- 120 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
Choice Editors' Picks for April 2024
2024 Choice Review Outstanding Academic Title (OAT) Award Winner
The Cult of the Victim-Veteran explores the pool of American post- Vietnam War angst that rightists began plying in the 1980s. Ronald Reagan's 1984 proclamation of a new "Morning in America" encoded the war as the moment of the nation's fall from grace; it was the meme plagiarized by Donald Trump for his "Make America Great Again" (MAGA) slogan.
The national funk tapped for right- wing revanchism was psychologized when George H.W. Bush appropriated post- Vietnam syndrome, the diagnostic forerunner to post- traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), to memorialize the military accomplishments in the Persian Gulf War of 1990–1991—we had "kicked the Vietnam Syndrome." America was a victim- nation, its trauma emblemized by PTSD-stricken veterans whose war mission had been lost on the home front, cast aside, even spat on, upon return home.
In this book we see the long historical threads woven for MAGA: the twining of traditional and modern ways of knowing that imbues war trauma with political and cultural properties that complicate its diagnostic use; the post- World War I disclosure that many shellshock patients had never been exposed to exploding shells, and the use of wounded- veteran imagery to fan the flames of German fascism; the cultural necessity of reimaging antiwar Vietnam veterans as psychiatric casualties that calls forth a new diagnostic category, PTSD; the derivatizing of PTSD for traumatic brain injury, Agent Orange, and moral injury; and the victim- veteran figure as metaphor for a wounded America, for which MAGA is the remedy.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half Title
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Spectacle, Science, and War Trauma: MAGA’s Tangled Back Stories
- 2 Shellshock: Political Culture, Medical Minds, and Moving Pictures
- 3 The Spectacle of Antiwar Warriors: Political Dissent Is Made a Medical Disorder
- 4 Agent Orange: As Spectacle and Trope
- 5 Traumatic Brain Injury: From News to Nomenclature
- 6 “Moral Injury”: Its Own Spectacle
- 7 Trauma in a Post-truth Era: Back to Charcot’s Salon?
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Index