’s the ending.]
Good propaganda fools the people who see it. Great propaganda fools the people who make it.