Military Culture
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America is a military state. It defines itself militarily as a "superpower" - indeed these days as "The Only Superpower". It defines itself in terms of its weaponry, its armed forces, its military history and accomplishments, its military heroes, and its continued military exercises.
Watch America's movies. They glorify the soldier, the fighter pilot, and the sailor. In every conflict, a branch of the Forces or a former member of the Forces or the firepower of the Forces or the equivalent of the Forces comes to the rescue. From "Top Gun" to "Starship Troopers" to "Deep Impact" to "ID4" to "G.I. Jane" to "Rambo" to "The Peacemaker" to "Armageddon" - look for the hero in uniform. Watch "Space: Above and Beyond" or "Soldier of Fortune" or "JAG" or "Pensacola: Wings of Gold" to see the pride and might of the American military.
And if it isn't the military directly, then it's a paramilitary police force: the city police or the state policy or the FBI or the CIA. Often, these police heroes are former soldiers or glorified soldiers. Their badge of honor is the military ethic: serve in the cause of defence, security, peace and freedom.
It's been this way for decades. Perhaps it's been this way from the beginning. But it is not universal. In many other countries, the military is a hidden footnote to social life. Movies do not seek out military heroes or glorify the military establishments. Conflicts do not cry out for military heroes. Society is not defined in terms of the peace-and-security ethic. Canada's "I Love a Man in Uniform" virtually makes a mockery of the military ethic.
In many countries, joining the military is the rule. In Israel and Switzerland, for different reasons, military service is compulsory. In other countries, service is voluntary and sometimes treated as a career of last resort. But in America, joining the military is a high aspiration and a high honor. The young man who aspires to serve stands tall in his community, especially in smaller communities where neighbors notice kids' aspirations. The willingness to join the military is the measure of a man.
With the help of Hollywood, America has manufactured a cult of the military. The caricatures have become reality. There is the head-shaven new recruit grunting along furiously under the constant holler of the sergeant. You see the firm-jawed tough military veteran with a John Wayne swagger and a Clint Eastwood glare. You feel the jolt of pride at the Marine graduation when the headwear is tossed in the air. How many war movies have there been? "From Here To Eternity", "Platoon", "Full Metal Jacket", "Apocalypse Now", "Jacob's Ladder", "Forrest Gump", and on and on and on and on. Not all of them are pretty, but even the cynical ones perpetuate the theme that America must be addressed on military terms.
Take the boy raised in this culture. Even more than having to succeed on the football field or on the baseball diamond or on the basketball court is the need he feels to stand tall as a soldier. Owning a gun is a reaffirmation of the constitutional right, not just to bear arms, but to show the courage needed to shoulder the responsibility to share in the protection of the country, its citizens and your loved ones. The gun is the symbol of courage and duty - the equipment needed to make a soldier out of the man.
Here we have a boy who has been raised in a gunless home in a town where gunlessness is quite possibly viewed with suspicion. Is he a man or a mouse? Is he a liberal, a communist, a hippie? Why would he refuse to have a gun? Is he naive? Is he afraid to protect himself and his family? Is he a draft-dodger, freeloading on the good will of those who take up the cause of freedom?
Surely it was known about town that the man was gunless - perhaps even afraid of guns. If it wasn't known originally, it would be known when the boy was invited to join in boyhood chatter about weapons and manufacturers, calibers and ammo, and how many yards away he can pick off a tin can. If the boy can't participate in these yarns and this boyish boasting, then he feels embarrassed, ashamed, weak and sissified. It's like finding out for the first time that you have no testicles - surely a world-changing event for any boy.
Perhaps his friends teased him, or openly questioned his father, or expressed their own fathers' sentiments about gun ownership. After all, this is NRA country where promoting gun ownership and use is as patriotic as flying the flag on Independence Day. The dissenter, just like the conscientious objector, is an active threat. If you ain't with us, son, then you is against us. How can a man remain gunless when Russian nukes continue to be pointed at American soil?
When boys have pissing contests, it's no fun when you lack a pisser. When Joey tells how he shot a rabbit and Tommy tells how he shot a deer, Timmy wants so badly to be able to tell how he shot a bear - but he has to admit to himself that he's never even held a gun, let alone fired a weapon.
To prove you're a man, you sometimes have to wag your balls. That means putting on an exaggerated swagger and starting the tall tales flowing. The fish that got away is a man's story about being a real man. Hunting trips are not as much about getting food as they are about getting notches in your manhood belt. And it may not be anymore that you have to prove your manhood in this way to get a woman - but you still have to rack up notches to fit in with the boys. Nothing is worse than being kicked out of the old boys' club for not being enough of a man to qualify for membership.
It's all the worse when you're small. When the time comes for size to count - often around high school time when boys are thinking of military careers and realize size really does matter - then the small kid feels rage at his own body and the people whose genes made it that way. Nothing is worse to a small kid than being small. Physical size is a measure of his ability to stand head-and-shoulders among his buddies metaphorically speaking. If you're small and also can't use a weapon, then you're a batter with two strikes against you, sweat pouring down your face.
The kid who feels he has a lot to prove about his manhood is the kid who goes the extra mile to try and prove it. It's usually the small kid or the picked-on kid who grows up to be the one who "tries too hard" to be accepted. Nothing looks worse on a guy than desperately wanting to be accepted. It looks pathetic, and it alone is enough to bar him from many groups. The real man doesn't care about being accepted because he doesn't have to care.
Trying too hard to fit into a culture where manhood is defined militarily means exaggerating your military features. It means working out to get a buffer body. It means buying the bigger gun. It means firing the more powerful ammo. It means killing the bigger animal. It means showing the greater brutality. It means having the greater swagger. It means being meaner - like bad, bad Leroy Brown.
This same exaggeratedness, no doubt, underlies the gang ethic that has paralyzed many neighborhoods in urban centers as well as smaller communities. Think of gangs as militarized subcultures, where the same ethos and rules apply. "The Godfather" and "Pulp Fiction" have the same kinds of "heroes" as the military and police films portray.
The kid who has to exaggerate to fit in soon develops a chip on his shoulder.
On the one hand, he still feels small and weak underneath, despite his exaggerated manliness. It's the thoughts of smallness that are perpetually fueling the urge to be superior. Perhaps he thinks he hears the snickers coming from the tougher guys who mock his exaggerated efforts. He develops resentment because things don't come easy to him. He hates the stronger for forcing him to try so hard.
On the other hand, he develops a new kind of resentment against others because that is the nature of hyper-masculinization. The one who wants so hard to be the 'real man' is constantly defining himself against those who do not qualify for the honor of that title.
At some level, underneath everything, the two may merge. He may conjoin his desire to prove his military manhood with his resentment against the tough guys, and turn his military firepower against the very men he aspires to be like. In killing his accusers, he proves his manhood by showing how tough he is.
Soldiers who "frag" their commanders are likely low-self-esteem kids who have taken the verbal abuse of military training personally. How often are those condemned for weakness roused to prove their strength by attacking their accusers? They hear in their ears the endless echoes of the accusations, and it becomes so all-consuming that the motivation to prove the accusers wrong becomes a paramount force in these people's lives.
Is this what's going on here? Do we see a kid driven to insane rage by a community and a culture set up to ridicule the weak and gunless? Is the price of making heroes, the debasement of the anti-hero? Is society to blame when its high values are asserted at the expense of some citizens? In the movie "Europa, Europe", we feel the frustration and rage of the Jewish boy put down by the Nazi German ethic. Is the ridiculed one ever free to explode when an unfair standard comes crashing down on his life and self-concept?
Explosion is greatly frowned upon. But in this instance, something else is going on. The boy's efforts to overcompensate for his weakness have obviously backfired. The very gun he may have purchased and carried to prove his manhood has been turned against him and used as the excuse for excluding him from this community of his classmates. The kid from the family that lacked guns, who took it upon himself to make himself a gun and ammunition expert, is now thrown back against the wall with the penalty of year-long expulsion. Not only has he not been accepted by the peers he admires, but he is now being denied access to them. And what's worse, his crime means he is denied access to the military school that might have served as a solid alternative. Talk about not being able to succeed for trying.
And so he snaps. Everything in him snaps. He turns the tool of his manhood-ambition against those who have prevented him from achieving that manhood - the parents who denied him guns in the first place and the classmates who denied him peer acceptance forcing him to try so hard. It is an act of desperate futility, a rapid unwinding of the elastic that's been spiralled so tight.
It is, of course, just a theory - but perhaps there's good reason to believe there's at least some truth to it. Why else the exaggerated need to become an expert in weapons that neither he nor his father had possessed for most of his life? If his life were turned into a play, the gun would be the key prop around which all the action flows: the gun he lacks, the gun he wants, the gun he gets, the gun he brags about, the gun he gives class talks about, the stolen gun he buys, the gun he carts to school, the gun he gets expelled for, the gun he kills with, the gun he asks to be killed with, the gun that destroys his entire life and turns the community upside-down. But the gun in itself is nothing. The salient factor is the culture that turns the gun into an object of great power and worship: a culture whose hero is the soldier whose potency resides in his weapon.
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