What I didn't know then as a schoolboy was the extent to which the Pentagon was paying to be cast as America's savior. By the time my own kids were growing up it was Jerry Bruckheimer's blockbuster film Top Gun, created with Pentagon assistance and equipment, that boosted civic pride in the military.
Now it's my grandkids' turn to be awed and overwhelmed by child-focused military propaganda. Don't even get me started on the war propaganda churned out by the toymakers. Even reality TV shows have gotten in on the gig with the Pentagon's entertainment office helping to sell war to the American public.
It's estimated that U.S. military intelligence agencies - (including the NSA) - have influenced over 1,800 movies and TV shows.
And then there are the growing number of video games, a number of which are engineered by or created for the military which have accustomed players to interactive war play through military simulations and first-person shooter scenarios.
This is how you acclimate a population to war.
This is how you cultivate loyalty to a war machine.
This is how - to borrow from the subtitle to the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove - you teach a nation to "stop worrying and love the bomb."
As journalist David Sirota writes for Salon, "Collusion between the military and Hollywood - including allowing Pentagon officials to line edit scripts is once again on the rise, with new television programs and movies slated to celebrate the Navy SEALs" - major Hollywood directors remain more than happy to ideologically slant their films in precisely the pro-war, pro-militarist direction that the Pentagon demands in exchange for taxpayer-subsidized access to military hardware."
Why is the Pentagon, and the CIA, and the government at large, so focused on using Hollywood as a propaganda machine?
To those who profit from war, it is as Sirota recognizes", a 'product' to be sold via pop culture products that sanitize war and, in the process, boost recruitment numbers". At a time when more and more Americans are questioning the fundamental tenets of militarism (i.e., budget-busting defense expenditures, never-ending wars/occupations, etc.), military officials are desperate to turn the public opinion tide back in a pro-militarist direction and they know pop culture is the most effective tool to achieve that goal."
The media, eager to score higher ratings, has been equally complicit in making (real) war more palatable to the public by packaging it as TV friendly.
This is what professor Roger Stahl refers to as the representation of a "clean war" - a war "without victims, without bodies, and without suffering":
"'Dehumanize destruction' by extracting all human imagery from target areas" - the language used to describe the clean war is as antiseptic as the pictures. Bombings are 'air strikes.' A future bombsite is a 'target of opportunity.' Unarmed areas are 'soft targets.' Civilians are 'collateral damage.' Destruction is always 'surgical.' By and large, the clean war wiped the humanity of civilians from the screen " Create conditions by which war appears short, abstract, sanitized, and even aesthetically beautiful. Minimize any sense of death - of soldiers or civilians."
This is how you sell war to a populace that may have grown weary of endless wars - sanitize the war coverage of anything graphic or discomfiting (present a clean war), gloss over the actual numbers of soldiers and civilians killed (human cost), cast the business of killing humans in a more abstract, palatable fashion (such as a hunt), demonize one's opponents, and make the weapons of war a source of wonder and delight.
"This obsession with weapons of war has a name: techno fetishism," explains Stahl. "Weapons appear to take on a magical aura. They become centerpieces in a cult of worship."
"Apart from gazing at the majesty of these bombs, we were also invited to step inside these high-tech machines and take them for a spin," said Stahl. "Or if we have the means, we can purchase one of the military vehicles on the consumer market. Not only are we invited to fantasize about being in the driver's seat, we are routinely invited to peer through the crosshairs too. These repeated modes of imaging war cultivate new modes of perception, new relationships to the tools of state violence. In other words, we become accustomed to 'seeing' through the machines of war."
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