Both right and left have been deeply disturbed by the way our commercial century, in the form of the screen and the ad in particular, has colonized every previously private or sacred space (home, school, church, the family, the bedroom, the body) and many have focused on the details -- the "violence" and mayhem of video games, the sight of Janet Jackson's pre-prepared nipple or Nicollette Sheridan's naked back. Neither the right, nor the left has, however, been particularly successful at coming to grips with the way consumerism has spent an American Century's worth of time breaking all boundaries of time, space, and desire.
If today you really wrote a landmark history of the last century, the conquerors would seize our time, communities, purses and emotional valences; the great battles would be for market share and property rights globally; the freedom-givers would offer that most modern of freedoms, the right to choose among many channels, catalogs, brands, and the shifting identities that go with them. Of course, the landmarks of the year 2004 aren't to be found in any book, but in the swooshes on our sneakers, the apples on our computers, the Mickey Mouses on our T-shirts, the golden arches that soar over our heads, and that "real American hero" on the child's floor. So ignore media arguments about what books should be read and what history should be taught and take a good long look from that floor to the screen in your house.
Out here, in the cyber-marketplace, all history has been superseded by a new kind of story-telling. On that child's floor and on the various screens of childhood are a set of "stories" for straight shooters, largely barren of historical context, reflecting mainly the stripped-down global-selling environment from which they arise; so insular (yet all-encompassing and well-armed) are they as to be both conquering heroes and nothing at all.
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Our troops in Iraq represent the first video-game generation, kids who spent their teen years ramping up their weaponry in outer space as on Earth. Perhaps then it's not surprising that, trapped in Iraq, they now speak of the enemy familiarly as "the bad guys."
But as any video-game "Zone" will tell you, as [G.I.] Joe's own history indicates, that old world of "landmarks" is long gone -- and that would have been so even if the invasion of Iraq had been a success, even if Syria and Iran had fallen like ten pins, even if the world's oil supplies were secured for us for generations to come. What the culture wars and the history wars and all the rest of the angry buzz hardly touch, what George Bush has no way of saying, is that, for decades, our world has been continually dismantled and restructured in a way that spells a kind of defeat. Like Joe in the Vietnam years, our President has a hold on our nation, but you can't spend two hours in a toy palace and not think that he won't, in the end, go the way of the giant Joe.
The conclusion of this piece highlights a phenomenon evidenced at the Republican Party Nomination Convention in Minneapolis. The militarization of America continues unabated, taken as a given. But the locus of the enemy has gotten much closer to home. War protesters are really high upon the list of internal enemies.
...you can often catch sight of the New York Police Department's heavily-armed HERCULES teams, specially stationed at "landmarks" and tourist attractions, togged out in full tactical gear, including the sort of dark helmets and heavy body armor that might leave them at home anywhere in outer space or possibly as the bad guys in some near-future shadow-op scenario.
The military and our increasingly militarized police look ever more like something out of an off-Earth video game or a comic book. They and the toy and video-game companies grow ever closer. (The Army is reportedly even patterning a new, fast-loading assault rifle on Hasbro's popular Super Soaker Water Gun.) Perhaps it's not that history, in the form of the military, is returning to the child's world, but that the exotic look first developed in that world is about to seize history by the throat with mayhem in mind.
