War Society
I saw a fantastic bumper sticker at work:
This triggered another thought I’ve been rolling around in my head for awhile: Why are we such a war-happy culture?
The phrase “war on x” is so common that we use it without thinking about its meaning. For anyone who as actually lived through a war and been personally impacted by it, war is literally hell on earth. It destroys families, ruins countries, and is felt for decades to come. In short, not the sort of word you would expect a healthy society to throw around carelessly.
To prove my point, let’s do a little thought experiment: How do you feel about the phrase “Let’s start a holocaust on drugs” or “The liberals have started another genocide on Christmas”?
Not such a friendly expression. Yet why should these be any different than “war on drugs” or “war on Christmas”?
Digging down a layer, you’ll find the problem is even more pervasive than it seems. The national media outlets love using violent analogies for non-violent events. Politicians don’t simply debate or argue, they “take the gloves off” (suggesting a rowdy fist-fight). It’s not merely a race or a contest for the Whitehouse, it’s a battle. We simply love using war/fighting/violence in our analogies.
Of course, the irony is that when there’s a real live war to report on, that same national media gives it only passing mention. The Iraq War is now the second longest war in US history, it has claimed north of 150,000 lives, and yet Britney’s personal meltdown gets more coverage.
Here’s the hook: we’ve gone a little screwy in our culture and with our lexicon. War is overused as an analogy and woefully underused to describe current events. Does anyone out there even bother to consider the use of peace as a conceptual tool? Do we really need to relearn the consequences of militarism? Have I gone off the deep end?
Filed under culture, war : Comments (1) : Jan 20th, 2008 by tadfad
January 21st, 2008 at 10:22 pm
I don’t think you have gone off the deep end, I think this is a significant point we don’t think about enough. Two wildly inconsistent takes: First, the “war” analogy prepares us to accept casualties (i.e., pathetic, chemically dependent drug users who are thrown into prisons for long sentences in order to “send a message” in the war) and dumbs down the debate by requiring the false choice of only two alternatives (are you for the “war” or soft on drugs). Second, the use of the “war” analogy is a way to talk tough while not spending the resources to have any chance to be effective. Our war on drugs, for example, is noteworthy in part because we have nowhere near enough treatment facilities to attempt to straighten out chemically dependent users. Similarly, compare the s airport scene in Europe, with trained, competent screeners actually talking to passengers in an attempt to spot potential risks with the US airport’s security theater of bored, stocking footed passengers walking by equally bored “screeners”. I think there is general agreement that trained screeners can do a much better job of reducing the risk of violence than a series of rules about bringing more than three ounces of toothpaste on board. But trained screeners require expensive training and significant pay. Far cheaper to have a war on terror, announce we are at threat level orange, and employ an army of ill paid people to simply enforce simplistic rules.