The negative example of Pat Dollard's disturbing pro-war documentary "Young Americans" has a lot to teach liberals about opposing the war in Iraq. They need to study this movie and learn from its appeal.
Just about everything that’s wrong with the opposition to the war in Iraq was accidentally summed up by Matt Taibbi in his sympathetic portrait of Cindy Sheehan in the August 25th 2005 issue of Rolling Stone.
http://www.rollingstone.com/...
In the Sixties, the anti-war movement was part of a cultural revolution: If you opposed Vietnam, you were also rejecting the whole rigid worldview that said life meant going to war, fighting the Commies, then coming back to work for the man, buying two cars and dying with plenty of insurance. That life blueprint was the inflexible expectation of the time, and so ending the war of that era required a visionary movement.
Iraq isn't like that. Iraq is an insane blunder committed by a bunch of criminal incompetents who have managed so far to avoid the lash and the rack only because the machinery for avoiding reality is so advanced in this country. We don't watch the fighting, we don't see the bodies come home and we don't hear anyone screaming when a house in Baghdad burns down or a child steps on a mine.
The only movement we're going to need to end this fiasco is a more regular exposure to consequence. It needs to feel its own pain. Cindy Sheehan didn't bring us folk songs, but she did put pain on the front pages. And along a lonely Texas road late at night, I saw it spread.
Pat Dollard shows us why.
In the previews for his as of yet unfinished documentary about the war in Iraq, "Young Americans", we do watch the fighting. We do see the bodies, and we do hear American soldiers screaming in fear for their lives when their base in mortared by insurgents. And yet Dollard, who’s actually much closer to Larry Clark than to his own description of himself as a right-wing version of Michael Moore, is not trying to make an anti-war movie. On the contrary, Dollard’s movie is unabashed propaganda for the neoconservative crusade to dominate the Middle East.
http://www.patdollard.com/
Like "Kids", Clark’s great 1995 pseudo documentary of a group of skateboarders in Washington Square Park, "Young Americans" is a middle-aged man’s celebration of adolescent male aggression, swagger, and contempt for authority. While it’s possible that some people will come out of "Young Americans" more opposed to the war in Iraq than when they went in, most of us will not. On the contrary, most of us will watch "Young Americans" and identify with Dollard’s soldiers’ contempt for the liberal media, the anti-war movement, and the Democratically controlled Congress. We will want them to stay in Iraq to "finish the job" and when they’ve finished the job in Iraq, we will want them to go on to Iran.
If the anti-war movement is to succeed in ending the war in Iraq and stopping the invasion of Iran, it has to take Dollard’s film seriously, and it has to understand why Matt Taibbi is wrong.
Liberals who are opposed to the war in Iraq have learned from the mistakes of the movement against the war in Vietnam. Unlike the new left in the 1960s, today’s liberals are careful not to blame the individual soldiers for Bush’s decision to invade Iraq or offend the sensibilities of Middle America. Unfortunately, along with the new left’s weaknesses, today’s liberals have also thrown out most of its strengths. In addition to being a visionary movement that aimed to transform American society as a whole, the new left of the 1960s had a hold on for what could be for lack of a better term called "eros".
Yes, there was a stupid macho side of the new left that would later give birth to the feminist and gay liberation movements, but the popular culture influence by the movement against the war in Vietnam also valued the feminine, the childlike, the lyrical undercurrents of American history that the current opposition to the war in Iraq most emphatically rejects. From the constant drumbeat on Democratic Party affiliated websites like Atrios, Jesus’ General, and Operation Yellow Elephant to get Bush’s daughters into the military, to the bills in front of Congress by liberal Democrats like Charles Rangel calling for a reintroduction of the draft, to grassroots leftist support for old Vietnam era reactionaries like Jim Webb, to the recommendations that anti-war protesters wear suits and ties, the opposition to the war in Iraq is politically liberal, but culturally conservative. It values the hard, the masculine. It looks back to the rugged blue-collar authenticity of the old urban Democratic Party machines, not to the visionary and the lyrical politics of the new left.. Just count the number of diaries on the left Democratic web community Daily Kos that express the sentiment that "my Democratic Party daddy can beat up your Republican Party Daddy". Obama "smacks down" Dick Cheney. Al Gore "schools" George Bush. Howard Dean "bitch slaps" Joe George Allen. The air is thick with testosterone poisoning.
If liberals have learned from their mistakes in the 1960s, then conservatives have learned even more. Where conservatives in the 1960s were stodgy, wooden, and largely illiterate when it came to popular culture, today’s conservatives are hip, edgy, and radical. What’s more, conservatives like Pat Dollard, an ex Hollywood agent, are not only the masters of the language of mass culture, they have a vision for the future and a coherent political agenda that allows them to understand their place in history in a way that most liberals don’t. Pat Dollard doesn’t merely try to turn the culture 1960s on its head, and the aesthetic of "Young Americans" looks back, not to the stiff right-wing culture of the 1950s or the hedonism of the 1960s, but to the punk nihilism of the 70s and 80s. While there is an endless debate between the liberals of the "reality based community" and neoconservatives about the class background of the troops serving in Iraq and the quality of the military in general, Dollard simply brushes past class and economics and heads straight for a common cultural thread that can unite young men from all ethnic groups and classes. "Young Americans" appeals not so much to patriotism as to alienation, not to pride in American capitalism but to contempt for the decadence of what Dollard labels the "MTV culture".
"Young Americans" opens almost literally with a bang. To the pounding rush of the 1980s punk group "Wasted Youth", "Young Americans" opens up with what seems like politics right out of the Daily Kos, to combat soldiers mocking the "chickenhawks" back home. "I hate going home and people asking the same hey what did you see did you ever see a dead body man. And then you’ve got the tough guys when you go home".
http://patdollard.com/...
But then Dollard jumps right to a montage of anti-war protesters, Hollywood liberals, and decadent youth, the "MTV culture" that he despises but which the soldiers in the beginning of his video barely seem concerned with. It seems like a crude attempt to superimpose right wing politics on the not so right-wing politics of the soldiers he’s interviewing that shouldn’t work aesthetically and yet it does. What the soldiers in Dollard’s videos object to about the "chickenhawks" back home is not their support of the war but their lack of hardness, of the kind of masculine authenticity that comes with living through combat. "Yeah. You’d have a fucking heart attack. You’d cry like a little bitch". By juxtaposing the soldiers with images of anti-war protesters and Hollywood liberals and overlaying it with angry 1980s punk, Dollard is able to feminize opposition to the war in Iraq, to turn anti-war protesters and liberals into the enemy, the other. He is also able to enlist the 1970s and 1980s punk contempt for the hippie culture of the 1960s into propaganda for the neoconservative crusade in the Middle East. Thus, liberals who try to oppose the war without opposing the culture of masculine domination that lies behind the war, without attempting to construct a visionary political agenda that transcends the current "reality" are left with nothing to say. Dollard rounds up a group of swaggering, cocky masculine young men who look at you right in the eye and say "fuck you Michael Moore. If you support the troops you’d support the war". It’s a virtuoso performance that leaves liberals in the "reality based community" like the popular Daily Kos diarist, liberal activist, and Marine veteran Mike Stark gasping for air, feeling as if by his own words, he’d been gut punched.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
This film, for me, a Marine Corps veteran, is a shot to the solar plexus.
From Jeff Wells' great Rigorous Intuition comes a trailer of a movie directed by Pat Dollard - a meth addict, sexual deviant and Hollywood agent turned right-wing war cheerleader. The movie juxtaposes some young Marines on the ground in Iraq with the peace movement back here in the US and the "MTV generation".
And yet Dollard’s own punk aesthetic has already shown the way out his nihilism and worship of the death instinct. Larry Clarks "Kids", the film "Young Americans" most resembles, while embodying the same latently homoerotic admiration of a repressed middle aged gay man for adolescent male swagger and bravado, also gave us the aesthetic counterpart of Chloe Sevigny’s AIDs infected teenager "Jennie". Sevigny, who looked a bit like a blue-collar New York City version of Jean Seberg embodied a soft feminine counterpart to Clark’s testosterone laden skateboarders and wiggers. Similarly, when Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of the seminal 1990s heavy metal punk group Nirvana, a man who grew up in the kind of economically devastated rural town that provides the military with so many recruits for the war in Iraq, posed on the cover of Rolling Stone in a dress, it was a message to the right-wing culture he grew up with. "Fuck you" it seemed to say. "You have no power to feminize or humiliate me". Indeed, while Pat Dollard is contemptuous of the feminine and looks at women in a degrading, exploitive manner, Cobain was rebelling against that very attitude.
http://www.nirvana-music.com/...
Well, when we played that No on 9 benefit in Portland, I said something about Guns N' Roses. Nothing nasty - I think I said, "And now, for our next song, 'Sweet Child o' Mine.'" But some kid jumped onstage and said, "Hey, man, Guns N' Roses plays awesome music, and Nirvana plays awesome music. Let's just get along and work things out, man!"
And I just couldn't help but say, "No, kid, you're really wrong. Those people are total sexist jerks, and the reason we're playing this show is to fight homophobia in a real small way. The guy is a fucking sexist and a racist and a homophobe, and you can't be on his side and be on our side. I'm sorry that I have to divide this up like this, but it's something you can't ignore. And besides they can't write good music."
This is not to say that the anti-war movement should imitate Kurt Cobain or try to return to the early Clinton era cultural rebellion against Ronald Reagan and the 1980s. Indeed, popular culture by the very fact that it’s produced and distributed by large corporations for profit will inevitably collapse into a reactionary nihilism, that "MTV generation" decadence Pat Dollard’s young soldiers rail against in "Young Americans". Public Enemy’s "Fight the Power" will eventually turn into bitches, hoes and bling simply because the people who control the recording industry are capitalists who want capitalism reinforced through popular music. Nirvana will give way to Limp Bizkit. Riot Grrl will be replaced by Britney Spears and American Idol. It’s simply not in the interests of the culture industry to promote a visionary, anti-war aesthetic. The Pat Dollards of the world, the sleazy, coke addled sexist pig Hollywood agents always have the advantage over earnest conservatives like Mike Stark.
What it means is that the anti-war movement cannot accept the ruling class’s terms on how to oppose the war. Yes there were excesses in the 1960s and some hostility towards returning vets (even though the image of the hippie spitting on the soldier at the airport has been proven to have been pure fiction) and yes it helps to give the men who risk their lives in Iraq a basic level of respect. But it’s also important to recognize that the slogan "Support the Troops" means "Support the War". Yes, the war in Iraq, as Taibbi argues, was a "mistake". It was badly executed, but it wasn’t only a mistake and any opposition to the war has to take a firm stance that the war was not only a mistake but also a war crime, a moral outrage and the part of a larger agenda to impose an authoritarian state on Americans. But above all it means that you cannot reject the vision of a better, different society out of hand in the name of some urge to be a "realist". You cannot go to the alienated young men Pat Dollard so skillfully exploits and tell them there will never be a better world than the one that gives them the choice between Walmart or the military or between smoking blunts and watching MTV or killing hajjis in Iraq. Their response will probably be something like "suck my dick Hollywood faggot yuppie. I’m not like you" and I’ll be cheering them on right along with Pat Dollard.