Kinder in Us Against Them stated that ethnocentric Americans are more likely to support war and confrontation with other countries and people. So the statement that "violence is as American as apple pie" is definitely true if looking at the over all policy. However if you look at the individual ethnic groups you may find a different opinion.

JC

He is is talking about violence in America and American Kultur not just talking about use of force in foreign policy. His examples; slavery, indian wars, and land wars were not from foreign wars in strange or exotic places.

There IS plenty of violence out there in America and it is much higher in some American sub-cultures than it is in in the dominant culture. It does not make any difference if they support US Foreign Policy or not. I remember reading a study where a guy was comparing violence in Modern Baltimore to the Old West by simply tracking level of mortality, he completely ignored medical progress, and the fact there were gang-bangers walking around Baltimore that had been shot in the thorax on 3-4 separate occasions. One wound like that would have killed them w septicemia back in the day. Bottom line Baltimore really is more dangerous than Old West.

Was a neat film that examined an interesting premise-- that some Americans are conditioned and trained for war before they ever go to basic training. Christian Bale plays a guy from the worst parts of LA who just got back from a stint in the Ranger Regiment. He tries to get a job with federal law enforcement agencies, but at the same time starts falling back in with his old friends. Between the conflicting forces of his old and current lives, as well as a severe case of PTSD, well, it makes for a pretty tragic thing. I rented it with a friend one night, and we wound up having to go back to the video rental place and getting a comedy just to wind down from it. Just wanted to give advance warning.

The thing that struck me about that film is the same thing Bearcat touched on-- that the film has a substantial foundation in the reality about American violence culture. Consider the demographics of the different branches in the military. There are plenty of statistics out there on it. Blacks and hispanics tend toward combat service support functions, whereas combat arms (especially infantry) are about as white as rice in a snowstorm. The common explanation is that the minority service members come from poorer areas and are looking for job skills and college money while southern whites are more motivated by a sense of patriotism and are drawn to the outdoors and the belief that combat arms will mean faster advancement through a military career.

What if the minorities have already seen enough shooting?

I had three acquaintances in my Army time that had been shot-- none in combat, and none had any desire to be in the infantry. One guy still had the bullet in him and enjoyed telling NTSB authorities at the metal detectors that he picked up his Purple Heart in LA. I swear, I'm not making that up.

You could argue that our increased violence culture makes us more prone to careless hawkishness, but I think it's too intangible to prove. I've discussed shooter video games on here before. There really is as much evidence to support that they don't adversely affect players as there is that they do. Dave Grossman seems to think so. Players and developers disagree. Then there's the high volume of violent television shows. I know of very few programs which aren't sit-coms that don't rely on some form of violence as the primary method of conflict.

Perhaps there's a necessary distinction to be made between desensitizing the population to violence and desensitizing it to war. I think more people feel an emotional investment in Jack Bauer's well-being than that of GI Joe. We've gotten to the point where deaths in Iraq are hardly reported and combat casualties in Afghanistan are viewed with the same level of excitement as Seinfeld reruns... maybe less. To capture the zeitgeist associated with that phenomenon, I'll fall back on another movie. Heath Ledger's Joker remarked that "If a truck load of soldiers dies tomorrow, nobody panics because it's all part of the plan. But if I kill one mayor, then everyone starts losing their minds."

Whatever fetish we may have for violence, we only like it so long as we can keep it at arm's reach. Newsweek did a report a while back on "war porn" websites. They get hundreds of thousands of hits daily. Meanwhile, the Christian coalitions launched a major effort against sexual pornography websites during the last Superbowl. I know they both fall under Commandments, but coveting your neighbor's wife was a little further down the tablet than killing, according to Moses. It says something about us that we live in a country where it's more socially acceptable to watch .50 caliber rounds tearing people in half than two dudes splitting a girl with 36DD's.

For the record, I don't watch either.

America is a violent country and that's not necessarily bad, because violence is a form of chaos and you need just enough chaos to remind political leaders that they actually have to work at their jobs. The question is whether or not we have a healthy relationship with violence and whether that leads to a healthy relationship with warfare. I think a comparison of our education system to our foreign policy shows our relationship is most unhealthy. How is it that a second-grader can be suspended from school permanently for drawing a picture of themselves shooting a classmate under a "zero tolerance policy" or a 14-year-old can be expelled for defending themselves in a fight in the same country that finds ways to justify preemptive strikes and water-boarding? In that regard, we completely fail at preparing future generations for making wise choices on public and foreign policy. The Army of 2020 will be made up of kids that grew up in a real world where you can't hit anyone, a make-believe world where you can kill everyone, and exist in a profession where you have to choose the right level of force to use against the right person at the right time-- or else.

These are harsh times, indeed.

This part really struck home:

Second, and more specifically, on the military and violence: One of the things that astonishes me is how we teach young men (and some women) to go overseas and kill people, and expect them to be "normal" when they leave the military a year or two later. Killing people changes those who kill. Two of the things I have learned from a Marine who did four hard tours in Iraq are:

--The best thing we can do for these people is listen to them, intently.

--The best thing we can say to them is "welcome home." (Not, to the surprise of many, "thanks for your service.") He wrote about this for my blog under the provocative headline, "You can go strangle yourself with that yellow ribbon."

This post reminds me of Richard Slotkin's excellent book about American myth and violence: Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in 20th Century America, a work that almost reads like a unified field theory of American culture in retrospect.

There's been many good comments here (esp JG again) so I'll just add - The Hurt Locker is a terrible movie. There is almost nothing redeeming about it. The only scene which was remotely worth a damn was the one at the end where he stands confused in the grocery store. Never has there been a movie less deserving of a Oscar Best Picture award. It does a disservice to soldiers who serve honorably.

Just my opinion, but well served by experience. Hurt Locker was like every sea story ever made stringed together in an incoherent mess. (yes I feel pretty passionately about this).

The Battle of Algiers is an alright analogy for Iraq, but I think the systematic torture scenes make it less than wholly applicable.

So if we're in agreement that killing people changes those who kill, why so supportive of war as less than a last resort (see: Libya)? Not trying to be combative, just asking.

Something else that occurs to me is Tom's invocation of the Indian Wars. I would like to think we were collectively more angry about 9/11 than any massacre of settlers, yet we're much more at odds with our approach today. Our society is much more critical of military violence in Afghanistan than it ever was during the Civil War. Indeed, if you read Charles Royster's "The Destructive War," he does a great job of narrating the metamorphosis of Sherman from the first "hearts and minds" guy into bloodlust incarnate. You have to take a look at what the press wrote during that war. The population couldn't get enough death and killing.

Today, it seems the press is much more critical of our violence in Afghanistan. Even Fox News seems to get a bit more reserved about things when they talk about drone strikes, as though they're afraid of sounding too much like a cheering section (whereas the rest of the time they have no fear of that at all). While Americans were all about blasting Toby Keith over the speakers and photoshopping images of Bin Laden's head onto a pike in 2001, by 2003 it felt like we'd got our belly full. I think that happened independently of Iraq. The America of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was all about eradicating the tribes, hunting Poncho Villa to ground, international borders be damned, and conducting diplomacy from the deck of a warship (and we did that in Japan long before TR came around). Now we cry as loudly to end the war when we kill an innocent Afghan as we do when the Taliban blows up one of our guys. If we're as domestically and locally violent as we ever were, why are we so timid militarily and internationally?

I returned from ten days in Europe late last night to find, among scores of messages, two phonecalls on each of two lines and two emails from a former sailor who was on duty as an air traffic controller at Beirut International Airport on October 23, 1983. He was looking right at the Marine battalion landing team headquarters when the bomb went off. He had just read The Root and wanted to challenge me on why he was never interviewed and why he is not in the book. He sounded both argumentative and subdued. I put the latter down to drugs.

The last thing I did before checking in here was to call him.

Sure enough, he told me as soon as I called the number he'd left six times (I found another message on LinkedIn) that he had been given the book by his PTSD group counselor. The book was his first "contact" with Beirut vets since he came home from Lebanon.

Though he said (and I might have heard while I was doing the book) he manned the control tower all by himself for 72 hours, he wasn't in the book because a proud and boastful Navy denied me access to all its folks who were there, except corpsmen serving with the Marines. A chaplain I knew in a former life who happened to be in Beirut to conduct a funeral service had to obey an order to avoid me.

The guy took the news well, but he really lit up when I gave him contact info for a master chief hospital corpsmen--a rifle platoon HM3 in 1983--who serves prominently with the Beirut Vets and finally took control of his own PTSD a few years ago.

It's going on 28 years since this man experienced his trauma, and it debilitates him every day in every way. I went straight to the good stuff without getting much of a story I'm sure he tells on a regular basis. I say "good stuff" because the best thing a PTSD sufferer can do short of definitive treatment* is to get hooked up with the people who shared the trauma, the closer the better, cured best of all.

* PTSD is probably 100 percent treatable, So says my brother, a combat veteran and psychologist who treats PTSD and chronic pain (which induces PTSD). PTSD is also contagious. I was doing a lousy job holding back my tears by the time he wanted to leave to call my corpsman pal.

Almost nothing beats World War I trench warfare books and movies for studies in PTSD (known as neurasthenia, a non-technical term of the period for nervous breakdown). I recently watched Behind the Lines, based on Pat Barker's semi-fictional book Regeneration. The book and film are literally about PTSD and 1917-era rehabilitation of officers with PTSD. Most of the true part of the story focuses on poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen along with Dr. William Rivers, an early and quite effective clinician.

Also, I get letters and book orders all the time from vets serving long prison sentences for violent crimes. I completey subscribe to comments above linking the violence of the post-Civil War West with PTSD. Lacking a frontier to hide in, modern vets driven to violent acts by PTSD-related syndromes do their violence closer to home.

I have even testified at the sentencing hearing of a former Marine, entombed in the Beirut Marine CP, who went on to commit an astonishing murder more than twenty years after the bombing but easily attributable to it in its level of violence.

PTSD--not necessarily caused by war or even violence, per se--is all around us, and thus the violence it engenders in some through frustration is always close at hand.

Look, PTSD is real but some of the stuff on here just embraces the classic stereotype. PTSD hits about 20-25% of Combat Vets, with about the same numbers never getting any PTSD. Of those that are affected PTSD ranges from simple nightmares, hyper-viligence to being unable to cope with average daily social interactions but these are only a small percentage of folks. They are working on it daily but let's not act like everyone who comes home from war is jacked up, that is a lie and I suggest you read "Stolen Valor" to clear up some of these people who claim PTSD and Vet status and who often wind up being neither.
I am all for taking care of our vets and helping treat any and all problems being service related but I am tired of the this BS stereotype that vets are damaged from their time nor do I think training someone to kill and then killing is going to automatically change you for the negative.