Airports and Other Inappropriate Public Spaces

The Super Bowl happened, the right team won, and it feels good to keep thinking of Boston as titletown (or something like that) for the rest of the year. There were no stupid messes like last year (despite Fox’s pulling/yanking/jacking, as it were, the second airing of the Go Daddy ad), and, somehow, I didn’t end the evening feeling weirdly disconnected from a seeming majority of Americans who want a theocracy like I did last year (instead, my weird alienation due to injection of religion into sports from this month comes in the penultimate paragraph of this article on Žygis Šeštokas and his scoring 76 points in a North Carolina high school game). Instead, this year, I ended up literally in tears (despite the party atmosphere) upon watching an ad offered up by Anheuser-Busch, an ad they call on their website simply “Applause.” The ad opens on a bunch of people listelessly doing what it is that people do in airports, while a single soldier starts marching by. One pair of hands clap. Then the soldiers and the applause multiply. Those who were listless earlier now stand up and cheer for the troops, who continue to walk through the airport affecting a dignity based on, I suppose, pretending not to notice the applause. The group of troops (or troop, as it were) passes, and we see their backs exposed to the camera, and one soldier looks around at the camera. Fade to a title of “Thank you.” and then to a stylised Anheuser-Busch logo. Yes, The Conservative Voice liked it. But, then, they hated the seemingly pro-VD (or pro ardor over me) Tabasco ad. Who knows.

My questions, then, addressed on the flip, are these: Are the soldiers returning or leaving? Does it matter which? (Obviously yes, but how?) And from where is the affective response?

As I first saw the ad, I imagined that the soldiers were returning. I was immediately sickened by a sort of crass level of cheap patriot hucksterism. I had no idea who funded the ad, but I was immediately reminded of the myth of the spit-upon veteran back from Vietnam. These soldiers were the new generation, in a new America that had excised the ’60s (or, more appropriately early ’70s) like a tumor or cyst. This is America fixed, without dissent. Everyone stands up and claps for what the troops sacrificed, for what they put on the line, presumably in Iraq. Thirty years ago, the ad tells us, America was lost. But now, under steady, Christian leadership, the ship is right. A second, secret narrative is that, now that Iraq has had “successful” elections, the war is over and the troops can come home to our fawning adulation over bringing elections and, subsequently, peace to the Middle East.

Yet the ad, and if I were to say it is a good ad, it is because of this moment of slippage, does not provide for us the direction of the troops. I only assumed, based on the aforementioned myth, that the soldiers were returning and that the purveyors of shitty beer wanted to put themselves on the side of the squares—fuck the hippies and their marijuana. And maybe that’s the play the ad gets for America as a whole. Maybe that’s even, you know, the intention.

But while watching the ad, I went from being furious to crying, and this was as I understood that the troops in the ad could be actually leaving for Iraq. Suddenly, this ad, and its ending, is tragic, hyper-affective, and maddeningly infuriating. The first reading plays on righting a myth and critiquing the hippies of the ’60s. This new, second reading justifies the chickenhawk cabinet surrounding George W. Bush as well as the empty screeds written by the “101st Fighting Keyboardists”—the punditocracy who, like the chickenhawks, talk a great game about war and the honor of fighting war without, you know, ever actually doing it. Or without making their children do it.

That look the soldier makes as he turns back can be both read as an acknowledgment of the applause, a way of saying “thanks” back to the clappers, or it can be the last look of a man sent, perhaps unwillingly (or at least beyond his level of expectations when he maybe signed up for the National Guard five years ago since his wife was pregnant again and the mill was making noise about moving south), off to be a sort of cannon fodder in an underfunded, misplanned, adventure off on the other side of the world that has real, on the streets, affective value for Americans throughout the nation but does not have the same affective value for, say, for George W. Bush, who has 0 family members in active duty. Or for Dick Cheney. Or for the overwhelming majority of the members of Congress (I think one member has a child in the service). Or, I’m guessing, for a giant proportion of the Board of Directors at Anheuser-Busch (they’re all rich, and the rich don’t fight).

I cried remembering the secret anxiety when the troop callups came at first, two years ago, knowing that I’d have family very possibly on the front lines, unlike these assholes who call the shots (or repeat the talking points) and then turn around and label me anti-troop or anti-patriotic for wanting fewer Americans to die.

That glimpse at the end, that’s the inverse of Lot’s wife looking back at Sodom and Gomorrah. He’s looking back to see the living world he’s leaving as he descends into a quagmire of brimstone and fire, his flag-draped coffin the pillar of salt into which he will turn. That’s the look of a dead man walking, a puppet, a pawn, a tool treated simply as such by fates hidden deep in the bowels of the Pentagon or the West Wing.

And there are the lazy Americans clapping, calling this adventure a just war, saying they support the troops while making sure that their own kin can stay the hell out of it. It’s sickening, not patriotic. It’s tragic, not supportive. Anyone who supports an actual, moral, culture of life can’t respond to sending troops to death in Iraq with applause, only with indignation.

Before I get too circular or heavy-handed here, I want to point out the hate Juan Cole unleashed on Monicagate-spawn Jonah Goldberg today, as it’s appropriate to what’s so fucked up about the ad I’m discussing. Goldberg, earlier in the exchange, excused himself from going to Iraq because he would miss his daughter, the income, and the weight he’d lose in basic training. Cole, potentially anachronistically and a little too overwhelmingly rhetorically, draws a distinction between this adventure and World War II. Imagine, then, this ad in 1942—there wouldn’t be any applause since every player in the airport wouldn’t be hanging out then, flying somewhere more important. They’d be enlisting their own asses. There would not even need to be a scene of applause, since the US would not feel guilty for sending its troops to death—those troops are fighting to protect something or other, and death is a part of that. The people clapping as the troops ship out in 2005 clap because they know that the war is fucked beyond recognition and because of their own, personal guilt over being part of the electorate that put this damned Kriegsmaschine in power (twice!) that is now turning our youth into splatter from IEDs.

Another way, and to sum up: Outwardly supporting the troops is a signal of your own shame for not being there yourself before it is a sign of patriotism.

Thank you for going to Iraq and dying, kids, so I don’t have to.