New Republic, Chris Lehmann
<https://newrepublic.com/authors/chris-lehmann>/May 21, 2021
The White Men Who Wanted to Be Victims
From the Vietnam War to the present, how aggrieved men cast
themselves as a discriminated-against minority
UNIVERSAL PICTURES/GETTY
Tom Cruise in the 1989 movie “Born on the Fourth of July”
The title of Joseph Darda’s new book,/How White Men Won the Culture Wars
<https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9780520381445>//,/may land awkwardly for
weary followers of recursive debates over cancel culture, wokeness, and
the like. The loudest and most visible partisans in these battles are
aggrieved white men, insisting that they’re scapegoats in unhinged
identity-driven witch hunts and eagerly putting themselves forward as
martyrs in ugly confrontations over free speech. How is it, then, that
this demographic emerged as the victors of the modern American culture
wars and managed to leverage that success into ongoing, ever-renewable
plaints of grievance?
How White Men Won the Culture Wars: A History of Veteran America
by Joseph Darda
Buy on Bookshop
<https://www.bookshop.org/a/1620/https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9780520381445>
University of California Press, 266 pp., $27.95
The answer, Darda argues in this original and persuasive revisionist
study, lies in the overlap between the post-1960s culture wars and the
legacy of an actual war: the American debacle in Vietnam. The United
States withdrew in defeat from Vietnam in 1975—a fraught moment as well
for the American political economy, coinciding with the landmark civil
rights and feminist uprisings that convulsed the country as many
American soldiers served overseas. Returning Vietnam vets mimicked the
rhetoric and strategies of the era’s homegrown protest movements while
developing a powerful narrative of abandonment and trauma to convey
their own sense of disaffection. And in spite of the heavily nonwhite
and working-class makeup of the conscript army in Vietnam, the dominant
image of the Vietnam vet became a white, middle-class one.
This curious work of cultural alchemy came about thanks to the
convergence of several other post–civil rights reckonings in 1970s
America. As white Vietnam vets struggled with the challenges of adapting
to an American social order transformed by the politics of
anti-discrimination and cultural representation, they were not simply
echoing the well-worn refrains of white reaction. Rather, as Darda shows
in this wide-ranging and provocative tour through the post-Vietnam
cultural and political scene, they fashioned their own new brand of
therapeutically inflected grievance politics, poised to capitalize in a
host of ways on America’s emerging postliberal backlash.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Conditions were ripe for returning Vietnam vets to engineer this
dramatic change in status. The so-called white ethnic revival announced
a defection from the old model of WASP ascendancy, and the assertion of
new cultural status on behalf of a cohort of twentieth-century
immigrants—Polish, Italian, Greek, and Slovak Americans (or PIGS, in the
provocative coinage of white ethnic theorist and eventual
neoconservative theologian Michael Novak)—who bore limited culpability
for the original sin of Black slavery. This reconfigured model of the
white immigrant experience “turned white people into minorities,
innocent and self-made,” Darda writes, while the culture-first logic of
the white ethnic revival permitted these reborn white Americans “to
attribute the material barriers that Black and brown Americans faced in
education, health services, housing, law enforcement, and wealth
accumulation to culture and choice.”
The emerging new politics of white blamelessness came to a head in the
1978 U.S. Supreme Court decision/Regents of University of California v.
Bakke./The plaintiff in that case, a Marine vet in Vietnam named Alan
Bakke, alleged that he was a victim of reverse racial discrimination
after the University of California at Davis twice rejected his medical
school application in favor of nonwhite candidates selected under a
quota system. The court ruled in his favor, and in place of the putative
discriminatory nature of admissions quotas, the/Bakke/majority endorsed
the far more amorphous-to-subjective metric of “diversity” to justify
minority outreach efforts in college admissions programs—thereby vastly
complicating measurable progress in racial representation while helping
to launch a top-down human resources land rush in diversity training and
institutional image management.
Other returning Vietnam veterans, meanwhile, were coping with the
challenges of reintegrating into an America society that seemed ashamed
of the failed Southeast Asian war—and indifferent to hostile to the
plight of veterans of the conflict. The mounting sense of anomie in the
white veterans’ community became focused on the notion of post-traumatic
stress disorder—a new psychological diagnosis that took root after a
nurse in a Boston VA hospital treated a veteran who’d taken part in the
infamous massacre of some 500 Vietnamese villagers in My Lai. By the
time PTSD was formally adopted in the 1980 edition of the/Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,/the notion of post-Vietnam
trauma was already spreading beyond the corps of afflicted veterans and
gaining traction as an all-purpose depiction of white male grievance in
a contracting economy and a still-confrontational climate of post–civil
rights and feminist protest. “The attribution of PTSD to vets and the
white men who identified with them, most of whom did not serve and did
not suffer from PTSD” worked “as a kind of entitlement,” Darda writes,
“a belief that something they deserved had been taken from them, had
been taken and must be returned. It encouraged a feeling of
entitlement/through/a sense of discrimination.”
The notion of post-Vietnam trauma was already spreading beyond the corps
of afflicted veterans and gaining traction as an all-purpose depiction
of white male grievance.
In a telling augur of this shift, Vietnam Veterans Against the War—a
militant anti-war group that gained notoriety when several of its
members (among them future senator and presidential candidate John
Kerry) hurled their service medals over a fence near the White
House—began to focus principally on issues of trauma and recovery,
sponsoring a series of “rap groups” to describe the harrowing experience
of combat in Vietnam and vets’ halting efforts to come to terms with its
psychic legacy. White veterans dominated in these sessions, as well, and
even when they recounted stories of atrocities that they’d carried out
in Vietnam, the psychologists who moderated the VVAW encounter sessions
diagnosed them as “survivors” of PTSD, effacing difficult questions of
accountability and guilt in “a dehistoricized trauma culture in which
all could claim the status of survivor,” Darda writes.
Another potent channel of this emerging dynamic of white blamelessness
was the Prisoner of War/Missing in Action movement, which also managed
to transmute a cross-racial vets’ issue into a politics of white
grievance. As part of the phased withdrawal of troops from Vietnam, the
Nixon administration orchestrated a high-profile return of 591 American
prisoners of war in the spring of 1973, in an initiative dubbed
“Operation Homecoming.” The returning prisoners were acutely
unrepresentative of the actual forces serving in Vietnam: They were
mostly college-educated officers. None of them had been drafted. They
were all men, and 95 percent of them were white; the most famous among
them, John McCain (another future senator and presidential candidate),
built a political career on the idea that his sacrifice and suffering
were emblematic of his generation of veterans. From this lily-white,
mediagenic presentation of returning prisoners of war, an activist
movement took root, seeking the return of allegedly still-living POWs in
Vietnam who were chiefly figments of urban legend—and the broader optics
of the American veterans’ movement ensured that these imaginary figures
had to be white. “The whiteness of the Operation Homecoming vets, the
most visible and distinguished former prisoners of war, made the POW/MIA
movement a vehicle for white racial grievance,” Darda writes, “and the
POW/MIA flag has been a common sight at white supremacist rallies ever
since. When a 1985/Newsweek/headline declared ‘We’re Still Prisoners of
War,’ some readers, whether conscious of it or not, would have taken
that ‘we’ to mean white America.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Not that anyone needed, by that point, any additional prompting to
envision the ideal type of the Vietnam vet as white and aggrieved:
American pop culture in the 1980s teemed with fables of white Vietnam
veterans fighting for recognition and some measure of vengeance in an
America that preferred to ignore or abuse them. Bruce Springsteen’s
stadium-rock anthem “Born in the U.S.A.,” the title cut from an album
that clocked more than 30 million sales, bemoaned the alienated state of
its narrator, a returned Vietnam vet, between a shouted chorus that
could well have doubled as a title for a tract in the white ethnic
revival genre. Not surprisingly, the song drew accolades from President
Ronald Reagan—whose reelection campaign briefly tried to adopt it as a
theme—as well as Reagan-allied propagandists such as high-Tory opinion
columnist George F. Will. Reagan’s opponent, Walter Mondale, also tried
to seize on the song as a rallying cry and even spuriously claimed that
the Boss had delivered an official Mondale endorsement.
Springsteen, a fairly apolitical cultural populist at that point in his
career, fought off the opportunistic embrace of both Reagan and Mondale.
But the campaigns of both men well understood that the failure of
Springsteen’s anthem to deliver any intelligible political message was,
in fact, the basis of its mass appeal. And as is the case with any
document bearing witness to white-inflected grievance, its own
identitarian agenda was pretty much hiding in plain sight:
The campaigns understood … that, whatever their candidates would or
wouldn’t do for the working class, the white worker and the Vietnam
vet meant something else to white men who identified as neither. The
insecure white worker of a Springsteen song signified for white men,
including most of all middle-class nonvets, that they had their own
hard-luck stories, that they had suffered in the wake of civil
rights, feminism, and the Vietnam War. The Reagan and Mondale
campaigns found in Springsteen, with the subtle mutable racial
meaning of his songs, a rare figure of consensus in the emerging
culture wars. Who wouldn’t vote for Bruce?
Neither subtlety nor mutability was a going concern for Sylvester
Stallone, whose blockbuster 1985 film,/Rambo: First Blood Part
2,/brought the image of the Vietnam vet back to its jingoistic Cold War
roots. Stallone’s title character is dispatched back to Vietnam on a POW
rescue mission and delivers his signature catchphrase in reply to the
officer briefing him: “Sir, do we get to win this time?” The movie
script also goes out of its way to give the character of Rambo a new
ethnic identity that hadn’t been referenced in the franchise’s debut
film or in the novel that formed the basis of the Rambo series: He’s
made half–Native American. As Darda notes, Rambo’s manufactured
Indigenous backstory gave a character played by a white actor a way to
co-opt a narrative of discrimination: “The white ethnic revival had made
white minorities the most American thing of all.… In the 1980s, that
meant a white actor starring as a half-Indian soldier—a minoritization
that, as simulated rather than embodied, allowed all white men to see
themselves reflected in it.”
Much the same simulacrum of authenticity altered the hallowed status of
veteran-ness in the film. When one of Rambo’s overseas handlers—a
feckless government bureaucrat based in Thailand—turns out to be lying
about his military service record, Rambo more or less shrugs it off. In
his debriefing session after the mission, he explains that he only wants
“what they [the POWs] want, and every other guy who came over here and
spilled his guts and gave everything he had wants: for our country to
love us as much as we love it.” The moral was plain, Darda argues:
“Veteran status has less to do for Rambo with wearing the uniform than
with waving the flag.”
In the world of literature, meanwhile, a new cohort of Vietnam authors,
all white and male, such as Tim O’Brien, Larry Heinemann, and Robert
Olin Butler, gained canonical stature in American letters—Heinemann’s
Vietnam vet novel,/Paco’s Story/(a “liberal answer to the Rambo films,”
Darda writes) famously beat out Toni Morrison’s/Beloved/for the 1987
National Book Award. The same white male–dominated narrative template
held for Vietnam memoirs, such as Ron Kovic’s/Born on the Fourth of
July,/which inspired both Springsteen’s anthem and a big-screen
adaptation by Oliver Stone.
This flood of literary recreations of the war crowded out memoirs and
fictions composed by Vietnamese writers who had been war refugees; when
Stone adapted one such memoir, Le Ly Hayslip’s/When Heaven and Earth
Changed Places <https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9780525431848>,/as the 1993
film/Heaven and Earth,/the film died at the box office, while critics
complained that a movie dedicated to the travails of a refugee rather
than a familiar anguished white veteran “lacks an emotional center,”
reserving their acclaim for Steve, the traumatized white male American
vet in the saga, played by Tommy Lee Jones. Jones’s character is “the
most effective, most powerful part of the film,”/Washington Post/critic
Hal Hinson proclaimed. For such onlookers, “the Vietnam War felt
abstract and unrelatable … without a dislocated white vet through whom
they could channel their anger and grief,” Darda observes. “Critics and
moviegoers, most of whom bought tickets to/Mrs. Doubtfire/and/The
Pelican Brief/that weekend instead, didn’t want to see a refugee saga on
the big screen unless it starred Steve, the refugee of [white Vietnam
vet memoirs]/Brothers in Arms, Going Back, The Circle of Hahn/, and/No
Longer Enemies, Not Yet Friends/.”
Even after he’d maligned the military service of John McCain earlier in
the campaign, Trump won the enthusiastic support of the assembled
POW/MIA activists.
And so the same cultural dispensation carries down through today. Like
Bruce Springsteen and Sylvester Stallone, Donald Trump dodged the
Vietnam war draft, claiming four deferments based ondubious diagnoses
<https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2019/02/27/trumps-lawyer-no-basis-for-presidents-medical-deferment-from-vietnam/>of
bone spurs in his feet. But Trump, who also became a national celebrity
in the vet-obsessed 1980s, seized the image of the brave defender of
defiled veteran honor. In 2016, speaking before D.C.’s traditional
POW/MIA Rolling Thunder motorcycle rally, Trump declared that “in many
cases, illegal immigrants are taken better care of by this country than
our veterans.” No one had to point out that the image of the veteran
Trump evoked was white—or that the “illegal immigrants” he had in mind
weren’t. Even after he’d maligned the military service of John McCain
earlier in the campaign, Trump won the enthusiastic support of the
assembled POW/MIA activists—and of the white nation that vicariously
identified with them. In the 2018 midterms, Democrats sought to follow
his lead, recruiting a slate of nearly 100 mostly white veterans to
attract voters from the long-fetishized center right.
In other words, the national consensus rested pretty much just where
Bruce Springsteen and John Rambo had left it—and white men could
comfortably reclaim their historic role at the center of American power,
shrouded in a gauzy mythos of innocence violated and reclaimed. As
Joseph Darda makes clear in this eye-opening study, they had won
something far more valuable and enduring than a culture war.
Chris Lehmann
<https://newrepublic.com/authors/chris-lehmann>@lehmannchris
<https://twitter.com/lehmannchris>
Chris Lehmann is an editor-at-large for/The New Republic/and/The Baffler/.
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