American
Sniper, Hollywood Heresy
What's so surprising is not that it
keeps happening. What's surprising is that people continue to be shocked and
scandalized when it does happen.
Every few weeks something erupts in
America's collective consciousness -- a political scandal, a pop culture
obsession, a hot spot in the culture wars. When it does, an American leftist
will say or do something appalling, ill-informed or attention-seeking (or all
three). The rest of the country is outraged and it carries a news cycle or two.
The latest tinderbox is American
Sniper. This is a good, if conventional, war film that tells the story of a
sniper sent to Iraq to kill jihadists. The story is based on the real story of
Navy Seal Chris Kyle. In American Sniper, Kyle saves hundreds of
American soldiers from ambush. He also has to kill women and children. He
becomes haunted by all the death he has caused, gets into debates about the
validity of the war, and suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
The story, directed by Clint
Eastwood, is well-told and not jingoistic. And yet the left has treated American
Sniper like a heretical text. Michael Moore uses Jesus to condemn Kyle,
preaching that the Messiah would never be a sniper. Bill Maher mounts his HBO
pulpit and calls Kyle a "patriotic psychopath."
To reply by calling Moore and Maher
crazy left-wingers misses the larger point. They aren't pundits, they're
preachers. Their theology was formed by the counterculture of the 1960s, one
that made bad faith in America a holy virtue. In 2010, the writer Shelby Steele
summed
up this new faith perfectly:
This new American identity -- and
the post-1960s liberalism it spawned -- is grounded in a remarkable irony: bad
faith in America as virtue itself, bad faith in the classic American identity
of constitutional freedom and capitalism as the way to a better America...Bad
faith in America became virtuous in the ‘60s when America finally acknowledged
so many of its flagrant hypocrisies: the segregation of blacks, the suppression
of women, the exploitation of other minorities, the "imperialism" of
the Vietnam War, the indifference to the environment, the hypocrisy of
puritanical sexual mores and so on. The compounding of all these hypocrisies
added up to the crowning idea of the '60s: that America was characterologically
evil. Thus the only way back to decency and moral authority was through bad
faith in America and its institutions, through the presumption that evil was
America's natural default position. Among today's liberal elite, bad faith in
America is a sophistication, a kind of hipness.
The sophisticated hipness of bad
faith in America has a representative in Matt Taibbi, a writer for Rolling
Stone. Taibbi went to see American Sniper, but there really wasn't a
need. He had formed his opinion before the opening credits. "I saw American
Sniper last night," his piece
opens, "and I hated it less than I expected to."
Again, don't balk at the arrogant
fatuousness of this. Taibbi is a theologian, not a journalist. His reaction is
no different from an Ayatollah who is asked to read The Satanic Verses.
To Taibbi, American Sniper will be "so ludicrous and idiotic that
under normal circumstances it would be beneath criticism." To Taibbi,
director Eastwood populates his movies with "white hats and black
hats." Forget the scene where a fellow soldier asks Kyle if the war is
moral or even doing any good. Or the one where Kyle runs into his younger
brother who is finishing a tour in Iraq and is badly damaged and says
"Fuck this place." Or that Kyle -- contrary to Taibbi's claim that he
"eventually gets around to feeling bad" -- is ashamed of his first
kill, a woman and child who were attacking a group of Marines with a grenade.
Or Kyle's own PTSD, which indicates that killing slowly poisons the soul. Any
film, book, television show or speech that hints that the American military may
do some things right -- or that, like American Sniper, admits that it is
also may do some things wrong -- is not sufficiently devoted to the idea that
certain American institutions (the military, white men, football, Republicans)
are evil.
Liberal theocrats -- let's just call
them Taibbiites -- even have an Edenic origin story. For them that time was the
1960s, an era which they solemnize and celebrate with Pauline ardor. Some great
things happened during that time: rock and roll, civil rights, the
environmental movement, the beginning of more tolerance for gays and lesbians.
But there were also bad missteps: "free" love, drugs, black militarism,
the War on Poverty, crime, and broken families. After the 1960s reasonable
people could honestly face up to the mistakes that had been made. They could
admit some uncomfortable things: maybe welfare trapped people in poverty. Drugs
could more often destroy than liberate. And perhaps biggest of all: the U.S.
military is not an evil institution.
When Jacob Weisberg, a liberal
writer, had the courage to explore
this fact, he was cast out
as a pariah by Paul Rosenberg at Salon. Those who read Rosenberg's piece
will notice that he quotes Weisberg, but quickly shifts topics without
addressing the issues that Weisberg brings up. Because exploring the truth of
reality is not the point. The point is to save your soul and stay respected in
the hipster Sanhedrin.
It's why Ayatollah Taibbi knew he
hated American Sniper before stepping into the theater.
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