Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 11, 1995 TAG: 9506140032
SECTION: BOOK PAGE: F-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY DAN FREI
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
\ Studs Terkel, commenting on "The End of Victory Culture," has written: "America Victorious has been our country's postulate since its birth. Tom Engelhardt, with a burning clarity, recounts the end of this fantasy, from the split atom to Vietnam. It begins at our dawn's early light and ends with the twilight's last gleaming. It is as powerful as a Joe Louis jab to the solar plexus."
Indeed, this brilliant, highly original and complex examination of American self awareness is a work that helps clarify and explain the evolution of our national identity since the end of World War II. It is a book that can change the way we see our history.
Tom Engelhardt opens the door to a re-thinking of myth, the telling of history and the victorious war stories we have told ourselves, to a new understanding of the decline of that "victory culture" culminating in the Vietnam war, and the attempted resuscitation of the victory culture in Grenada and Iraq. This book is about American society's once deep-seated sense of conquest and control, our triumphant interpretation of our own history, and how that changed with our inability to forge victory in Korea and Vietnam.
In no way at all does Engelhardt write disrespectfully of America's military heros and soldiers. His is a cultural and intellectual historiography of a domestic kind.
Engelhardt chronicles the changing American domestic culture - the birth of "rock 'n roll" and the inclusion of black culture into the youth driven commercial 1950's mainstream (considered a dangerous national phenomenon) - while fusing those changes with the political overview of the fear of communism, the space race, spy vs. spy, and the un-usable H-bomb. Engelhardt notes that Hollywood's portrayal of defeats at The Alamo, Custer's Last Stand, Pearl Harbor - events that entertained the public consciousness in sometimes mythological ways - represented, in the larger sense, "being surrounded" by alien enemies but through which we went down fighting.
Out of this entertainment perspective one can better understand the cold war mentality in which we saw ourselves surrounded, even to the extent of thinking "they" (replacing our frontier fear of "the Indians" with our 1950's fear of "the communists") were going to overtake us domestically.
But in Vietnam, where we could hardly even see the enemy, that perspective - in competition with a civil rights struggle at home - led to the end of a white superiority that had been the fulcrum of the American victory culture since before the French and Indian War. It is perhaps in this context that we can begin to understand today's rising "militia mentality" and right-wing antagonism as a cultural backlash to this perception of the decline of our victory culture.
Even though the white European culture that settled America repressed and subjugated the native populations (not to mention our imported slave labor), it was the image of the savage attacking "us" that became the basis of our fear, and also, later, our entertainment.
As Engelhardt writes in the first chapter, "War Story":
"From silent films to 'hip' westerns like 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' (1969), there may have been no more common or less commented upon scene; none more generically thrilling or less considered by either audiences or critics than the spectacle of the slaughter of the non-white. Featured in thousands of movies, its prototype was certainly the band of Indians, whooping and circling the wagon train; but 'they' could be Arabs charging the North African fort ('Beau Geste'), Chinese rushing the foreign legations ('55 Days in Peking'), Mexicans rushing the Alamo ('The Alamo'), Japanese banzai-ing American foxholes ('Bataan'), or Chinese human-waving American lines ('Retreat, Hell!')."
Those of us who grew up and were schooled in the '50s and '60s were constantly subject to (at least) an illusion of a victory culture in America, from the movies we watched, the triumphant interpretation of history in our school books, the toys (GI Joes and Barbie dolls) we played with, to comic books we read. We grew up understanding the paradigm of America as the natural and preordained winner on the world stage.
With the late 20th century American mind set up to receive, through increasingly modern and pervasive technological means, such a repetitious cultural mythology about the natural order of things, the failure of our role in Vietnam became a prime cause of the disillusionment of a generation resulting from an inability to continue our national victory narrative. This book is not so much an indictment of American culture as it is a filling out of a complex and delicious national story.
Tom Engelhardt's work in this regard is important, and is also a magnificent reassessment of the post WWII American cultural paradigm. Engelhardt keeps a keen eye on the contributions to that perspective made by the everyday things and commercial manifestations of the culture that have touched our lives. Orville Schell ("Mandate of Heaven") has said "This is truly the first post-Cold War book."
I liked it so much that I read it twice, and probably will revisit it again.
Dan Frei is a political and public relations consultant in Roanoke.
by CNB