By Bruce Gambrill Foster
September 14, 2014
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To watch an hour or two of Nat Geo, Discovery
Channel, Arts and Entertainment, History, TLC,
and even the Food Network is to believe the
world is at war. Animals are at war. Families
are at war. Cooks, bakers and brides are at war.
Environmentalists are at war. Shippers and
shoppers and crafts people are at war. Bands do
battle. Bulbs do battle. Dips and books and
babies do battle. Even cupcake makers are at
war!
The promo for A&E’s Storage Wars, for example,
features a handful of working class folks and
retirees firing assault rifles, racing to do
battle in armored Humvees, fast-lining from
choppers and throwing flames while a baritone
voiceover announces that “five soldiers of
fortune” will “battle it out” with “their gloves
off” in the biggest blockbuster of the season.
The clip ends with the firebombing of a building
as the combatants strut away in slow motion.
Food Network’s promo for Cupcake Wars features a
sixty-something ex-marine named Bruce who tears
his shirt off in the opening sequence, pumps a
bit of iron, and announces that “there will be
no prisoners” in the cupcake business and that
“only the strong survive.” With a variation of
the Star Wars theme underscoring the next
sequence, Bruce goes to what he calls “the war
zone,” where he empties 50-pound sacks of flour
into industrial-sized mixers. In the final
sequence, wearing a vintage WWII helmet, he
claims to be “the general of the cupcake wars”
and barks a final order at his hapless underling
to “straighten out those damn cupcakes!”
And in what may well be the most absurd
promotional advertisement of this kind, TLC’s
Craft Wars host Tori Spelling strikes a classic
James Bond pose with her glue-gun at the ready,
while a contestant on the show exclaims, “this
isn’t just crafting, this is war.” Glue-ya!
In the wake of the Michael Brown shooting in
Ferguson, Missouri, much is being said and
written about the militarization of our state
and local police departments. Regrettably, this
trend is not limited to law enforcement and
other government agencies; it is part and parcel
of our national character. And this is nowhere
more insidious or egregious than in the overtly
martial tone of American non-fiction television
programming.
Available in over 85 million American
households, the National Geographic Channel and
other content providers have wittingly joined
forces with the march toward a hyper-militarized
society. Like History, TLC and Discovery
Channel, Nat Geo, the brand’s affectionate
diminutive, runs a slate of non-fiction programs
with factual content focused on nature, science,
culture, and history. But there is nothing
factual about the tone and pervasive militancy
in the framing and marketing of otherwise benign
documentary programming.
For those who may not be familiar with these
shows, Storage Wars, Shipping Wars, Abalone
Wars, Junkyard Wars, Trawler Wars, Swamp Wars,
Texas Car Wars, Property Wars, and even Weed
Wars feature simple, working-class men and women
who struggle to eek out a living by scouring
repossessed storage units, flipping used cars or
derelict properties, fishing, farming and
otherwise going about their business in a modest
and occasionally pathetic attempt to make a
buck. They have names like Jarrod and Brandi and
Darrell. They wear jeans and t-shirts and chew
gum and speak in fragments. And they hail from
small towns like Appledale, Birchville,
Hillgrove and Plumfield.
Nat Geo Wild, an updated version of the
venerable and iconic nature magazine, has joined
the battlefield with Python Wars, Rhino Wars,
Cat Wars, Predators at War, and Elephant Wars.
Episode titles such as Animal Fight Night, Shark
Kill Zone, Predators Ambush, and Savannah
Smackdown pay sad homage to the tradition of
anthropomorphic portrayals from a gentler time.
Compare, for instance, the magazine’s 1962
article entitled Storks, Vanishing Sentinels of
Europe’s Rooftops. Today, we would have Stork
Wars.
Beginning in 1930 with J. Edgar Hoover’s
declaration of the War on Crime, American
rhetoricians adopted the metaphor to great
effect in their efforts to engineer public
approval for the management of social problems.
Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 declaration of the War on
Poverty, followed in 1971 by Nixon’s War on
Drugs, and subsequent declarations of war on
gangs, cancer, women, AIDS, obesity and terror
have firmly established the concept of armed
conflict in our everyday lives. Even a
celebration of universal love and charity, in an
irony of the highest degree, was rendered a
battlefield when commentators declared the War
on Christmas.
The connection between combating the violence of
organized crime, for example, and war is easily
bridged. In both, blood is spilled. Less so the
relationship between warfare and poverty,
although the case can be made for the life and
death struggles of the poor and impoverished.
But in what increasingly dim recess of our
imagination do we allow for comparison between
organized warfare and the purchase and resale of
goods from abandoned storage lockers? To what
depths have we descended that we so casually
equate the wholesale mutilation, death and
destruction of innocent civilians caught, as
they inevitably are, in the horror of industrial
violence with the creation of decorative candle
stands or embroidered placemats? How have we
come to associate the instinctual order and
balance of the natural world with the forced
relocation and extermination of entire human
populations?
The militarization of society takes many forms.
In the case of our law enforcement agencies, it
manifests in the transfer of military hardware
and tactical deployment of the kind we witnessed
in Ferguson, Missouri. In less obvious ways,
however, it pervades our news coverage and
creeps into our language as we target various
groups with bullet points and marketing
campaigns that attack the opposition and rally
our allies and give us a shot at victory. In
their book Language and Peace, authors Schaffner
and Wenden point out that we should be concerned
not with the use of martial rhetoric per se, but
patterns of metaphorical thinking that inform to
a great extent an overarching ideology. They
conclude that “the language of journalists and
diplomats [and television programmers]
frequently represents ideological stances that
accept and promote war as a legitimate way of
regulating international relations and settling
inter-group conflict; that language
unquestioningly promotes values, sustains
attitudes and encourages actions that create
conditions that can lead to war; and that
language itself creates the kind of enemy image
essential to provoking and maintaining hostility
that can help justify war.”
Ethicist and philosopher James Childress
suggests the use of martial rhetoric poses a
dilemma: “In debating social policy through the
language of war, we often forget the moral
reality of war.” But it’s a far cry from framing
serious social policy initiatives in such
violent terms and using them to promote everyday
activities such as cooking, shopping, crafting,
making a living, or documenting the natural
world. Through these decisions, we are rapidly
devolving the character of our interactions into
kill-or-be-killed, take-no-prisoner,
only-the-strong-survive clichés. If even our
simplest joys are couched in terms of conflict,
death and domination, what hope is there to
distinguish and abhor and eventually end the
true villainy of armed conflict, the scourge of
war?
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