- Together We Stand, Divided We Fall:Building Alliances with Combat Veterans
Hey you! would you help me to carry the stone?Open your heart, I'm coming home.Hey you! don't tell me there's no hope at all.Together we stand, divided we fall.
—roger waters
I've never opened an essay with an epigraph before. It looks strange floating up there out of context like a piece of litter on a perfectly manicured suburban lawn. But it is actually quite meaningful to me, so I will leave it there—floating at the top of the page to inspire me as I write. I hope that what follows will help contextualize the meaning(s) I ascribe to it. The words are lyrics from the song "Hey You," performed by the famous English rock band Pink Floyd. Like many of their songs, this one takes the perspective of the protagonist, Pink, who desperately calls out to members of society from behind The Wall—a place of loneliness and isolation.1 The song's sentiment of lonely existence resonates broadly with the privatizing logic of neoliberalism that has become the dominant ideological framework guiding contemporary social, cultural, and political practices. By neoliberalism, I refer to a logic of individualism and privatization of the public sphere. As Henry Giroux recently argued, "privatization has run rampant," shifting the responsibility of socially produced problems onto the overburdened individual (2011, 10). [End Page 284] This individualistic orientation is fundamentally incompatible with some of the nation's most precious democratic, communitarian ideals.2
Over the years the neoliberal impulse has inspired several accompanying rhetorics of individuation such as that of the "self-made man" of postindustrial America. According to Dana Cloud, the rhetoric of the "self-made man" masked a growing polarity between socioeconomic classes in this era, disguising the fact that success attained through self-determination was often only a remote possibility for members of the working class. The language of individualism and the rhetoric of personal responsibility persuaded members of the working class that they were individually responsible for their social and economic standing (Cloud 1998, 24). In this way, individualizing rhetoric diverts attention from larger social ills by narrowing focus onto the local, personal level rather than promoting examination of broader systemic structures.
War and Rhetorics of Pathology
One of the most significant social and political problems presently facing humanity is war. If the overriding question for politics is how we can live peacefully together without eliminating diversity, war represents a direct challenge to the political project as the ultimate expression of political antagonism. The United States is currently enduring the longest military conflict in recent history, the toll of which accumulates daily. A significant social challenge created by an era of perpetual warfare is the proper "management" of returning service members. Like the economic disparities of the industrial age, the present return of combat veterans has been cloaked in an individualizing rhetoric that I describe as "pathological." As discursive patterns, rhetorics of pathology function similarly to the therapeutic discourse prevalent during the first Gulf War, which translated "social and political problems into the language of individual responsibility" (Cloud 1998, 1).
For Cloud, rhetorics of therapy were used to inhibit public dissent during the Persian Gulf War. She argued that the media privileged groups who supported the war in order to cast blame, guilt, shame, and anxiety on those who openly opposed it. But when Cloud was writing in the 1990s, she was describing a relatively new rhetorical situation that was an outgrowth of " Vietnam Syndrome," the phrase used to describe public reticence to support the war. [End Page 285] She argued that "yellow ribbon stories" served to allay a public wary of war. These emotionally charged news stories described families coping with the anxiety and risks of war. By focusing on the intimacy of family struggle, conversations about the war shifted focus from the public political realm to private, domestic spaces. According to Cloud, these stories functioned as therapeutic discourses by quelling dissent and by appealing to idealistic patriotism in order to reassure the public of their nation's martial superiority. The yellow ribbon rhetoric of the...