The End of Victory Culture
Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation
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2.0 • 1 Rating
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
In a substantial new afterword to his classic account of the collapse of American triumphalism in the wake of World War II, Tom Engelhardt carries that story into the twenty-first century. He explores how, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the younger George Bush headed for the Wild West (Osama bin Laden, “Wanted, Dead or Alive"); how his administration brought “victory culture” roaring back as part of its Global War on Terror and its rush to invade Saddam Husseins’s Iraq; and how, from its “Mission Accomplished” moment on, its various stories of triumph crashed and burned in that land.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Freelance writer Engelhardt here traces the roots of American ``triumphalism'' back to early New England, where the massacre of Indians set the pattern for the self-justified slaughter of external enemies, a ritual that would be replayed endlessly not only in life but also in fiction, movies, toys and comics. In his sprawling meditation, he considers the effect of our ``loss of enemy'' when the Japanese surrendered in 1945. In his tedious recap of the Vietnam tragedy Engelhardt suggests that the American public's inability to view the Viet Cong as a savage, lesser adversary contributed to our becoming ``the world's most extraordinary losers.'' The desire to create a Third World battlefield with maximum U.S. weaponry and minimum U.S. casualties was briefly satisfied, he contends, by the Gulf War with its seemingly bloodless, machine-versus-machine destructiveness. America, according to Engelhardt, is still yearning for a revival of our national identity via the victory culture, ``the story of their slaughter and our triumph.''
