Poverty, military service seem to go hand-in-hand By ROY MacGREGOR Saturday, April 5, 2003 - Page A1
A little sappy, but interesting nonetheless. I was thinking, as i watched them board the plane dressed in jeans, sneakers, and work boots (contrast to Elizabeth Smart's family!), that this must be overwhelming to them.
I do recall her father saying bitterly, when he first learned that she'd been among the soldiers ambushed and MIA, that she'd joined the army because there wasn't even a job at McDonald's. At the time I thought, "uh oh." It's one thing for a black man to be angry. It will simply be racistly dismissed. But coming from a poor white man, such sentiments would be perceived as dangerous to the administration. Not that this was at the forefront but I thought it was exceedingly odd that this wasn't particularly newsworthy, buried for the most part.
Saving Pvt Lynch was the best thing that could have happened for them, in more ways than may seem obvious.
I would add that seeing Iraqis as victims that need to be saved while simultaneously spunky fighters--like Pvt Lynch--may be a dangerous path to eros. Not impossible, but dangerous given the fact that it seems to easily slide into identification with the agreesor. Funny, though, I thought conscience--identification with the other--was off the table.
Saving Private Lynch
April 6, 2003 By MELANI McALISTER
WASHINGTON - The rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch by American Special Forces from an Iraqi hospital near Nasiriya was an impressive feat of planning, bravery and luck. Yet the ecstatic media response cries out for an explanation larger than the celebration of good news, even in a war that has taken longer than many expected. Private Lynch's story resonates because it is the latest iteration of a classic American war fantasy: the captivity narrative.
Since the Indian wars of the mid-1600's, tales about the capture and rescue of hostages have been told and told again - in novels, autobiographies and, later, in movies and TV. In these stories, the captive (an ordinary, innocent individual, often a woman) embodied a people threatened from outside. The captive confronted dangers and upheld her faith; in so doing, she became a symbol, representing the nation's virtuous identity to itself.
In 1682 Mary Rowlandson, a New England minister's wife, published a wildly popular account of her abduction by Indians during King Philip's War. Captured after a battle, Rowlandson became a servant in the household of a Pocasset tribal leader and endured hunger and fear at the hands of her captors, whom she described as "barbarous" and "black creatures of the night." Her narrative, like others of the genre, showcased her grit in fighting to survive amid the heathens. (In another story, the hostage, Hannah Dunston, killed 10 of her captors and fled with their scalps.)
Yet these captives were victims as well as heroes, and their stories also emphasized their femininity. Rowlandson's account begins with the death of her child during the raid; throughout she speaks of her longing for her family. Ultimately, the narratives suggested, God would protect a worthy nation as he saved his innocent daughters.
The captivity theme appeared in various forms over the centuries, but it reached its television-age apotheosis only with the Iranian crisis of 1979-1980. For 444 days, Islamic revolutionaries held 52 Americans at the United States Embassy in Tehran. Like Mary Rowlandson, these captives were ordinary people who became national symbols through their encounter with a foreign people. Although most of the women were released early on, the hostages were nonetheless identified with traditional feminine categories
- home, family, domesticity - as cameras showed us their families' living rooms, church services and Christmas celebrations. The failed rescue mission of April 1980, in which American helicopters crashed outside Tehran, was viewed as a failure not only of equipment and military planning but of the American dream of seeing ourselves as both victims and heroes.
In the news media's telling, Private Lynch is both - in a way a man never could have been. She is tough, a soldier seized in the line of duty. Like Hannah Dunston, she was "fighting to the death." But she is also young, white and pretty. The focus on her injuries points up her vulnerability. Even her bravery is feminized. "Talk about spunk!" Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas said, using language we didn't hear when, say, Capt. Scott O'Grady was rescued from Bosnia in 1995.
Accounts of the Lynch rescue have depicted it, implicitly or explicitly, as the classic happy ending of a classic American captivity story. If the war's first weeks didn't give us as many pictures of Iraqis welcoming their own rescue by American liberators as we expected, the image of a blonde American woman being saved may be the next best thing. After all, Americans were primed to expect a story of rescue - not just because our president told us that we would save Iraq and ourselves, but because for more than two centuries our culture has made the liberation of captives into a trope for American righteousness.
Melani McAlister, associate professor of American studies at George Washington University, is author of ``Epic Encounters: Culture, Media and U.S. Interests in the Middle East.''
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/06/opinion/06MCAL.html?ex=1050644645&ei=1&en=8b8f63cd18597ed6