An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States Ortiz

Conclusion: The Future of the United States 227

excited because a jet bomber flies over the football stadium to

open the football season and is glad that he or she is in the sta­

dium to see it, is being militarized. So militarization is not just

about the question "do you think the military is the most im­

portant part of the state?" (although obviously that matters).

It's not just "do you think that the use of collective violence is

the most effective way to solve social problems?"-which is

also a part of militarization. But it's also about ordinary, daily

culture, certainly in the United States.19

As John Grenier notes, however, the cultural aspects of militari­
zation are not new; they have deep historical roots, reaching into the
nation's British-colonial past and continuing through unrelenting
wars of conquest and ethnic cleansing over three centuries.

Beyond its sheer military utility, Americans also found a use

for the first way of war in the construction of an "American

identity." ... [T]he enduring appeal of the romanticized myth

of the "settlement" (not the conquest) of the frontier, either

by "actual" men such as Robert Rogers or Daniel Boone or

fictitious ones like Nathaniel Bumppo of James Fenimore

Cooper's creation, poiQts to what D. H. Lawrence called the

"myth of the essential white American."2^0

The astronomical number of firearms owned by US civilians,
with the Second Amendment as a sacred mandate, is also intricately
related to militaristic culture. Everyday life and the culture in gen­
eral are damaged by ramped-up militarization, and this includes
academia, particularly the social sciences, with psychologists and
anthropologists being recruited as advisors to the military. Anthro­
pologist David H. Price, in his indispensable book Weaponizing An­
thropology, remarks that "anthropology has always fed between
the lines of war." Anthropology was born of European and US co­
lonial wars. Price, like Enloe, sees an accelerated pace of militariza­
tion in the early twenty-first century: "Today's weaponization of
anthropology and other social sciences has been a long time coming,
and post-9/rr America's climate of fear coupled with reductions in