The Puritan Culture of America's Military by Lorenzo Ronald

Author:Lorenzo, Ronald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2014-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

Um, I would like to emphasize again that this is not…uh…with any type of…we do not believe…um, wrong intentions or motives. This is, as you could put it, the desire of the people. This is their chosen form of punishment and the Koran was found guilty (Florida Church Burnt Holy Quran by Pastor Terry Jones).

Again, this is notable that even in a bizarre act of revenge, Jones has to make a statement that the Koran is being destroyed not out of spontaneous emotion, but because of an obligation and only after consultation with the community.

“The gloves are coming off” has an unintended meaning. Aficionados of boxing should note that boxing gloves are meant to protect the boxer’s hands from becoming broken and damaged. Without boxing gloves and sufficient tape, a powerful boxer would break his or her hand at the first punch against an opponent. The boxing gloves are meant to protect the boxer throwing the punch and not the opponent taking the punch. Likewise, the “gloves” that “came off” at the beginning of the Global War on Terror were the metaphorical gloves of human rights and international law. Instead of sustaining broken hands, the United States and its military have sustained a broken reputation among the world community. One can think of the torture at Abu Ghraib, extrajudicial battlefield killings in Iraq and Afghanistan, and human rights violations at Guantanamo, Bagram, and other places as the broken bones inside of the metaphorical hands of the United States. Just as a boxer is diminished in his or her capacity to fight with broken hands, the United States is diminished in its ability to win the war of hearts and minds with a diminished morality.

Puritan revenge, and even failed revenge, follows a pattern. Sometimes literature serves as a pathbreaker for reality. In the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Burdick and Lederer’s book The Ugly American served as a pathbreaker for nonfiction accounts of inadequate public relations and outreach efforts described in books such as Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone. Heller’s Catch-22 and even Kafka’s The Trial capture the absurdities of military courts-martial described in Mestrovic’s The Trials of Abu Ghraib and The Good Soldier on Trial. The template for failed Puritanical revenge is Melville’s ([1851] 1981) Moby Dick. The parallels are eerie. In literature of the grotesque, characters with injuries or deformities to their legs are characters with tragic flaws. In Spanish literature, the Diablo Cojuelo (the limping devil) is a grotesque figure; in biblical literature, Asmodeus, whose name from the Avestan language literally translates as “demon of wrath,” is another (JewishEncyclopedia.com., s.v. “Asmodeus”). In mythology, the classical grotesque figure of Oedipus, whose name means “swollen foot,” has served as an archetype for study in psychology. In Shakespearean literature, Richard III is another grotesque character who is portrayed with a clubfoot and is consumed with revenge. In cinema, director Werner Herzog depicts the titular character in Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) in a similar

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