Posted by Benjamin on: 08.01.2008 /
This upcoming weekend in Seattle is called SeaFair, and there will be lots of celebration and conspicuous American-style consumption and production of green house gases.
Part of the festivities will be a performance by the precision U.S. Navy flying team called the Blue Angels. Six pilots will fly their six F/A-18 high performance fighter jets in various acrobatic maneuvers and formations to the ooh’s and ah’s of the huge crowds who will be watching. The Blue Angels have been practicing today in the skies above Seattle, and they are *loud*!
When I was a kid, I used to have these huge posters of lots of fighter and bomber aircraft all over the walls of my room. I wanted to be a fighter pilot when I grew up. I thought all those planes were *so* kewl.
Now I have a slightly different view. It seems to me that the F/A-18’s are designed with one purpose in mind–killing people and wreaking death, destruction and mayhem, all from a relatively clean distance where the pilot, and those who send him/her, are able to avoid the sight and the smell of blood, death, tears, and horror. Which is all kind of kewl, I guess, from one perspective.
The Blue Angels involve the use of these aircraft to glorify and perpetuate the myth of redemptive violence. Even in extremely left wing Seattle, lots and lots of people will turn out to watch them and ooh and ah over their spectacular flying. And all the while they will be, at some level, … supporting and imbibing the idea that such machines-of-death are kewl.
I’m not saying I’m immune. Just a few years ago I went to watch the airshow, and I too was overcome by that “Wow–totally kewl!” feeling. I’m just trying to raise certain questions.
What are your thoughts about the Blue Angels? Do you have a story about seeing them fly?
Leave a Reply
Comment by: Craig
1 08/1/08 9:11 AM | Comment Link |A good friend of mine is an air-show announcer, might even be announcing at the SeaFair. He knows the Blue Angel pilots and has flown with them a few times…I’ll see if he’ll post here. I’m sure he’d have an interesting perspective!
Comment by: benjamin ady
2 08/1/08 12:44 PM | Comment Link |Craig,
That would be great!
Comment by: Claudia
3 08/2/08 9:31 AM | Comment Link |That’s a really interesting question–my stepdad (who’s a complete pacifist, btw) is obsessed with flight and used to take us to airshows constantly when I was a kid. The precision flying troupes like the Angels always seemed in some way the _least_ military thing at those shows, because so much of the other stuff would be technical displays of what the planes were capable of (how far they could go, how much payload they could carry). The Angels (interesting sort of naming frission there, too) always seemed more a celebration of what human beings (with, granted, some pretty spectacularly technical tools) are capable of. Like Ayn Rand’s ideal circus act or something.
It’s probably not fair to try to divorce the fighter pilots from the rest of our military air capability, too, but the F series I don’t think are generally involved in much air-to-surface stuff–I thought they were mostly dog-fighters? Would that expulcate them at all?
Comment by: Benjamin
4 08/2/08 9:10 PM | Comment Link |Claudia,
So I’m totally and absolutely not qualified to talk about specifics of the F/A-18. Having said that, I was poking through the wiki article as well as global security’s pages, and it very much looks like the aircraft is used in both air superiority roles (as in tangling with other fighter aircraft) AND bombing/striking roles (as in destroying people and property on the ground).
In fact, for instance, it looks like the aircraft specifically carries CBU-87 and CBU-89, cluster weapons with lots of submunitions. The way they work is the big bomb gets dropped, and at some point close to the ground, it opens up and all the smaller bomblets get shot out to cover a wide area. Then when the bomblets hit the ground, they themselves explode, sending out what amounts to lots of little pieces of shrapnel at really high speed, destroying, very effectively, any human beings who are in the area.
The big problem with these munititions is that the have a 5 to 30% failure to explode rate. The CBU 87 has 202 bomblets in it, which means for each CBU 87 which gets dropped by an F/A-18 pilot, 10 to 60 of the bomblets don’t explode, and what you end up with is a countryside littered with unexploded bomblets, which farmers, children, and others come along and find and accidentally set off, sometimes decades later.
The CBU-87 is illegal under the recently adopted Convention on Cluster Munitions, but of course the U.S. is not, and does not seem likely to become, a signatory to that convention.
Gosh I got off on a bit of a detailed track there, didn’t I?
I think your question has wider implications:
If such divorces are allowed, then that’s a relief at some level, because we can no divorce *ourselves* from the crimes committed by the U.S. military.
But I rather suspect that they *aren’t* allowed. When one of the guys currently flying a Blue Angel in air shows around the U.S. returns to the Nimitz or the Eisenhower or the Roosevelt, and in the course of flying an F/A-18 off the deck of one of these carriers kills some young children in Iraq or Afghanistan or Iran or Venezuela or any other country, I’m rather thinking we’re culpable. Perhaps to varying extents, but … culpable, even just in that we live in the U.S., and eat food and drink water and go to school and play at the park and go on vacation here, and we don’t speak out, or even allow ourselves to acknowledge, the horrors perpetrated by the empire of which we are citizens.
BICBW
Comment by: Richard
5 08/3/08 10:20 PM | Comment Link |I agree with you, Benjamin. I don’t think, though, that Christians get their violent impulses from ancient idols like Tammuz… I think our violence emerged much more recently — the Nicolaitan takeover of the church under Constantine. At that point the pagan persecution stopped, but it wasn’t long before the most diabolical kinds of torture and “redemptive violence” began to be perpetrated by the Christian leadership against Arians, against Waldenses, against anyone that could be labeled as a witch or a heretic.
Happily, the 19th century church mostly abandoned the violence; but the 20th century saw states exercise massive violence — violence it was convinced was necessary and even redemptive — with religious fervor, against enemies that could be defined in religious terms: Chinese by Japanese, Japanese by Americans, Jews, Homosexuals, Gypsies, and Jehovahs Witnesses by Nazis, Armenians by Turks, American Blacks by White Supremacists, Jews by Arabs, Congolese by Belgians, Black South Africans by Afrikaners, etc. etc.
I know you’ll probably catch a lot of flack from my Christian brethren who confuse patriotism with religious duty, but I believe the points you raise are quite correct… and I urge all American Christians to watch the challenging documentary, “Why We Fight”. You can get it on DVD from Netflix, or watch it in its entirety on Google:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9219858826421983682
Comment by: Benjamin
6 08/6/08 3:52 PM | Comment Link |Richard–thank you for the link. I’ve been meaning to watch Why We Fight for sometime, and finally did.
Here’s to delineating the differences between patriotism and christianity.