1st Edition
The Cult of the Victim-Veteran MAGA Fantasies in Lost-war America
The Cult of the Victim-Veteran explores the pool of American post- Vietnam War angst that rightists began plying in the 1980s. Ronald Reagan’s 1984 proclamation of a new "Morning in America" encoded the war as the moment of the nation’s fall from grace; it was the meme plagiarized by Donald Trump for his "Make America Great Again" (MAGA) slogan.
The national funk tapped for right- wing revanchism was psychologized when George H.W. Bush appropriated post- Vietnam syndrome, the diagnostic forerunner to post- traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), to memorialize the military accomplishments in the Persian Gulf War of 1990–1991—we had "kicked the Vietnam Syndrome." America was a victim- nation, its trauma emblemized by PTSD-stricken veterans whose war mission had been lost on the home front, cast aside, even spat on, upon return home.
In this book we see the long historical threads woven for MAGA: the twining of traditional and modern ways of knowing that imbues war trauma with political and cultural properties that complicate its diagnostic use; the post- World War I disclosure that many shellshock patients had never been exposed to exploding shells, and the use of wounded- veteran imagery to fan the flames of German fascism; the cultural necessity of reimaging antiwar Vietnam veterans as psychiatric casualties that calls forth a new diagnostic category, PTSD; the derivatizing of PTSD for traumatic brain injury, Agent Orange, and moral injury; and the victim- veteran figure as metaphor for a wounded America, for which MAGA is the remedy.
Introduction.
1. Spectacle, Science, and War Trauma: MAGA's Tangled Back Stories
- Spectacle: Bridging Tradition and Enlightenment
- A Visuel Leads the Way in the "Science" of Mental Health
- The Camera: Heaven-sent for Spectacle in the Science of Mental Health
- The "Great War" as Spectacle: When Casualties Become Story-Telling Props
2. Shellshock: Political Cultural, Medical Minds, and Moving Pictures
- Catapult to More War: Germany’s Dolchstosslegend
- The Myth of the Hostile Homecoming: Gendered and Medicalized
- The Great War in Triple Spectacle: Machines, Their Casualties, and Moving Pictures
- The Unseen Incoming from the Big Guns
- Hidden Injuries: The Political Text
- The “Gold-Star Mother”: The Spectacle of Death as an Achievement
3. The Spectacle of Antiwar Warriors: Political Dissent Is Made a Medical Disorder
- Sir! No Sir!
- Discrediting Antiwar Veterans: Not Really Veterans, Not Real Men
- Psychologizing the Political
- Political Spectacle Makes the News, the News Makes Medical Science
- The New York Times Medicalizes Veteran Dissent
- The “Crazy Vet” Movies
- Victim-Veterans and Victim Nations
4. Agent Orange: As Spectacle and Trope
- “Seeing” and Remembering the War
- Imagining Agent Orange
- The Quiet Backstory to Agent Orange
- “Earth Day was a Snow Job”—I.F. Stone
- Veterans and Agent Orange
- 1978: Agent Orange Comes Out
- Agent Orange Goes to The Movies
- Agent Orange: A Conversion Disorder
5. Traumatic Brain Injury: From News to Nomenclature
- World War II: Different War, Different Representations
- Korea and The Return of Spectacle
- The Battle of Paradigms Resumed: Neurology vs. Psychiatry
- The Central Park Jogger and NFL Quarterbacks: Rehearsing for TBI in War Trauma
- Recipe for Spectacle: A War Reporter with a War Injury
6. "Moral Injury": Its Own Spectacle
- "Moral Injury": War Trauma de Jour
- Moral Injury: Its Own Spectacle
- Seen Combat? Who’s to Say?
- What Did You Do in The War, Daddy?
- Atrocities and Moral Injury: A Troublesome Mix
- The Consequences of “Moral Injury”
- Moral Injury a Dog Whistle for MAGA
7. Trauma in a Post-truth Era: Back to Charcot’s Salon?
- Billy Pilgrim Psychologized
- Billy Pilgrim’s Creator Psychologized
- Trauma as Spectacle
- Forward: From Modern Rationality to Pre-modernism Spectacle
- Steve Bannon: The White House Whisperer
- MAGA’s Call: A New Zion or Nihilism?
Biography
Jerry Lembcke is the author of eight books including The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (NYU Press, 1998) and Hanoi Jane: War, Sex, and Fantasies of Betrayal (UMass Press, 2010). He is presently Associate Professor of Sociology Emeritus at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.
"This eye-opening book takes us through a history of war- and postwar spectacle from World War I to the present forever war(s) and exposes intriguing parallels and interrelations in the representation of trauma and its political utilization. Jerry Lembcke shows that it was most often the media and popular culture, rather than the sciences themselves, who introduced and promoted (pseudo)scientific explanations of trauma – which, turned into postwar spectacle, would serve to legitimize new wars, not to end or prevent them."
- Paul Benedikt Glatz, independent scholar (Berlin, Germany), author of Vietnam's Prodigal Heroes (Lexington, 2021)The book presents an original argument about public memory and the Vietnam War. It points to the existence of fantasies that have emerged from that war, which conceive of U.S. military veterans as victims of their own government and that obfuscate veterans’ extensive involvement in anti-war activism. Lembcke spells out the political implications—showing how these fantasies have fuelled a revanchist call to "Make America Great Again" and to avenge the lost war in Vietnam through repeated military interventions whose failure perpetuates the vicious ongoing cycle he describes. No other scholars or books have looked at the history in the same way as Lembcke has, nor made the same historical connections. The material is extremely timely and important for people to understand. The book is very vital in exposing a central pathology of modern U.S. political culture which is fuelling a slide towards endless war and fascism.
– Jeremy Kuzmarov, Managing Editor, Covert Action Magazine
From shell shock to TBI, Jerry Lembcke reveals how the spectacle of war––in photography, film, literature, journalism––has shaped the science of combat trauma and furnished the contemporary Right with a powerful fantasy of betrayal, loss, and the promise of redemption. Lembcke, our most cleareyed critic of the cultural economy of war, challenges the unassailability of a story that has repeatedly fueled a desire to take up arms and find the next enemy. Read this book.
––Joseph Darda, author of How White Men Won the Culture Wars: A History of Veteran America
