Sunday, December 2, 2007
Citizen/Soldier
I was at the movies last night, and during the run-up, they played an advertisement for the National Guard composed as a music video. The "song" is called "Citizen/Soldier," and I was only half-paying attention to it, until I realized that the visuals had moved from National Guard soldiers working in the wake of disaster to Revolutionary War reenactors dodging cannon-fire and lining up those poor, rank-and-file British in their sights. The phrase that flashes on the screen: "I fired the shot that started a nation." It was straight out of Colonial Williamsburg's "Colonial Me" handbook. I know that there is a Marines ad that references the famous raising of the flag at Iwo Jima, but this is the first time I'd ever thought about historical imagery in military recruiting; it probably has a longer history than I am aware of. You can watch the "Citizen/Soldier" video, if you wish, here.
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2 comments:
I saw this ad several weeks ago, when I went to see Love in the Time of Cholera (very disappointing, in my opinion), and it seemed to me to be an overt response to a crisis of military and historical masculinity. Again, I am thinking about Thompson's argument--this ad isn't aimed at war vets or anyone who has had a realistic encounter with war, but at young men who are searching for a connection between their masculinity and the heroic and patriotic representations of history.
That all makes sense to me. Yet I was surprised to see the Revolutionary War enlisted on those grounds. (Perhaps because of the resonance with Homeland Security since it was fought on soil that's now the U.S.? There's also a shot of a guardsman at Ground Zero.) It's also quite a shift that there was just so much combat imagery, since the National Guard ads that I recall (as much as I recall them) were about disaster relief and the like entirely. Of course, given the deployment of the Nat. Guard in Iraq, the combat imagery might be more accurate.
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