CounterPunch Failure

Liberal writers have been lining up for the last month to decry American Sniper along predictable, ideologically comfortable lines. “Macho Sludge” was the title of an Alternet piece by David Masciotra. Chris Hedges called it “a grotesque hypermasculinity that banishes compassion and pity.” These reviewers, driven perhaps by their own political distaste of American Sniper miss much – or most of what is at work politically in the film. Straight propaganda rarely makes for compelling entertainment, so the enormous popularity of American Sniper (hauling in $30.6 million in its fourth weekend to total to nearly $250 million in 17 days of broad release) suggests that it has reached far beyond the hard core of ultraconservatives one would expect to embrace the film these reviewers describe.--J.E. Lowndes

Don't let anyone tell you that CounterPunch is simply a leftist rag with a slanted view, for it actually published this piece by a University of Oregon professor.

I can't imagine CP co-founder Alexander Cockburn ever accepting for publication such tripe were he alive.

The Ivory Tower in Eugene just took an RPG round right between its cornices with this piece.

I'll be as succinct as I can. There is no excuse under the sun for this kind of pseudo objectivity about American Sniper. First, not one of the writers the author mentions was placing the sole blame--or credit--for the film's popularity on "ultraconservatives."

Second, ultraconservatives are not exclusively under the spell of propaganda these days, nor have they ever been.  Propaganda's effect, like the measles, can touch all of us who are unvaccinated, and regarding its preemptive wars the U.S. is profoundly ill.

Liberals in the 2003 Congress supported the Iraq invasion for God's sake, and their constituents are pouring into the theaters to absorb this film's muddled message.

And that message is that Americans can get it wrong and wrong and wrong again, and it still won't rectify matters or negate the allure of hegemony on naive minds--liberal or ultraconservative or anywhere in-between.

In other words it's an American film, and that presents a whole lot of political problems that we're unable to solve with the supposedly wise help of Rowdy Yates, Dirty Harry, and Josey Wales.

This is not an us or them matter. This is a significant problem with the terms of the debate.


TS