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