The Scourge Of War: The Shameless Marketing of Violence

The Scourge Of War: The Shameless Marketing of Violence


September 14, 2014 "ICH" - To watch an hour or two of Nat Geo, Discovery Channel, Arts and Entertainment, History, TLC, and even the Food Network is to believe the world is at war. Animals are at war. Families are at war. Cooks, bakers and brides are at war. Environmentalists are at war. Shippers and shoppers and crafts people are at war. Bands do battle. Bulbs do battle. Dips and books and babies do battle. Even cupcake makers are at war!

The promo for A&E’s Storage Wars, for example, features a handful of working class folks and retirees firing assault rifles, racing to do battle in armored Humvees, fast-lining from choppers and throwing flames while a baritone voiceover announces that “five soldiers of fortune” will “battle it out” with “their gloves off” in the biggest blockbuster of the season. The clip ends with the firebombing of a building as the combatants strut away in slow motion.

Food Network’s promo for Cupcake Wars features a sixty-something ex-marine named Bruce who tears his shirt off in the opening sequence, pumps a bit of iron, and announces that “there will be no prisoners” in the cupcake business and that “only the strong survive.” With a variation of the Star Wars theme underscoring the next sequence, Bruce goes to what he calls “the war zone,” where he empties 50-pound sacks of flour into industrial-sized mixers. In the final sequence, wearing a vintage WWII helmet, he claims to be “the general of the cupcake wars” and barks a final order at his hapless underling to “straighten out those damn cupcakes!”

And in what may well be the most absurd promotional advertisement of this kind, TLC’s Craft Wars host Tori Spelling strikes a classic James Bond pose with her glue-gun at the ready, while a contestant on the show exclaims, “this isn’t just crafting, this is war.” Glue-ya!

In the wake of the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, much is being said and written about the militarization of our state and local police departments. Regrettably, this trend is not limited to law enforcement and other government agencies; it is part and parcel of our national character. And this is nowhere more insidious or egregious than in the overtly martial tone of American non-fiction television programming.

Available in over 85 million American households, the National Geographic Channel and other content providers have wittingly joined forces with the march toward a hyper-militarized society. Like History, TLC and Discovery Channel, Nat Geo, the brand’s affectionate diminutive, runs a slate of non-fiction programs with factual content focused on nature, science, culture, and history. But there is nothing factual about the tone and pervasive militancy in the framing and marketing of otherwise benign documentary programming.

For those who may not be familiar with these shows, Storage Wars, Shipping Wars, Abalone Wars, Junkyard Wars, Trawler Wars, Swamp Wars, Texas Car Wars, Property Wars, and even Weed Wars feature simple, working-class men and women who struggle to eek out a living by scouring repossessed storage units, flipping used cars or derelict properties, fishing, farming and otherwise going about their business in a modest and occasionally pathetic attempt to make a buck. They have names like Jarrod and Brandi and Darrell. They wear jeans and t-shirts and chew gum and speak in fragments. And they hail from small towns like Appledale, Birchville, Hillgrove and Plumfield.

Nat Geo Wild, an updated version of the venerable and iconic nature magazine, has joined the battlefield with Python Wars, Rhino Wars, Cat Wars, Predators at War, and Elephant Wars. Episode titles such as Animal Fight Night, Shark Kill Zone, Predators Ambush, and Savannah Smackdown pay sad homage to the tradition of anthropomorphic portrayals from a gentler time. Compare, for instance, the magazine’s 1962 article entitled Storks, Vanishing Sentinels of Europe’s Rooftops. Today, we would have Stork Wars.

Beginning in 1930 with J. Edgar Hoover’s declaration of the War on Crime, American rhetoricians adopted the metaphor to great effect in their efforts to engineer public approval for the management of social problems. Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 declaration of the War on Poverty, followed in 1971 by Nixon’s War on Drugs, and subsequent declarations of war on gangs, cancer, women, AIDS, obesity and terror have firmly established the concept of armed conflict in our everyday lives. Even a celebration of universal love and charity, in an irony of the highest degree, was rendered a battlefield when commentators declared the War on Christmas.

The connection between combating the violence of organized crime, for example, and war is easily bridged. In both, blood is spilled. Less so the relationship between warfare and poverty, although the case can be made for the life and death struggles of the poor and impoverished. But in what increasingly dim recess of our imagination do we allow for comparison between organized warfare and the purchase and resale of goods from abandoned storage lockers? To what depths have we descended that we so casually equate the wholesale mutilation, death and destruction of innocent civilians caught, as they inevitably are, in the horror of industrial violence with the creation of decorative candle stands or embroidered placemats? How have we come to associate the instinctual order and balance of the natural world with the forced relocation and extermination of entire human populations?

The militarization of society takes many forms. In the case of our law enforcement agencies, it manifests in the transfer of military hardware and tactical deployment of the kind we witnessed in Ferguson, Missouri. In less obvious ways, however, it pervades our news coverage and creeps into our language as we target various groups with bullet points and marketing campaigns that attack the opposition and rally our allies and give us a shot at victory. In their book Language and Peace, authors Schaffner and Wenden point out that we should be concerned not with the use of martial rhetoric per se, but patterns of metaphorical thinking that inform to a great extent an overarching ideology. They conclude that “the language of journalists and diplomats [and television programmers] frequently represents ideological stances that accept and promote war as a legitimate way of regulating international relations and settling inter-group conflict; that language unquestioningly promotes values, sustains attitudes and encourages actions that create conditions that can lead to war; and that language itself creates the kind of enemy image essential to provoking and maintaining hostility that can help justify war.”

Ethicist and philosopher James Childress suggests the use of martial rhetoric poses a dilemma: “In debating social policy through the language of war, we often forget the moral reality of war.” But it’s a far cry from framing serious social policy initiatives in such violent terms and using them to promote everyday activities such as cooking, shopping, crafting, making a living, or documenting the natural world. Through these decisions, we are rapidly devolving the character of our interactions into kill-or-be-killed, take-no-prisoner, only-the-strong-survive clichés. If even our simplest joys are couched in terms of conflict, death and domination, what hope is there to distinguish and abhor and eventually end the true villainy of armed conflict, the scourge of war?