Mechanical Mikey and the Theater of War

“If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood/Come gurgling from the froth-corrupted lungs . . . . My friend, you would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori  [It is a sweet and fitting thing to die for one’s country]

– Wilfred Owen, Dulce Et Decorum Est

On the morning of November 11, I was passing through Pittsfield, Massachusetts, heading north. The traffic was stopped as a Veteran’s Day parade headed south. It was a sight for a musing mind, so that is exactly what I did, sitting in my car watching the parade’s celebration of the patriotism of military veterans.

I asked myself: What are they still marching for?

I was once in the U.S. Marines but became a conscientious objector during the U.S. war against Vietnam and have opposed US militarism and wars ever since. I was brought up to be a patriot, and the marching men – mostly old – with their ancient rifles teetering on their shoulders as the season’s first snowflakes peppered their faces and the marching band drummed up a martial beat to counter the dreary morning, touched me in a melancholic and twisted way. They seemed to be barely holding on – but to what? I wondered – war, their youths, past bonds, a lost country, some meaning in once having a cause to fight for, the best times of their lives, false nostalgia, the joy of killing?

Young, smiling, and excited 11-13 year-old girls ran alongside, handing out small American flags to any occupant of the halted cars who would open their windows. I was about to do so, despite a lifetime of rejecting the flag waving (but not the country) that has come to represent war mongering for me, but the cops motioned the traffic on. The marchers waved to the very few people scattered along the sidewalks who waved back. I drove on wondering why my heart opened to the marchers. It surprised me. Waves of conflicting emotions flowed over me.

When I arrived at my destination, there was a television playing in the waiting room of the office. I took a seat and watched it, something I usually avoid. It was a History Channel program about U.S. soldiers killed and wounded in Vietnam, the Medevac helicopters flying into combat zones and medics evacuating fellow soldiers. Very dangerous work by courageous men. Hearing the program’s narrator blather on about patriotism as it showed gruesome pictures of bloodied and dead soldiers, erased any previous sentiment I felt about the parade marchers. Like the documentary, the parade typically did not mourn the millions of victims of the endless U.S. wars nor did it picture or in any way illustrate all the U.S. dead, wounded, and crippled soldiers. The marchers’ smiles were pasteboard masks concealing the grim reality of war.

I felt rage rising in me, even as I admired the bravery of the evacuation teams bringing out their comrades. My blood boiled at the way the program was using bravery as a cover to continue to promote war, to say these soldiers had been defending their country and were therefore patriots when they were attacking another country over eight thousand miles away for the lies of son of a bitch politicians (LBJ and Richard Nixon, both of whom were elected as peace candidates) who always wage wars so easily, using the flesh and blood of young people as cannon fodder. Yes, the old lies told by jackals with smiling faces.

I wanted to grab the politicians by their turkey necks and force their hands into the massive bloodied hole in an 18 year old boy’s entrails, to push their lying faces low to smell the blood and guts of their easy-going wars.

I wanted to force them to drink their martinis sitting among the hundreds of slaughtered Vietnamese women, children, and old people in a Vietnamese village massacred in a U.S. “search and destroy” mission; force them to walk in their shiny shoes though the body parts in Iraq and Libya and Gaza and all the places soaked in blood by their decisions; make them spend their vacations locked up in the world-wide CIA torture black sites to listen to the screams of the victims.

I could understand how young draftees could have been hoodwinked by the government’s lies about the wars, but I was still flabbergasted by how veterans could still march in support of America’s wars after all the lies have been exposed so many times, not just about Vietnam but Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Latin America, etc. An endless tapestry of lies told to support criminal wars, genocide, and the subversion of countries around the world. In the words of  the English playwright Harold Pinter: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them.”

When I was earlier sitting in my stationary car, I felt as though I was sitting in a front row seat in a theater, watching a play. Then I realized that I was doing exactly that, and that the annual march was a reenactment of war’s death march – “the theater of war” – and the old soldiers were still playing their parts – but now as survivors – to remind the audience of the dead and their “sacrifices” for the flag, a reminder meant to celebrate wars while the band played on.

The little wind-up mechanical tin toy soldier I was given as a toddler –  a World War I (the “Great War”) doughboy that I called Mechanical Mikey after the neighbor who gave it to me – reminds me of the theatrical nature of child’s play, wars, the military, and their parades – all social life actually. The ways play is a way for adults to catch children in the social net of lies, imitation, and violence, not necessarily out of cruelty but ignorant love. And for the adults to play their parts of eternal innocents on the social stage where performing is de rigueur.

Such child’s play is a dress rehearsal (etymology: to bring back the hearse) for death and a life of repeating the dead hand of the past, but no child would know this. Death is hidden in the play, the roles serving a distancing technique: “now back to real life.” I wonder if I was choking Mikey in this photo. His key was on his left side. Had I wound him up and then decided to stop him in his tracks as he marched across the rug? Was the boy aware at some level that some day he would be following the words of the singer Phil Ochs, I Ain’t Marching Anymore. I know Eddie became Eddy, a name change that suggested that a whirlpool was brewing down river.

In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell writes the following: “Seeing warfare as theater provides a psychic escape for the participant: with a sufficient sense of theater, he can perform his duties without implicating his ‘real’ self and without impairing his innermost conviction that the world is still a rational place.”

Those who march in military parades are acting out parts in a play that both repeat and prepare for the next show. The parade serves a double function, just as my toy soldier had a key for me to wind him up again and again to create a form of psychic socialization through repetition. The key being repetition. Repeat, Rehearse, Remember – do it again.

Norman Brown puts it thus in Love’s Body: “Ancestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the dance macabre or war dance; Valhalla, ghostly warriors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again. All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis, every soldier a living corpse.”

Watching the parade and then the History Channel’s documentary, I realized I was watching live and taped versions of repetitive religious performances of sacrificial rituals of a mythic nature, similar to the election every four years of the U.S. president. They are two liturgies of the national religion rooted in war-making, lying, and an economy dependent on killing. But most people act as if they are not choosing to pretend such parades and television documentaries are about remembering and honoring past “sacrifices,” when they are endorsement for future wars.

Likewise, the presidential elections serve to promote the illusion that the the next president will be different from his predecessor and will end the U.S. wars, which never end. The most recent example is the election in 2024 of Donald Trump, with some diehard Trump supporters continuing to believe in Trump’s irenic intentions despite his blatant betrayal of his antiwar promises, just like his recent predecessors Bush, Obama, and Biden. These men are elected to wage war, support the military industrial complex, and therefore the U.S. economy based on war.

It does not matter which political party is in power in Washington, D.C. Their political platforms are meaningless; they are sops thrown to an electorate desperate for illusions, as anyone with a smidgen of historical knowledge would know. Yet many justify the ruthless war-making of the American empire and how it underlies the entire economy by arguing that the parties differ on domestic policies, which is often true. But the lesser of two evils is still the evil of two lessers and another form of bad faith, for the domestic economy, being dependent on warfare and funded by the politicians of both parties, is an economy of death. Harold Pinter said it truly in his Nobel Award Address:

The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

But as with every religion – maybe more so – as Dostoevsky said of conventional Christianity, such political belief also depends on miracles, mystery, and authority rather than freedom. The flight from freedom is commonplace, despite all the rhetoric that uses it to justify the wars and the war makers.

The problem we are faced with is an issue of objectivity and reality wherein the public as audience suspends its disbelief in the theater of politics and war and plays its part as audience, as if war and politics were a Broadway show. It’s one big show with everyone in on the act. It is mass hypnosis, a passive surrender to what is perceived to be superior power. Ernest Becker, in his stunning book, The Denial of Death, when commenting on Freud’s work on group psychology and people’s tendency to abandon their judgment and common sense writes:

Freud saw right away what they did with it: they simply became dependent children again, blindly following the inner voice of their parents, which now came to them under the hypnotic spell of the leader. They abandoned their egos to his, identified with his power, tried to function with him as an ideal.

This is another way of saying that on the stage of social life few people choose to not play their assigned roles as obedient children to authority. It is a protection racket, what Jean Paul Sartre calls bad faith – mauvaise foi – and what Hemingway fictionalizes in his masterful story, “A Clean Well-Lighted Place.”

Such bad faith can probably not be countered by an essay like this. Maybe Liam Clancy’s compelling version of Eric Bogle’s great song about a non-mechanical Aussie doughboy in WW I might pierce the heart and break the spell in a better way.

Edward Curtin: Sociologist, researcher, poet, essayist, journalist, novelist….writer – beyond a cage of categories. His latest book is AT THE LOST AND FOUND: Personal & Political Dispatches of Resistance and Hope (Clarity Press). Website: edwardcurtin.com