Oscar-contender “American Sniper” is breaking box office records. What’s the secret? At an unsettled moment in the nation’s history, the movie shows us a hero based on Chris Kyle, an actual sniper whose “kills” in Iraq broke records. Shooting from rooftops, out of sight, he drops 160+ unsuspecting people at amazing distances. Though he’s conscientious about the women and children he sometimes kills, he’s cleanly enraged at the Iraqis he shoots. No apologies. Troops call him “Legend.”
Chris Kyle could be seen as a skilled assassin, but he insists he’s just trying to save other Americans from enemies. From infancy, when we wail for help, we look for heroic rescue from doctors, lovers, scientists, gurus, warriors—and now, apparently, snipers. At home, okay, values are under fire from all sides and incomes are in trouble. [1] It's tempting to think that this hero might save us. But why a sniper?
For one thing, in the style of Texas conservatism, this hero is vehemently sure he’s right. The movie invents a super-villain sniper named Mustafa for the hero to beat as Batman does. In his memoir Kyle’s not afraid to say he’s proud of killing “savages” and occasionally looting their homes because they’re dependent pussies like US welfare trash. [2] This is reassuring at a time when racism, welfare- and immigrant-bashing are in the air again back home, which usually means that people want to relieve stress by taking a poke at someone who can’t poke back.
Taking a swipe at someone—a “sly verbal attack”—is one definition of sniping. In the culture wars, rant broadcasting and politics regularly hide their sponsors and shoot at distant targets. Instead of attacking “lazy niggers,” say, you demand cuts in “wasteful big government” programs that rescue the poor. Fox news has become the model for character assassination by innuendo. [3]
Here’s where things get interesting. Like a billionaire in politics, sniper has the power of life or death over his victims, so the movie masks the unfairness by showing him facing danger all the time. And as in a video game, the targets die remote, sanitary deaths. No sticky blood, no spilled brains, sobbing relatives, and scary feelings to forget.
In addition, the sniper breaks records like a football star and is dubbed “Legend” by worshipful buddies. Back home, Texas feted Kyle in Cowboys stadium. But as in professional sports, the sniper-hero showed entrepreneurial initiative, monetizing his celebrity in a ghost-written best-selling memoir and other deals. He found Hollywood before Hollywood found him. And he dramatized popular religion too, inking a cross on his skin as he killed Muslims, and trying to help injured veterans at home.
Even Kyle’s death befits politically charged heroism. His widow Taya claims that “After he returned from war he was “blessed to be able to serve countless numbers of veterans during hunts and shoots. He discovered a new use for guns: healing.”[4] That is, he thought that shooting would make crippled veterans feel heroic again. But when Kyle and a friend took a mentally disturbed Iraq veteran target shooting as therapy, the patient thought guns meant killing, and fearing they would kill him, killed them both.
To die trying to help yourself and a veteran undo the injuries of war is poignant. But it also confirms the political feeling that you can’t help some people.Better not try. The dead hero was celebrated in Cowboys stadium, but nobody pointed out the terrifying conflict that made Kyle’s “therapy” and death revealing.
Heroism has no natural limits. How much is enough? To keep breaking records can be addictive. If warriors and hunters don’t know where to stop, they become predators. This unspoken anxiety is one reason that publicity is now remaking the sniper into a loving family man. Taya Kyle turns the danger on its heads by arguing that guns are “healing.” She’s now a celebrity gun-advocate. In an address to the National Rifle Association Convention, she suggested that guns “were part of the fabric of Kyle’s identity.”[4] People magazine (Feb. 9), by contrast, makes Taya a celebrant of the devoted family man (“He is still with me”). You can hear her straining as she preaches that her husband “loved his fellow man enough to take on the immense responsibility of using his gun—the only effective tool he had—to stop the evil coming at them.”
Nobody should pick on a widow. But Mrs Kyle dramatizes the twisted values of many troubled Americans today. For starters, her “love of fellow man” cliché implies that humankind needed to be rescued from alien “evil.” In fact, Kyle was killing Iraqis—also his “fellow man”—to save other Americans who were in Iraq killing Iraqis because of blatant official lies. Her husband’s rifle was not “the only effective tool he had.” He could have used his reason to challenge the lies that sent him to Iraq in the first place. Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. The troops were not rescuing anybody from super-weapons, because the WMDs were a cynical propaganda tool. Most of the world openly protested at the lie; about half of US soldiers couldn’t handle it.
Kyle, says Taya, was supposedly “blessed” (more religiosity) to serve “countless” (more cliché) crippled veterans by taking them target shooting and hunting.
The woman knows that a psychotic Iraq veteran (Eddie Routh) murdered her husband. He thought it was in self-defense—the same motive given by president Bush for our invasion of Iraq. Routh hadn’t been properly treated at the VA because “it costs.” [5] But one painful truth leads to another: back home, Kyle himself suffered alcoholism and PTSD, and he too was trying to heal the emotional anguish of killing people without giving up guns and the rewards of heroic fantasy.
“Healing” with guns can be lethal. If like Eddie Routh you suffer from the terror of death and guilt about killing—with the fear that strangers might in turn kill you in revenge—guns are a symptom not a solution. In shooting targets and live bucks in a preserve, crippled veterans were trying to magically undo their terror and suffering by replaying combat, this time slaying the enemy bullseye target and the unarmed trophy buck to rekindle a conviction of mastery.
You can see how such a compulsion to undo fear might lead scared cops to shoot unarmed black “animals.” The justification is always heroic rescue: someday police violence will save your life. We’re told that Kyle’s father bullied him as a kid to save sheep from wolves, as if sheep and wolves were clearly labeled in a game. Behind this, needless to say, is a sorry history of pulp westerns, atrocious lynching, “incursions,” and degraded religion. Homespun sanctity justified the Puritans and other ethnic cleansers who saved white settlers by manipulating native American folks to the happy hunting ground.
Kyle kept leaving his family to go back to Iraq. Back home, he suffered panic and other symptoms of PTSD, drank and brawled too much. Taya says he sometimes jokingly pretended to shoot bad guys on TV with a real gun. The conventional explanation of PTSD is that combat reflexes persist when you’re no longer in peril. But being safe is also a let-down from the high of combat and triumphant survival. Kyle’s memoir and other projects were ways he tried to keep his heroic identity pumped up and to reintegrate his identities as killer and dad. More than once he told improbable tall tales of Rambo-like derring-do, such as plugging two wannabe carjackers at a Texas filling station and having the CIA excuse him from legal consequences because he was so special. Again: heroism can be addictive.
In a way the sniper-hero played out a national myth, since the US keeps trying to recreate the heroism of D-Day and saving Pvt. Ryan, today styling us the “global policeman.”
But reality needs to have its say. “Sniping” implies devious aggression, as in an ambush. The emphasis on the sniper’s skill tries to offset that sour reality. In fact sniping is all around us these days. Executive power (no paper trail) and technological remote control are prime examples. A CEO nods and in fifty towns paychecks disappear. Poof. A house explodes in Yemen and only a metal scrap in the rubble points to a drone from somewhere over the horizon. It’s all sniping. Like CCTV cameras, NSA snooping, cell phone tracking, and social media’s data grab, the sniper scope slyly oversees you and the world.
And sniping is the skill of a kleptocracy too. On Wall Street the so-called “invisible hand of the market” squeezes a trigger and regulations die in Congress, and valuations writhe in the markets. Using swaps, unseen bankers whack Birmingham, Detroit, 500 cities in Italy, and gasping Greece. [6] A financier can buy a company and out of the blue, legally, kill your union contract, cripple your pay, and blow away your health insurance altogether. Credit card, mortgage, pension, student debt, pink slip: blam. You never knew what hit you.
Maybe you were taken by surprise because you were watching a movie about a heroic sniper from Texas whose only motive for killing people is to save his American buddies. It’s a movie inspiring executive fantasies of zapping enemies from a lofty perch, as if ordinary life is really a euphemistic style of warfare. So sit back, enjoy the record kills. And if you can’t get to the rooftop yourself,
- Break Glass
- Wait for Rescue.
Resources used in this essay:
The Psychology of Abandon will soon be out in paperback from Leveller's Press.
Ernest Becker’s Escape from Evil has powerful insights into the creaturely motives underlying heroism and the drive for self-esteem.
1. Tyler Durden, “Fired before Hired: How corporations rigged the American dream,” zerohedge, January 28, 2015
<<http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-28/fired-hired-how-corporations-ri...
2. Lindy West, “The Real American Sniper was a hate-filled killer.” Guardian, January 6, 2015. <<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/06/real-american-snipe...
3. The website Restoring Liberty illustrates sniping as character assassination of the president: “’The Silence Is Deafening, Mr President’: Obama Has yet to Acknowledge the Death of Legendary Seal Sniper Chris Kyle. There may be as legitimate reason as to why Obama has waited so long to acknowledge Kyle’s death—we just don’t have one, or any reason, for that matter . . . “ http://joemiller.us/2015/02/texas-declares-chris-kyle-day-medal-honor-pe...
4. Nicholas Schmidle, “In the Crosshairs,” New Yorker, June 3, 2013. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/06/03/in-the-crosshairs
5. Schmidle reports that the former vice-chief of the Army admitted that “cost issues” limit the VA’s ability to give veterans quality care.
6.Matt Taibi, “Looting Main Street,” Rolling Stone, March 31, 2010. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/looting-main-street-20100331
