The End of Victory Culture

Last Book Read - The End of  Victory Culture - Tom Engelhardt

Fifty years ago today, October 2nd, 1959, The Twilight Zone premiered on television, portraying a new dimension of horror and uncertainty which has become a fundamental inspiration for an entire era of culture, including the recent ultra-post-modern Lost.  Like film noir before it, the themes of  The Twilight Zone, the uncertainty, the hidden dangers, the fear of the unknown, were possible only through the holes forming in American victory culture. The underlying neuroses of the culture, created by the beginnings of the Cold War and the nuclear age, were finally breaking through to the surface, and while not addressed overtly, they were omnipresent and influencing all aspects of American culture.

In The End of Victory Culture, Engelhardt traces the demise of victory culture through its earliest origins to the post 9/11 world.  He begins long before World War II, tracing the lineage back to colonial America, discussing atrocities throughout American history.  I think its easy to understand that this victory culture - the one we learned in school, and the one that likes to come out during oversimplified conversation, was always a facade but was a construct that was sustainable - for a time -under an emerging American leadership. Of course, anyone with any depth could tell by 2003, with the invasion of Iraq, that the American myth was dead.  So it seems that his historic introduction is far too lengthy and sometimes unnecessary, but finally we get to the beginning of the Cold War.


The atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima also blasted openings into a netherworld of consciousness where victory and defeat, enemy and self, threatened to merge.  Shadowed by the bomb, victory became conceivable only under the most limited of conditions, and an enemy too diffuse to be comfortably located beyond national borders had to be confronted in an un-American spirit of doubt (6).

Faced with doomsday weapons of our own creation, wars were now unfightable, or at least unwinnable.  This led to the necessity of new operative agencies and underground freedom fighters and proxy wars.  "'War' had ceased to be a military operation. Left to the armed forces in those years was fantasy." (81)  Unable to find global solutions, America lost itself in the world of consumerism. "the United States was involved in a global 'war', yet Americans were military unmenaced. . .the country was reimagining itself as a magic kingdom."

In 1950s America, the worlds of consumer arcadia and global fear, of twenty-four-hour-a-day television and twenty-four-hour-a-day airborne nuclear-armed bombers coexisted.  In one of these worlds, Americans half-fancied that they had stepped beyond history into a postindustrial landscape of 'affluence' where 'leisure' might soon replace work almost entirely and the main problem was an inability to find problems. (87)

 This leisure filled existence "looked like a mass society from which there might be no exit for the individual."  While containment kept communism secured, it also kept the individual contained in the American lifestyle where image became valued over substance.  Traditional narratives fell apart and the only stories that seemed to hold their form were in pop culture, particularly television.  Here Engelhartd discusses the contradictions inherent in this mass culture where elements of sub-culture were appropriated, purified and produced for consumption.  White pop music took from underground black music and brought with it "an element of disorder and sexuality associated with darkness."

"Some of [the young] rushed to embrace the very nightmares their parents were conjuring up. In the rhythms of an unknown music, some were ready to discover a new kind of freedom story. In grown-up terrors, some found dark humor.  Behind a frozen universe of abundance and destruction, some spotted pleasure,excitement, movement, energy." (136)  The gruesome horror-filled comics became a target of decency advocates, but were eventually taken over to be corporate controlled.  Rock music and television came to be major industries by being marketed to the young.

Meanwhile the victory weapon became unusable. Engelhardt points out how the popular fears of nuclear conflict dissipated after the Cuban Missile Crisis, while in reality the Soviets were finally fielding a force that was highly capable of devastation. "With weapons of seemingly limitless destructive capacity, however, the idea of victory began to shrink." Conflicts had to be restricted and containment applied to oneself.  These limited wars would "perform a function midway between the abstractness of a show of force and the terrible concreteness of annihilative conflict." They could not bring about a "radical alteration in the distribution of power." (159)  We were locked into a stalemate, unable to win or lose.  Credibility replaced victory, but it could not be a viable substitute.  A quote by Daniel Ellsberg reveals the dangers we faced as a victorious entity, "we have been in the process of fighting monsters without stop for a generation and a half, looking all that time into the nuclear abyss.  And the abyss had looked back into us." This danger was, of course, that we had solely used nuclear weapons in the past, and at several points in the early Cold War had seriously discussed using them again.

Like all Cold War books, Engelhardt spends a great deal of time discussing Vietnam.  Most interesting here, is his illustration of "reversals"  Unable to achieve limited victory despite how much military might we expended, the U.S. military was forced to reverse all normal notions of success and failure.  President Nixon himself was forced to reverse that office's image and become a "madman" (A lesson learned well and now deployed by the "axis of evil") to convince the enemy he was capable of anything in an effort to provoke their surrender. The streets of America became a battlefield at home and at wars end reconstruction needed to be done here rather than in theater.  This reconstruction really peaked during the Reagan years (and the buildup to the Second Cold War).  After a decade of feeling the loss of the Vietnam War, we were finally able to achieve victory through pop culture, mainly in film.

When Engelhardt comes to discussing Desert Storm, his analysis would fit in completely with Baudrillard's The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.  He approaches it from the angle that the entire event was really just a staged production by the American military and government.  But, I think he really reads too much into it, particularly regarding the public's understanding of it.  It would seem that America was more concerned about getting it right and provided (from a strategic standpoint) everything necessary to ensure a swift and contained victory.  If it was just a one-sided bloodbath, then at least we have apparently learned from it.  I believe that it was the last war that will ever be fought in a conventional style.  The 2003 "shock and awe" campaign  was nothing of the sort, compared to twelve years earlier.  Furthermore, our continued Middle East campaign has become much more surgical in nature.  For instance, our bomb size has gone from 2000 lb to 250 lb now in order to minimize blast.  We have built MOABs and Bunker Busters, but when used these will certainly be less devastating than a massive assault of hundreds of aircraft that was normal by the end of Vietnam.

Finally, with the end of the Cold War, Engelhardt notes that we were really left without an identifiable enemy, and this led to complications of our own identity.  Even the latest incarnation of G.I. Joe was left to find new types of wars and new enemies. Until 9/11.

With the events of 9/11,  "the bomb's most essential message- of potentially civilization busting, planet-rendering, or even planet-ending destruction- reinforced over so many years by terrifying Cold War fears and pop culture fantasies, had finally come home" (306).  The destruction, although tremendous and considered "ground zero," was not nuclear and was not as nearly devastating as it could have been.  The president, a better actor than anyone previous, attempted to resurrect victory culture.  But now, following year after year of stalled progress,  this victory culture is clearly unsustainable.

In discussing the events of post-9/11 America, Engelhardt picks up where he left off with Desert Storm, the media production.  He notes that the history of the late twentieth century, aside from a few key points of the Cold War could be defined in terms of consumer technology, from the automobile to the ipod.  He discusses consumer society, "in the cyber-marketplace, history has been superseded by an new kind of storytelling." (329)  These fabricated narratives, used to sell toys, games, television and film are the same kinds of narratives used by the government to sell wars.  Military reality has crossed into fiction, and the distinction has been blurred, leaving new weapons inspired by fiction and new fictions inspired by weapons.


It's been a long path from August 6th, 1945, to the present moment, a long, long time to wait for apocalyptic catastrophe to strike in the most victorious nation on the planet, which, in more recent times, has been touted as the globe's last superpower, its sole hyperpower, its global sheriff, its New Rome. (332)


Throughout the book Engelhardt refers to a "narrative" and the resulting lack of narrative. While he uses these terms for the specifically American world, its interesting to view the events discussed here in terms of a more historic and global theory. What he says has much in common with the post-modern theorists.  He discusses technology, consumerism and corporatism in the same light. Landmarks are gone, leaving only the logos.  The "real" sources are gone, leaving only the baseless hyper-real.  There are no more narratives, or a meta-narrative, of history.  The only one now are created in television, films and games, existing independently, and their reality is blurry like the reality of post-Cold War history.  The more we progress as a technological society, the more truth seems obscured and lost in The Twilight Zone.

While being overly verbose and perhaps too politically correct, this book does shed interesting light on the underlying psychology of America at the end of the modern age. What is most interesting is not what is explicitly stated but the implications suggested by the resulting "lack of a narrative." As revealed here, the Cold War was the force driving America from the modern to the post-modern world, a notion emphasized in the post-9/11 conclusions.