Memorial Day’s on Monday. Time to Think About Chris Kyle Again.

Gawker went and dredged up yet another fictitious chapter from revered folklorist and sniper, Chris Kyle. It seems Kyle, in what would be one of his more innocuous fibs, took the liberty to award himself a couple extra honorific medals.

I recently spent a very much undesired amount of time thinking about Kyle and the very bad film memorializing his purported life. I was taking a critical look at film depictions of war, focusing most closely on their rhetoric and how it converges or diverges with state messaging. Suffice it to say American Sniper is a state-owned megaphone. Below is an excerpt from the project mentioned above. I’ll add that — in anticipation of Memorial Day, a day on which we will surely be expected to resurrect the Legend of Chris Kyle and exalt it as the unassailable tale of a saintly man “protecting freedoms,” — if we must flog Kyle’s corpse for political points, let’s remember that his death is easily seen as consequence of the moral injuries of an intractable, doomed war fraught with irreconcilable moral conundrums. As you might rightly assume, I do not think it correct or even necessary to canonize Kyle’s life work as being most interested in preserving freedom and democracy. I simply think Kyle is best understood as a guy who really liked being an historically lethal warrior. Everything else was subordinated to this, his self-identified and self-styled persona.

From “Signs of the State: The Langue and Parole of Statecraft”:

With over 160 confirmed kills, Chris Kyle was the most prolific killer in US war history. In the Kyle biopic, American Sniper, Kyle’s character goes from wayward, rambunctious cowboy to Navy SEAL sniper after seeing a news report about the 1998 bombing of the US Embassy in Nairobi. “Look what they did to us,” whispers Kyle, outraged. “Us” would refer to the twelve Americans killed in the attack, out of the more than 200 victims. Kyle’s dogmatic moral certitude does not allow for discernment. It is of no concern for him that the devastation was most tragically inflicted upon Kenyans. For Kyle, any loss of American life anywhere constitutes an act of war against the US. He does not fight on behalf of Kenyans. He only does so for his own country, which he feels morally sworn to “protect.” When Ryan Job, a fellow SEAL, unwisely professes a creeping moral uncertainty about the mission, Kyle reflexively reminds him, “We’re protecting more than this dirt.” The perceived threat reaches well beyond the “dirt” of Iraq, returning all the way back to Kyle’s quaint and bucolic Texas.

Early in the film, we see flashbacks of a young Kyle with his father. In a scene of overt foreshadowing, the elder Kyle guides the hand of his son as he shoots his first deer, and thus begins his career as a legendarily efficient killer. Shortly thereafter, adolescent Chris sits at the family dinner table, listening eagerly as his father declaims authoritatively on the moral nature of humankind. The camera pans across a Bible, as Kyle’s father begins, “There are three types of people in this world.” This alone would be enough to understand Kyle’s rigid moral manicheanism. But it’s the rest of his father’s downhome, folksy wisdom that initiates Kyle’s life-project of protecting those whom he feels compelled to protect. “Sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs,” continues Mr. Kyle. Sheep are helpless as prey; wolves vicious exploiters and predators, while sheepdogs the noble guardians of those who cannot guard themselves. Young Chris learns then and there that it is his fate to be a sheepdog. He must protect the American sheep.

Chris Kyle’s father couldn’t have known it, but his modest pearl of moral philosophy presaged that of Chris’s eventual Commander-In-Chief, George W. Bush. In his 2002 State of the Union, Bush applied the same rhetoric to delineate roles in the War on Terror. “Some governments will be timid in the face of terror,” Bush asserted. Such timid governments readily fill the role of elder Kyle’s sheep. There remained two other roles to be assigned, and for this Bush announced a neo-Axis of Evil — North Korea, Iran, and Iraq, the governments of which represent a single wolf: “States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an Axis of Evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world” (youtube.com “President Bush”). Thus it is incumbent upon the US, the dutiful sheepdog, to protect the sheep from the wolves. A state narrative, and also that of American Sniper, America-as-Sheepdog proved especially effective for the state’s war aspirations in Iraq. Chris Kyle, as seen in Sniper, embodies this rhetorical strategy, breathing life into it through his own unexamined cognitive dissonance. His solemn mission as guardian angel with gun, a strictly post-9/11 undertaking, takes places exclusively in Iraq, a place in no way even loosely related to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It is of no concern for the resolute war protagonist that of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, fifteen were of Saudi birth, with the other four coming from the UAE, Egypt and Lebanon. It gives him no pause that the Taliban, having long given sanctuary to the masterminds of 9/11, were endemic to Afghanistan, a world apart from Iraq. For the sheepdog, wolves are wolves, no matter where.

Sniper makes no apology for its outsized orientalism. On the contrary, a polarized narrative demands a distinctly othered setting. It must begin with the muezzin’s haunted call to prayer, as it does, resonating from within the war ruins, because what beckons the pious also beckons Chris Kyle; them to their mosques, him to his gun. It must only depict Kalashnikov-wielding shadowy men, their glowering eyes peering darkly from behind slits in checkered headscarves, because without the existence of these, Kyle could not exist. Without their purpose, he would not have his purpose. As a benevolent patriot, he is meant to be an entirely sympathetic character. Even when he blithely refers to the Other as, “Mujj,” “Hajji,” even labeling them savages, he is sympathetic because and not in spite of this objectifying language, as these epithets are uttered from atop the moral high ground. When Kyle witnesses The Butcher, the right hand of accomplished terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, drill into a girl’s brain in front of her father, we are meant to see the enemy’s depthless depravity and inhumanity. Not much earlier, however, when Kyle fires a bullet into the chest of a small boy, we are most obviously witnessing a man wrenched by moral anguish, nevertheless steadfast and duty-bound to morally justified violence. In Sniper, the moral equation should show us that Kyle kills for the right reasons, while the savages do not.

The notion of just war returns us immediately to the language of the state, precisely the same language spoken by Chris Kyle in Sniper, although at times he encodes the state’s message in terms different than those of the state itself. In the case of Kyle’s war in Iraq, a preemptive invasion under demonstrably false pretenses would be unachievable without the banner slogan of “protecting our freedoms.” The immense persuasive powers of such rhetoric are unmistakable when one considers that Iraq in 2002 had no more bearing on Americans’ basic freedoms than it did their security. That claim lay exclusively with Islamic terrorists, who had succeeded in a slow erosion of Constitutional rights by triggering the US state of exception, with its official document unassailably entitled, United and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001, more commonly known as The P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act. It would be a tall order for anyone to oppose such a measure, with its skillfully sentimental language, and not be forthrightly vilified as an enemy of unitedness or strengthening, or even of intercepting and obstructing terrorism. Not coincidentally, the very same thing is likely to occur should you find yourself even mildly scrutinizing the mythos of Chris Kyle, indistinguishable as it is from the mythos of the state. Considering that there is nothing remarkable about Sniper as a film, except that its most memorable qualities are 1) Kyle’s ready-made childish moral code as it is advanced unabashedly by the film without even a slight nod toward critique, and 2) a sickly maudlin combat-romance trope that at times nearly careens into self-parody, it may surprise that Sniper enjoyed a chorus of euphoric praise upon its release and after. A mega-hit, Sniper grossed $350 million in the states, the most of any movie released in 2014. Worldwide it brought in $547 million (boxofficemojo.com “American Sniper”). It was also nominated for six Oscars, winning one. Basking in a cascade of plaudits and adoration, Sniper, a film based on Kyle’s own biography, features a scene depicting an American soldier (Kyle) blowing away a child, then later musing to his war buddy, with the slightly disgruntled air of a workaday Joe Schmoe complaining about his boss after punching out for the day, that, “the kid barely had any hair on his balls.” There persists an innumerable and ever-renewed audience for this kind of thing, as Sniper demonstrates with its galactic windfall. That the real Chris Kyle was a dubious and infamously mendacious storyteller doesn’t seem to have hurt the film’s reception. His American idealism dealt via business end of a sniper rifle was not solely reserved for foreign enemies. Kyle boasted as much when he claimed to have infiltrated New Orleans, post-Katrina, and shot some thirty looters from the roof of the New Orleans Superdome. He also told of killing two would-be carjackers in self-defense at a gas station near Dallas. When the police arrived on scene and ran his license plate, Kyle claimed, they discovered a phone number linked to the Department of Defense (cnn.com “Legend”). Both of these anecdotes of courage and chivalry, two innate traits of the good sheepdog, remain wholly uncorroborated. The New Orleans tale, however, gives useful insight into the mindset of Kyle, a ferocious agent of the state. For Kyle, even stealing items over which he has no legitimate claim of any kind, within a city to which he has no relation of any kind, is a capital offense, punishable by his dispensing of righteous execution. There is obvious and profound delusion and self-aggrandizement in fancying oneself the omnipotent mediator of universal justice. Yet Kyle’s tall tale of sniping looters has predicate in reality. Upon appointment by George W. Bush as chief administrator of the so-called Coalition Provisional Authority in 2003, L. Paul Bremer immediately implemented a new strategy of shooting Iraqi looters. One anonymous official explained the aggressive policy in succinct terms: “They are going to start shooting a few looters so that words gets around” (baltimoresun.com “U.S. Troops”). Here again, we hear echoes of the state language in Kyle’s own folklore. Once more, a wolf is a wolf for the sheepdog, whether found stealing microwaves in Ramadi, Iraq or New Orleans, USA.