[H]owever effective it is as a piece of cinema, even a cursory look into the film’s backstory - and particularly the public reaction to its release - raises disturbing questions about which stories we choose to codify into truth, and whose, and why, and the messy social costs of transmogrifying real life into entertainment. Chris Kyle, a US navy Seal from Texas, was deployed to Iraq in 2003 and claimed to have killed more than 255 people during his six-year military career. In his memoir, Kyle reportedly described killing as “fun”, something he “loved”; he was unwavering in his belief that everyone he shot was a “bad guy”. “I hate the damn savages,” he wrote. “I couldn’t give a flying fuck about the Iraqis.” He bragged about murdering looters during Hurricane Katrina, though that was never substantiated.
We Americans just loves ourselves some hero, don’t we? A man in a uniform, taking unbelievable risks to protect the country he loves, willing to make the ultimate sacrifice if that’s what the job calls for. It’s the sort of stuff that gives Hollywood directors and studio more-than-four-hours-long woodies- a resolute, moral, American (no doubt White) who fords any stream, climbs any mountain, and/or kills any bad guy who’d harm good, God-fearing ‘Mericans.
The End. Amen. Don’t forget to vote Republican.
Except that real life is rarely black-and-white. Being human means invariably being colored in alternating shades of grey; it means often being anti-hero as much as hero. No person is universally good or evil; we all, no matter how reprehensible we may be, have good within us. The drive to lionize Chris Kyle as some sort of American hero is as delusional as it wrong. Kyle, while certainly worthy of recognition for his service, was a hate-filled racist who claims to have enjoyed killing. By all indications, the real life Chris Kyle was kind of a dick. I have a hard time seeing how that sort of thing is worthy of the sainthood that so many Conservatives would confer upon Kyle…because it ignores the truth of the moral quandary that was the man and his service to his country.
That some are willing to summarily declare Kyle an American Hero only demonstrates their ignorance of his life and work. Two-plus hours of Clint Eastwood-directed war porn is just about the worst sort of Right-wing brainwashing imaginable.
Perhaps it’s time he went back to talking to empty chairs.
Kyle, a US navy Seal from Texas, was deployed to Iraq in 2003 and claimed to have killed more than 255 people during his six-year military career. In his memoir, Kyle reportedly described killing as “fun”, something he “loved”; he was unwavering in his belief that everyone he shot was a “bad guy”. “I hate the damn savages,” he wrote. “I couldn’t give a flying fuck about the Iraqis.” He bragged about murdering looters during Hurricane Katrina, though that was never substantiated.
THIS is the man that Conservatives would elevated to virtual sainthood? That they consider a True American Hero? I don’t know anything about Kyle’s political leanings, but given the arch-Conservative nature of our military and the fact that he was a Texan, it doesn’t take a Ph.D. to hazard a guess about his ideology, but that’s not the worst part. Not by a long shot. Kyle may have thought he was serving America, but in the end, his willingness to kill and his abject hatred of The Other makes it clear that his America is not mine.
Kyle is hardly the only Conservative hero/American soldier to become famous. Marcus Luttrell, who wrote “Lone Survivor” (later also turned into a movie) wrote openly of his disdain for Liberals, as if we were somehow “less than.” I haven’t read Kyle’s book (I couldn’t bear to finish Luttrell’s poorly-written screed), and I have no particular desire to. Someone who enjoys killing and hates foreigners is not the sort of person I’d choose to consider a hero.
Kyle served his country and met an untimely death at home, and that’s unfortunate for the wife and family he left behind. No matter how I try, though, I fail to understand how Conservatives can ignore the complexities and moral ambiguities of Kyle’s nature and service. Killing is what happens in war; that’s the nature of the beast. The problems begin when a soldier begins to enjoy taking lives. When you begin to enjoy killing, where do you draw the line? Do you draw a line? When do you pass from soldier to murderer?
I’m not saying Kyle was a bad person, because I’m just not familiar enough with him to pass that kind of judgment. What I am saying is that Kyle put down roots in a morally grey world and became quite comfortable there. He learned to hate those he defined as The Enemy…and I can’t help but wonder how that changed him.
That question came to the fore last week on Twitter when several liberal journalists drew attention to Kyle’s less Oscar-worthy statements. “Chris Kyle boasted of looting the apartments of Iraqi families in Fallujah,” wrote author and former Daily Beast writer Max Blumenthal. “Kill every male you see,” Rania Khalek quoted, calling Kyle an “American psycho”.
Retaliation from the rightwing twittersphere was swift and violent, as Khalek documented in an exhaustive (and exhausting) post at Alternet. “Move your America hating ass to Iraq, let ISIS rape you then cut your cunt head off, fucking media whore muslim,” wrote a rather unassuming-looking mom named Donna. “Rania, maybe we to take you ass overthere and give it to ISIS … Dumb bitch,” offered a bearded man named Ronald, who enjoys either bass fishing or playing the bass (we may never know). “Waterboarding is far from torture,” explained an army pilot named Benjamin, all helpfulness. “I wouldn’t mind giving you two a demonstration.”
The patriots go on, and on and on. They cannot believe what they are reading. They are rushing to the defence of not just Kyle, but their country, what their country means. They call for the rape or death of anyone ungrateful enough to criticise American hero Chris Kyle. Because Chris Kyle is good, and brown people are bad, and America is in danger, and Chris Kyle saved us. The attitude echoes what Miller articulated about Kyle in her Salon piece: “his steadfast imperviousness to any nuance, subtlety or ambiguity, and his lack of imagination and curiosity, seem particularly notable”.
Conservatives have allocated no space to consider that Kyle may have been a good soldier while also being a bad person for whom the line between state-sanctioned killing and murder may have been obliterated,
or a complex guy in a bad war who convinced himself he loved killing to cope with an impossible situation; or a straight-up serial killer exploiting an oppressive system that, yes, also employs lots of well-meaning, often impoverished, non-serial-killer people to do oppressive things over which they have no control. Or that Iraqis might be fully realised human beings with complex inner lives who find joy in food and sunshine and family, and anguish in the murders of their children. Or that you can support your country while thinking critically about its actions and its citizenry. Or that many truths can be true at once.
Whatever the truth may be, Conservatives have directed plenty of hatred and bile at those who’ve chose not to unquestioningly swallow the propaganda whole. Fail to genuflect at the altar of a Conservative hero and prepare to face a veritable s—tstorm of calumny and condemnation…which invariably leaves me feeling as if I’m on the right track.
Recognize and honor Kyle for his service and his commitment to those who served once he returned home to Texas. Those are certainly laudable things, but to ignore the rest of who Chris Kyle was does him- and America- a disservice. Heroes aren’t black or white one-dimensional cartoon characters. Heroes are human beings who lives often detour through ambiguously grey moral spaces.
Was Chris Kyle a hero? I don’t know, but what I do know is that efforts to whitewash the truth of who Kyle was and what he did in the service of a political agenda is as dishonest as it is disrespectful to his memory. Clint Eastwood didn’t make a film about a hero in the war against terrorism; he made two-plus hours of war porn.
