Let me lead off with a tawdry true tale of a certain “veteran” (you’ll shortly understand why I place the word “veteran” in quotation marks) with whom I’m quite well acquainted. His name is Richard, but I’ll call him Dick, you’ll shortly understand why this is appropriate too. Today Dick is a fifty-something wannabe man’s man who’s wont to affect New York tough-guy diction even though he was born and bred in California, and to express sexist (borderline misogynistic) attitudes about women, whom he datedly calls “broads” and “dames”. But these aren’t the only ways that he struggles to affirm his manqué machismo, hence his relevance to my topic.
Let me provide some backstory. As a child Dick’s cheesy mother dressed him in Donald Ducky sailor suits, in honor of his dear old dad, who was in the navy for all of the last five minutes of WW2, a factoid of family lore that Dick likes to hype for the reflected manhood and glory that it casts upon him. The military had always been extolled to Dick as the honorable bastion of authentic manhood, the preeminent proving ground of one’s masculine mettle. So it’s hardly surprising then that when he reached his late teens Dick decided to enlist in the “service”, to follow in the proud if overmeasured footsteps of his idolized forefathers and join the navy.
Of course starry-eyed Dick went into the navy with the purest of conscious intentions, wishing to pay homage to the high ideals of his family’s mythologized military tradition, to serve his benevolently neocolonialist nation – perhaps his subconscious motives included going on an extended male ego trip and partaking of the carousing off-duty lifestyle that sailors are famous for, but then whose true motives are ever 100% pure, after all? Now then, our dear boy Dick was able to muster up enough of the right stuff to make it all the way through basic training, but alas that feat seemed to exhaust his scant supply.
Very shortly after beginning the daily grind of active duty, and finding himself under an overbearing superior (what are the chances of running into one of those in the military?!), he realized that he wasn’t liking the reality of life in uniform, and took off without leave, playing hooky from the U.S. Navy for most of his stint. He went on the lamb, flopping with one high-school buddy after another, and trying to get in as much partying as he could before being tracked down by military police.
Eventually he decided to turn himself in and plead for mercy before a court-marshal. On the drive back to base, however, he got in a quite serious vehicular accident and spent the next few months in hospital. When he was finally sufficiently recovered he was placed in the brig for a bit, after which the navy washed its hands of him by granting his sorry derriere a medical discharge. His injuries saved him from a dishonorable expulsion from the “service”, and left him with the bare-bones and bogus bragging rights of claiming to be a “veteran”.
And boy does he exercise said bogus bragging rights! You’d never guess how paltry are his props as a “veteran” from the way he’s embraced that masculine ego-boosting self-image. Yes, if you were ever to meet him socially you’d learn, within the first two minutes of chatting with him, that he was once in the navy, he always finds a way to introduce this little personal fact into any conversation. His e-mail address and online handle even includes a reference to his mediocre military background, so that everyone whom he communicates with knows before even reading his message that he’s a “veteran”. And now that he’s living on disability, his pathetic pièce de résistance of self-misrepresentation is, yes, to describe himself as a “broken-down vet”, dishonestly implying that his condition is somehow due to valorously-received war wounds, which is of course about as far as possible from the ignominious truth.
In other words, although Dick rather likes to ballyhooingly bill himself as John Q. Veteran, to overcompensate for his failure to be molded into a man by the military, in actuality he’s just a poseur. That is, a fraud who self-identifies with veterans for a self-serving payoff to his shaky male self-esteem.
And how, one might wonder, aside from his e-mail address, does he reinforce this fraudulent self-identification with veterans and members of the military? Why of course by becoming their biggest booster. No one could be a more avid backer of the troops, or a more warm-hearted proponent of the interests of veterans.
It’s all quite simple, really. Since ole Dick couldn’t quite man-up sufficiently to tough out his tour in the navy, he vicariously attaches himself to the putative machismo of real soldiers and swabbies and vets, thus giving his limp sense of manhood a shot of psychic Viagra, and this all takes the outward form of being empathetically-patriotically pro-military and pro-veteran. It’s of course not really armed forces personnel and veterans as individual human persons per se that he identifies with and feels the need to champion, it’s a classic masculine stereotype of the military man that his male ego tries to derive backbone from.
Which is to say that Dickie baby’s whole shtick of being a staunch supporter of his country’s fighting men is an egoic subterfuge with delusions of patriotic legitimacy. But perhaps you’re asking “Who cares about the subconscious psychology motivating this fellow Dick’s pro-veteran stance, that’s just him”? Ah, but is it?
Is overcompensating Dick really such an isolated case, I think not. Take some of the most public apologists of the military, and advocates for its personnel and its alumni, on the right of the political aisle. Take, for instance, former president Ronald Reagan, who was only in the army during World War Two in the most technical sense. In reality being “in the military” didn’t cramp or alter Reagan’s lifestyle as a movie star an iota, as he was the beneficiary of a privileged form of draft dodging that was made available to Hollywood actors, allowing them to don the uniform but merely continue making films to promote the war effort, without ever having to take part in it on the front lines. Well, as we all know, Ronnie Reagan went on to become one of the great touters of the military of our time!
Just about the same was almost the case with another famous conservative actor, John Wayne. Although Wayne played a somewhat convincing marine, the same one with different names in movie after movie, he managed to avoid induction into the military entirely. But when the Vietnam War came along he was so gung ho to support the American troops fighting in it that one might have mistakenly thought that he could actually relate to what they were experiencing. Nope, you would have never guessed that he successfully evaded military service during the “good war”.
Another right-winger who wore being a fan of veterans on his sleeve like a badge of honor and manhood was of course Ross Perot. Like Dick, he couldn’t hack it in the navy and got out early, and then became another great, clearly overcompensating advocate for veteran’s causes. And speaking of naval washouts, after being “invalided” out of Uncle Sam’s navy, “libertarian” author Robert Heinlein became a writer of tales featuring virile military types serving heroically in futuristic “space navies”. Thus by promoting the positive archetype of he-manly warriors in his stories, he connected with a bit of macho glory through his characters and the archetype that they embodied.
Aha, it would appear that men who haven’t validated their masculine self-worth by authentic and successful military “service” tend to seek to do so by becoming rightist hero-worshippers of men-at-arms. This also dovetails with the primitively macho psychological nature of most conservative ideology. That is, in many instances it really does seem to be the case that conservatives are poignant individuals suffering from a masculine inferiority complex who’ve embraced pro-militarism/hawkishness and other conservative social and political stances because doing so makes them feel like the strong and hairy-chested men that they yearn in their quiet desperation to be.
Indeed then, as the examples above and my anecdote about a certain lame Dick go to show, wrapping oneself in the flag, and in the mantle of a supporter of those who have fought for it, à la so many conservatives, is a tried & true way of overcoming egoically painful insecurity about one’s manhood. And signing on with the rest of the conservative worldview and agenda, well, that’s truly taking overcompensation to the ideological hilt. Veteran’s Day is coming up, and if you listen with a critical mind to commentators and politicians on the political right sing the vapid praises of their country’s valiant veterans who’ve tragically and immorally gone into harm’s way to serve & protect the special interests of the plutocratic elite, you should be tipped off to the fact that they’re “hollow men” vainly trying to fill the hollowness in their own character with the bravery and manfulness of others.
Let me provide some backstory. As a child Dick’s cheesy mother dressed him in Donald Ducky sailor suits, in honor of his dear old dad, who was in the navy for all of the last five minutes of WW2, a factoid of family lore that Dick likes to hype for the reflected manhood and glory that it casts upon him. The military had always been extolled to Dick as the honorable bastion of authentic manhood, the preeminent proving ground of one’s masculine mettle. So it’s hardly surprising then that when he reached his late teens Dick decided to enlist in the “service”, to follow in the proud if overmeasured footsteps of his idolized forefathers and join the navy.
Of course starry-eyed Dick went into the navy with the purest of conscious intentions, wishing to pay homage to the high ideals of his family’s mythologized military tradition, to serve his benevolently neocolonialist nation – perhaps his subconscious motives included going on an extended male ego trip and partaking of the carousing off-duty lifestyle that sailors are famous for, but then whose true motives are ever 100% pure, after all? Now then, our dear boy Dick was able to muster up enough of the right stuff to make it all the way through basic training, but alas that feat seemed to exhaust his scant supply.
Very shortly after beginning the daily grind of active duty, and finding himself under an overbearing superior (what are the chances of running into one of those in the military?!), he realized that he wasn’t liking the reality of life in uniform, and took off without leave, playing hooky from the U.S. Navy for most of his stint. He went on the lamb, flopping with one high-school buddy after another, and trying to get in as much partying as he could before being tracked down by military police.
Eventually he decided to turn himself in and plead for mercy before a court-marshal. On the drive back to base, however, he got in a quite serious vehicular accident and spent the next few months in hospital. When he was finally sufficiently recovered he was placed in the brig for a bit, after which the navy washed its hands of him by granting his sorry derriere a medical discharge. His injuries saved him from a dishonorable expulsion from the “service”, and left him with the bare-bones and bogus bragging rights of claiming to be a “veteran”.
And boy does he exercise said bogus bragging rights! You’d never guess how paltry are his props as a “veteran” from the way he’s embraced that masculine ego-boosting self-image. Yes, if you were ever to meet him socially you’d learn, within the first two minutes of chatting with him, that he was once in the navy, he always finds a way to introduce this little personal fact into any conversation. His e-mail address and online handle even includes a reference to his mediocre military background, so that everyone whom he communicates with knows before even reading his message that he’s a “veteran”. And now that he’s living on disability, his pathetic pièce de résistance of self-misrepresentation is, yes, to describe himself as a “broken-down vet”, dishonestly implying that his condition is somehow due to valorously-received war wounds, which is of course about as far as possible from the ignominious truth.
In other words, although Dick rather likes to ballyhooingly bill himself as John Q. Veteran, to overcompensate for his failure to be molded into a man by the military, in actuality he’s just a poseur. That is, a fraud who self-identifies with veterans for a self-serving payoff to his shaky male self-esteem.
And how, one might wonder, aside from his e-mail address, does he reinforce this fraudulent self-identification with veterans and members of the military? Why of course by becoming their biggest booster. No one could be a more avid backer of the troops, or a more warm-hearted proponent of the interests of veterans.
It’s all quite simple, really. Since ole Dick couldn’t quite man-up sufficiently to tough out his tour in the navy, he vicariously attaches himself to the putative machismo of real soldiers and swabbies and vets, thus giving his limp sense of manhood a shot of psychic Viagra, and this all takes the outward form of being empathetically-patriotically pro-military and pro-veteran. It’s of course not really armed forces personnel and veterans as individual human persons per se that he identifies with and feels the need to champion, it’s a classic masculine stereotype of the military man that his male ego tries to derive backbone from.
Which is to say that Dickie baby’s whole shtick of being a staunch supporter of his country’s fighting men is an egoic subterfuge with delusions of patriotic legitimacy. But perhaps you’re asking “Who cares about the subconscious psychology motivating this fellow Dick’s pro-veteran stance, that’s just him”? Ah, but is it?
Is overcompensating Dick really such an isolated case, I think not. Take some of the most public apologists of the military, and advocates for its personnel and its alumni, on the right of the political aisle. Take, for instance, former president Ronald Reagan, who was only in the army during World War Two in the most technical sense. In reality being “in the military” didn’t cramp or alter Reagan’s lifestyle as a movie star an iota, as he was the beneficiary of a privileged form of draft dodging that was made available to Hollywood actors, allowing them to don the uniform but merely continue making films to promote the war effort, without ever having to take part in it on the front lines. Well, as we all know, Ronnie Reagan went on to become one of the great touters of the military of our time!
Just about the same was almost the case with another famous conservative actor, John Wayne. Although Wayne played a somewhat convincing marine, the same one with different names in movie after movie, he managed to avoid induction into the military entirely. But when the Vietnam War came along he was so gung ho to support the American troops fighting in it that one might have mistakenly thought that he could actually relate to what they were experiencing. Nope, you would have never guessed that he successfully evaded military service during the “good war”.
Another right-winger who wore being a fan of veterans on his sleeve like a badge of honor and manhood was of course Ross Perot. Like Dick, he couldn’t hack it in the navy and got out early, and then became another great, clearly overcompensating advocate for veteran’s causes. And speaking of naval washouts, after being “invalided” out of Uncle Sam’s navy, “libertarian” author Robert Heinlein became a writer of tales featuring virile military types serving heroically in futuristic “space navies”. Thus by promoting the positive archetype of he-manly warriors in his stories, he connected with a bit of macho glory through his characters and the archetype that they embodied.
Aha, it would appear that men who haven’t validated their masculine self-worth by authentic and successful military “service” tend to seek to do so by becoming rightist hero-worshippers of men-at-arms. This also dovetails with the primitively macho psychological nature of most conservative ideology. That is, in many instances it really does seem to be the case that conservatives are poignant individuals suffering from a masculine inferiority complex who’ve embraced pro-militarism/hawkishness and other conservative social and political stances because doing so makes them feel like the strong and hairy-chested men that they yearn in their quiet desperation to be.
Indeed then, as the examples above and my anecdote about a certain lame Dick go to show, wrapping oneself in the flag, and in the mantle of a supporter of those who have fought for it, à la so many conservatives, is a tried & true way of overcoming egoically painful insecurity about one’s manhood. And signing on with the rest of the conservative worldview and agenda, well, that’s truly taking overcompensation to the ideological hilt. Veteran’s Day is coming up, and if you listen with a critical mind to commentators and politicians on the political right sing the vapid praises of their country’s valiant veterans who’ve tragically and immorally gone into harm’s way to serve & protect the special interests of the plutocratic elite, you should be tipped off to the fact that they’re “hollow men” vainly trying to fill the hollowness in their own character with the bravery and manfulness of others.