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Alien-Invasion Films
Imperialism, Race and Gender in the
American Security State, 1950–2020

Mark E. Wildermuth
Alien-Invasion Films
 Mark E. Wildermuth

Alien-Invasion Films
Imperialism, Race and Gender in the American
Security State, 1950–2020
Mark E. Wildermuth
Literature & Languages
University of Texas of the Permian Basin
Odessa, TX, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-11794-7    ISBN 978-3-031-11795-4 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11795-4

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
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Cover illustration: Joe McBride / Getty Images

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 This book is dedicated to my father whose valor on the battlefield
during World War II in the fight against fascism was exceeded only
by his brilliance as an artist in the years thereafter.
 Acknowledgments

I must thank the University of Texas and the Dunagan Endowment for
gracious financial support during the writing and the researching of this
book. Special thanks go to my research assistants Aileen Taft, Lisette St.
Michelle, Amanda Christesson, and Robert Kirk for their invaluable aid in
finishing this book. Thanks also to the late Dr. Peter Brunette, Reynolds
Professor of Film at Wake Forest University, whose scholarship and kind
guidance have taught many of us so much about film, media, and the
profession.

vii
 Contents

1 Introduction  1

2 An
 Overview of the History of American Imperialism
and the American Security State 13

3 The
 First Postwar Security State Invasion Films,
1950–1956 47

4 Invasion Films in the 1960s Post-Camelot Security State 81

5 Nixon, Post-détente, and Invasion Films in the 1970s109

6 Invasion Films and the Reagan Era145

7 Invasion Films and the 1990s Interregnum179

8 Invasion
 Narratives After 9/11: The Bush and Obama
Regimes229

ix
x Contents

9 Invasion Films After 9/11 in the Trump Regime263

10 Conclusions283

Index289
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In 2005, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri indicated in the book Empire
that “sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national
and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule. This new
global form of sovereignty is what we call empire.” Thus, “in contrast to
imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not
rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializ-
ing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global
realm with its open, expanding frontiers” (xii). It replaces the old nation-
alist and imperialist states via a global “regime with no temporal boundar-
ies” (xv). Many postmodern critiques of oppressive nationalist and imperial
states are therefore obsolete, and even postcolonial “discourses are effec-
tive only in very specific geographical locations” (154). Politics of differ-
ence that are the basis of such critiques have no place in a system that
incorporates them to support “the functions and practices of imperial
rule” (142).
Since 9/11, and with the resurgence of populism and nativism that
flowered under the revival of nationalism since 2001, this view of empire
has been rejected by others seeing modified forms of imperialist discourse
and practice flourishing in the twenty-first century. In 2005, Atilio Boron’s
study A Critical Reading of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri criticized
the limited view of this conception of empire in the wake of 9/11.
Likewise, the editors of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
noted that Boron and other critics rightly “point to the unilateral U.S.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
M. E. Wildermuth, Alien-Invasion Films,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11795-4_1
2 M. E. WILDERMUTH

invasion and occupation of Iraq, dating from 2003, as evidence that sov-
ereignty of the traditional nation state is as hegemonic as ever” (2618). In
short, they say Empire relies too often on “oversimplifications of ‘post-
modernism’ and ‘postcolonialism’” (2619).
Indeed, culture critics describe how the twenty-first-century nation
state and its imperialistic tendencies in America require double focus on its
continuity with the past and its continuing evolution. John Carlos Rowe,
describing the role of culture in U.S. imperialism and globalization, argued
in 2005 that what Horkheimer and Adorno had “termed ‘the culture
industry’ conditioned American citizens to accept the undisguised milita-
rism and jingoistic nationalism now driving U.S. foreign policy” in places
like Iraq and Afghanistan (575). For Rowe, not only was military might be
involved, but also the exportation of American culture. This was evident
in the “globalization of consumer capitalism” (576). Such activity is a part
of “our emergence as a neo-imperial nation since 1945” and is central to
“our conception of the U.S. as a discrete nation that nonetheless has a
global identity and mission” (576). The state’s use of the cultural industry
works in ways “that encompass a wide range of nominally different politi-
cal positions, so that in many respects left, liberal, and conservative cul-
tural works often achieve complimentary, rather than contested, ends”
(575). Rowe, in short, described a state behaving much like that discussed
in Empire but one which, despite its global reach, centered itself in
American culture and still had a central geographical location.
Rowe’s reference to 1945 as a late modern starting point for this neo-­
imperialism in American culture points to his interest, shared with other
cultural critics of his time, in the reprisal of the American security state in
the years after 9/11. Writing in 2003, feminist critic Iris Marion Young
said “a security state […] constitutes itself to an […] aggressor outside” by
organizing its “political and economic capacities to respond to this threat.”
Such a state “must root out every enemy within” the state by keeping
“watch on everyone who could be an internal security threat” (225). The
security state thereby embodies “a logic of masculinist protection” that
reduces citizens to the role of helpless women and children (223–225).
Rowe and Young implicitly were showing how this post-9/11 security
state was becoming an extension of earlier security state regime logic
which could create cover for American neo-imperialism. They were not
alone. In his afterward to the 2009 edition of William Appleman Williams’
famous critique of American imperialism (originally published in 1959,
with subsequent editions in 1962 and 1979), The Tragedy of American
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

Diplomacy, Andrew J. Bacevich said that Williams’ description of an

American imperialism that depended as much on economic domination as
military might was still completely valid. This American tendency had
found “expression in the Global War on Terror, justified by a defensive
response to” 9/11 (323). Bacevich contended that U.S. involvement in
Somalia, Yemen, and Iraq showed that “Americans have persuaded them-
selves that American prosperity (and therefore American freedom)
demands that the United States must determine the fate of these energy-­
rich precincts” (324). These critiques still have resonance today—even
with three American presidents, Obama, Trump, and now Biden, initiat-
ing withdrawal of American troops from some of these regions, as military
experts and politicians from both sides of the aisle question the appropri-
ateness of these actions, especially after the tragic consequences of Biden’s
evacuation from Afghanistan. And as recently as 2021, President Biden
has mobilized allies in the EU and G-7 to combat the military and eco-
nomic threat represented by mainland China’s attempts at military and
economic expansion globally—something Chinese leaders describe as typ-
ical of American aggression and an attempt to establish its own economic
dominance.
In the context of the security state and its imperialist propensities, some
twenty-first-century culture critics have been drawn to popular narratives
that focus on empire as a theme. Those which focus on invasion narratives
or reverse-colonial narratives are of especial interest here and, in cinematic
contexts, comprise the subject of this book. Such invasion narratives prof-
fer stories where a dominant imperialist and nationalist power is conquered
or invaded by an alien invasion force which in the process of the narrative
can implicitly raise questions about the status of that nationalist power
with regard to its strength, viability, and capacity to act as an ethical agent
in the course of pursuing its role as an empire. These narratives can alter-
nately or simultaneously support or question the status quo of the nation-
alist power regarding its implicit value systems and its means of effecting
its dominance in a global community and at home through hegemonic
hierarchies often based on race and gender.
The present study, Alien Invasion Films: Imperialism, Race and Gender
in the American Security State, 1950–2020, focuses on science fiction films
about alien invasions that are extraterrestrial in origin, covering the time
from the postwar period to the Trump era. These films can either support
or criticize America’s neo-imperial tendencies implicitly or explicitly
through their narratives that focus on the state’s hegemonic tendencies
4 M. E. WILDERMUTH

abroad and domestically. Before explaining their cultural significance and

the aims of this study, however, we must begin with a brief discussion of
the origins of invasion narratives—also known as reverse imperial or
reverse colonial narratives—in general, and their evolution before and
during the emergence of the modern American neo-imperial security state.

The Origins and Evolution of Reverse Invasion/

Reverse Colonial Narratives
In 2004, Michael C. Frank wrote an article on what he termed “reverse
imperial” invasion narratives in nineteenth-century British fiction reflect-
ing and commenting upon the imperialism of Great Britain. In such nar-
ratives, the current imperialist power becomes the object of colonial or
imperial conquest that it has previously visited on other peoples. Frank
discusses how the opening of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness imagines the
“converse scenario of a conquered Britain.” Stories such as this point to
the precariousness of Britain’s position, suggesting the civilized mindset of
the culture can “always be susceptible to relapses into savagery” (70).
Reverse imperialist narratives transform “London into the site of various
kinds of invasion, casting the English in the role of the defeated and the
colonized, and not always with a successful liberation of the British Isles”
(71). Hence, despite what writers like Foucault imply about the mono-
lithic and static nature of imperial discourses, “the narrativization of
empire was more discontinuous, ambivalent and polyphonic than”
expected (71–72). Hence, “narratives of reverse imperialism constitute a
counter-discourse to contemporary imperialist narratives of progress” (73).
Examples of this kind of narrative include H. Rider Haggard’s She and
H.G. Wells’ 1898 War of the Worlds. In the latter, “British colonizers […]
are equated with alien invaders, whose attitudes and actions turn out to be
distorted mirror images of the national self” (83). Their presence as more
highly evolved beings than humans implicitly critiques Social Darwinist
justifications of imperialism that was “legitimized as following the ‘natu-
ral’ law of survival of the fittest” (82). The reverse imperialist invasion
narrative thus “undermines […] any glorification of […] imperialism
itself” (83). Similarly, Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula plays on themes of
invasion while underscoring “xenophobia” toward other cultures and
concerns about imperial Britain’s declining resources (84).
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

Frank points to the influence of such narratives on Cold War and

post-9/11 films of the American security state. This is apparent in “the
American alien-invasion films of the 1950s, which allegorize the Red Scare
and the threat of nuclear warfare, as well as another wave of invasion films
shortly preceding and following the terrorist attacks of September 11,
2001. Whenever a great power has to focus its energy and attention on its
periphery, the center is felt to be vulnerable.” Hence viewers of films like
Independence Day (1996) were “unaware of the genre memory, dating
back to Victorian times” (88–89).
Frank notes that the terms invasion narrative and reverse imperialism
actually originate in Stephen D. Arata’s 1990 essay on “Dracula and the
Anxiety of Reverse Colonization” which appeared shortly after the end of
the American Cold War security regime with the collapse of the Berlin
Wall and the Soviet Union. Herein Arata argues that narratives like
Dracula reflect the “growing domestic uneasiness over the morality of
imperialism” which along with fears of the “irretrievable decline” of the
empire, eroded “Victorian confidence in the inevitability of British prog-
ress and hegemony” (621–622). For Arata, such narratives can be more
ambivalent than Frank suggests since they can try “to defend against and
even to assuage the anxiety attendant upon cultural decay” (623). Thus,
they “contain the potential for powerful critiques of imperialist ideologies,
even if that potential usually remains unrealized.” Nevertheless, “these
narratives provide an opportunity to atone for imperial sins, since reverse
colonization is often represented as deserved punishment” (623). Texts
like this can also focus on issues foreign and domestic simultaneously—
such as fears of the working class, of women (631–632) and foreign
“Oriental” dangers (734). In the end, they “exacerbate the anxieties they
are presumably intended to assuage” (644).
Discussion of these narratives has continued during the twenty-first-­
century security regime. In 2007, Rob Latham argued, building on earlier
commentary by Peter Fitting and John R. Rieder, that “tales of ‘first con-
tact’ within science fiction tend to recapitulate the ‘encounters of the
European discovery of the New World’” and as such are “conquest narra-
tives” (103). They expose “the workings of imperialist ideology” and
underscore “the underlying anxieties of hegemonic power, its inherent
contingency and vulnerability, notwithstanding the inherent purported
inevitability of Western progress” (104). They reflect various forms of cri-
tique of U.S. foreign policy “during the Cold War as driven by economic
and military imperatives designed to expand the powers of corporate elite”
6 M. E. WILDERMUTH

(108). Writing in 2012, Karoly Pinter also explored these themes with
regard to H.G. Wells’ Martians and like Arata, detected greater ambiguity
in invasion narratives. She saw critique of today’s world but also a view
supporting the superiority of humankind (133–134). She sees a critique of
the comparable “ruthlessness of humans” in imperial contexts but also
supports the idea that “anything alien is likely to be horrible” and so they
do smack of “an instinctive horror of otherness” in general (135).
Discourse on these narratives, in short, points to complex and some-
times contradictory readings of just what they signify in our culture and
what kind of significance they bear for understanding what they teach us
about their evolution in various media such as film. What my study seeks
to accomplish is to present a description of their evolution in science fic-
tion films focusing on alien invasion narratives in the context of American
security state culture since the Cold War beginning after 1945. The hope
is to show how they either criticize or support the imperialistic tendencies
of the various regime cultures as they reflect how these issues informed the
architectonics of domestic culture and the response to external threats that
often led to economic and military expansion in the different regimes as
well as oppressive measures taken against marginalized domestic groups
identified with external alien threats. Hence, we can better understand
why these films continue to play a role in the United States wherein they
both reflect and shape the discourses on imperialism abroad and hege-
mony at home in American culture.
Some of these themes have been explored in M. Keith Booker’s
Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War: American Science Fiction
and the Roots of Postmodernism, 1946–1964 (2001). However, the scope of
this present study is much greater than Booker’s, extending well beyond
1964. Moreover, this study focuses as much on implicit criticism of impe-
rialism and colonialism as it does on those that support these agencies.
Booker’s study tends to characterize the science fiction invasion film as
decidedly pro-empire. Citing William Pietz’s studies of the time, he
describes the “rhetoric of the Cold War as a sort of ‘substitute for the lan-
guage of colonialism’” and says aliens in the invasion films resemble the
Soviets and “Others from the Third World as well” (9). Hence, he says, as
America replaced Britain as a global imperial power, “Americans were con-
fronted not only with the red menace of the Russians, but also with the
red and brown and yellow and black menace of those Third-World hordes
who had formerly been held in check by the global power of the British
empire.” This accounts for “the remarkable frequency with which the
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

earth (read America) turns out, in 1950s science fiction films, to be a

superb source of resources for alien civilizations (read the Third World or
the jealous Soviets, or both) which often seem poor and desperate, despite
their advanced technologies” (118).
My study, partly because of its greater historical scope, points to ways
in which these invasion films can question, as well as confirm, not only the
agendas whereby the American security state justifies extension of hege-
monic practices abroad, but also the tendency of such states to establish
hegemonic hierarchies within its own borders based on gender, as
described by Iris Marion Young above, and also on race, as critic Robert
Corber discusses in later chapters. Hence, this study offers greater depth
and breadth of focus than what has been evinced in any preceding studies.
We will see in the study that as these films evolve from the 1950s to the
present, they begin to exhibit more frequently after the Vietnam era the
inclination to question the status quo and the neo-imperialist tendencies
of the security state abroad and at home. They do this with varying degrees
of success and failure but in ways consistent with social and political criti-
cism of each successive time period in America. They also focus on recur-
ring motifs resulting from hegemonic practices in the security states after
World War II such as social divisiveness, paranoia, and the fear of misuse
of technology and mind control, plus the theme of apocalypse. They help
us chart the development of these motifs and the intensification of their
manifestation in the daily lives of Americans from the days of Harry
Truman to the time of Donald Trump.
It should be pointed out that while the above critics do not typically
offer definitions for the terms colonialism and imperialism, for this study
the former term colonialism will refer to attempts made by a dominant
country to exert influence over another country or countries’ economics
and/or politics by actual occupation with military might and governance
so as to occupy and directly control a country or countries. The latter term
imperialism will more frequently mean domination politically and/or eco-
nomically (though sometimes militarily as well) without direct occupation
or governance, usually with the intent to also dominate and transform the
target country or countries’ cultures to make them conform to the values
and ideology of the dominant country. The term neo-imperialism will
typically be applied to describe imperialist practices in the United States
after World War II. These definitions are based on the histories reviewed
in the next chapter where these terms are used by historians whose exper-
tise is exemplary and whose discussions will make clear why the terms need
8 M. E. WILDERMUTH

to be implemented as they are in this study. These terms can also be used
in the same fashion to describe the hegemonic practices of countries or
planets in the imagined worlds of these alien invasion films.
Meanwhile, the term alien invasion film does refer to science fiction
films depicting invasions or anticipated invasions or conflicts from extra-
terrestrial planets or cultures which manifest reverse imperial or reverse
colonial intentions toward our planet or groups of planets with which we
are affiliated. In short, these films depict humanity as the object of either
imperial modes of proceeding to dominate us as we have dominated oth-
ers. And they qualify as science fiction films because they conform to an
implicit definition of such films as being focused on themes of technology,
its uses and abuses, ethically speaking, with regard to the benefit or harm
of human beings, or other living things, in their shared societies or
environments.
It should also be noted that while historians, political scientists and oth-
ers will continue to debate to what degree America qualifies or has ever
qualified as a genuinely colonialist or imperialist power, the historical and
cultural surveys below are intended mainly to be a history of to what
degree America, Americans, and denizens of other countries perceived the
United States as being either an imperialist or colonialist power. That is
because what is needed to contextualize the implicit ideas on imperialism
represented in the films is a history of how perceptions and attitudes
toward American involvement abroad evolved. Anything more than this
would be beyond the scope of a study on film.
In line with this presentation of historical contexts for these films and
their cultural milieu, it should also be noted that terms borrowed from
H.W. Brands’ histories on this subject will also be used as a short hand for
describing the two major polarities of American involvement abroad.
These are the terms exemplarism and vindicatorism. The former repre-
sents the tendency of some Americans to believe that the best role of
America in the world is as an exemplar of moral and political value, draw-
ing other cultures to our way of life through example. The latter, the
opposite, is to directly intervene, militarily if necessary, in other countries’
affairs to establish American values as a means of improving other cultures
and ensuring America will be safe from its enemies. The two philosophies
are brandished by both progressives and conservatives to effect various
purposes. As polarities existing on a spectrum of ideas on geopolitics, they
prove to be most useful in this study.
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

And finally, the definition for security state used here is the same as that
offered by Iris Marion Young above—a state whose resources, materially
and culturally, are organized to defend against threats both external and
internal to the state’s well-being. This is the type of state which has so
often promoted imperialist modes of proceeding in America after 1945,
often with overseas influence seen as being justified by the need to secure
the country against external threats that are characterized as having impe-
rialist or expansionist intentions threatening America. Hence, such states
will often be described as neo-imperialist or neocolonialist states depend-
ing on the types of involvement they have with countries they may seek to
dominate economically, militarily, or culturally.
And now some words about methodology and organization.

Method and Organization

The methodology of this book employs a post-Althusserian approach on
the impact of ideology on the material, political and cultural aspects of
human life. This study does not represent the kind of purely
Marxist/Structuralist analysis that Louis Althusser practiced, but it never-
theless implements a similar focus that enables this study to describe the
influence of ideology and culture on American social and political life.
Louis Althusser’s best known work on ideology entitled “Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatus” indicated that ISAs or ideological state appa-
ratus such as electronic and print media, literature and the arts, plus insti-
tutions such as the church and schools, represented the “ideology of the
ruling class” (1343). ISAs not only outlined for the culture what was
moral or immoral behavior (1353–1354), but they also defined “‘truth’ or
‘error’” in cultural products like the literature or film that human beings
assimilated (1356). The ruling state thus defined the individual subject
with this ideology that “‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects” that
come to embody the values of the state (1356). Therefore ideology defines
the human subject’s relation to the state, and so the ISAs inculcate “the
reproduction of the relations of production, i.e. of capitalist relations of
exploitation” of individuals by the state (1346). Nonetheless, Althusser
surmised that the masses can resist if they “turn the weapon of ideology
against the classes in power” (1343, n. 3).
This study occasionally will supplement Althusser with other critical
approaches such as trauma theory, information theory, or complex dynam-
ics (chaos) theory when historical context, especially when dealing with
technological issues in that culture of security states, requires this. The
10 M. E. WILDERMUTH

study does not adhere to any one approach to feminism or race studies in
hopes of instantiating an inclusive rhetoric that will stimulate dialogue on
this topic. Nor does it represent any single means of approaching the sub-
jects of imperialism or colonialism, although it does share much in com-
mon with what The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2010) calls
Edward Said’s tendency to depart from some postmodern modes of pro-
ceeding like Foucault’s and instead retain “a humanistic belief in ‘the
determining imprint of individual writers’ and intellectuals” on culture
(1863). As the anthology editors say of his analysis of Mansfield Park, his
approach there could help us understand the novel’s “humanistic value
and its participation in injustice and oppression” (1864). This study,
though focusing on film rather than the novel, shares Said’s double focus
on humanism and postmodern conceptualizations of oppression, the bet-
ter to situate the reader in the changing milieu of the culture of the secu-
rity state whose films echo the suffusion of the modern and the postmodern
in the world of American neo-imperialism.
The study proceeds from this introduction to the following chapters.
Chapter 2 provides a brief but detailed overview of the rise of the neo-­
imperialist security state in America. Chapter 3 discusses films of the 1950s
such as The Thing from Another World and The Day the Earth Stood Still to
discuss ways in which the films either support or criticize the state while
also giving evidence of how the Cold War Consensus was beginning to
crumble. Chapter 4 shows how films like The Bamboo Saucer and 2001
begin to show more overt questioning of the security state and its associ-
ated cultural values as the culture gradually becomes more critical of
American foreign policy in places like Vietnam. Chapter 5 shows how
1970s invasion films like The Andromeda Strain and Close Encounters of the
Third Kind, both before and after détente, continue to critique the state.
Chapter 6 describes how invasion films reflect the death of détente and
either support or question the Reagan paradigm. This discussion includes
such disparate films as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Predator. Chapter 7
discusses how 1990s interregnum films explore possibilities for subverting
or supporting some of the social and political paradigms traditionally asso-
ciated with the security state as seen in films like Star Trek: First Contact,
Men in Black, Starship Troopers, and The X-Files: Fight the Future. Chapters
8 and 9 describe how the post-9/11 states could also inspire commentary
on the return to the security regime norm. Films such as District 9, at the
beginning of the period, and Captive State, toward the end, reflect confu-
sion and frustration with the oppressive social and geopolitical aspects of
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

the security state. The study ends with a conclusion on where the films
have taken us and where they may take us in the future.
It should be pointed out that this is not an exhaustive study discussing
every alien- invasion film from the 1950s to the present. Instead, only
films offering salient contributions to what is really a subgenre of science
fiction are discussed. The films analyzed herein are the ones which had the
greatest impact on and captured the attention of a significant part of the
film audience. This is not to say only those films which were box office
successes are described here, but these films did leave their own special
mark on the American viewing public’s history and interaction with these
films. No attempt has been made to discuss every single sequel made to
the more ground breaking films presented here, unless those follow-up
films were singular in their contribution to what the original film in the
series accomplished. Hence, all of the Alien films are discussed here, but
not the myriad sequels of the Predator or the Alien vs. Predator series. Nor
are disappointing remakes like Keanu Reeves’ version of The Day the Earth
Stood Still which disappointed critics and audiences alike.
Now, let us begin.

Works Cited
2001: A Space Odyssey. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. MGM, 1966. Warner Brothers Home
Entertainment, 2008. DVD.
Althusser, Louis. 2010. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus. In The Norton
Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch, 2nd ed., 1341–1361.
New York: W. M. Norton. Print.
The Andromeda Strain. Dir. Robert Wise. Universal Pictures, 1971. Universal
Studios Home Entertainment, 2016. Blu-Ray.
Arata, Stephen. 1990. The Occidental Tourist: ‘Dracula’ and the Anxiety of
Reverse Colonization. Victorian Studies 33 (4): 621–645.
Bacevich, Andrew J. 2009. Afterword: Tragedy Renewed. In The Tragedy of
American Diplomacy, 5th ed. New York: W.W. Norton Co.
The Bamboo Saucer. Dir. Frank Telford. Paramount Pictures, 1968. Paramount
Home Entertainment, 2014. DVD.
Booker, M. Keith. 2001. Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War. American
Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism, 1946–1964. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press. Print.
Boron, Atilo. 2005. Empire and Imperialism. A Critical Reading of Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri. London: Zed Books.
Brands, H.W. 1998. What America Owes the World: The Struggle for the Soul of
Foreign Policy. New York: Cambridge University Press.
12 M. E. WILDERMUTH

Captive State. Dir. Rupert Wyatt. Universal Pictures, 2009. Universal Pictures
Home Entertainment, 2019. Blu-Ray.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Columbia Pictures,
1977. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2007. DVD.
Corber, Robert J. In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and
the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America. Durham: Duke
University Press, 1993. Print.
The Day the Earth Stood Still. Dir. Robert Wise. 20th Century Fox, 1951. 20th
Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2008. DVD.
District 9. Dir. Neil Blomkamp. Tri Star Pictures, 2009. Sony Pictures Home
Entertainment, 2012. Blu-Ray.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Universal Pictures, 1982.
Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2017. DVD.
Frank, Michael C. 2009. Reverse Imperialism: Invasion Narratives in English
Turn-of-the-Century Fiction. Studies in Literary and Cultural History 33:
69–91. Print.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Latham, Rob. 2007. Biotic Invasions: Ecological Imperialism in New Wave Science
Fiction. The Year Book in English Studies 37 (2): 103–119.
Men in Black. Dir. Barry Sonnenfeld. Columbia Pictures, 1997. Sony Pictures
Home Entertainment, 2015. Blu-Ray.
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch.
New York: W.W. Norton Co., 2010. Print.
Pinter, Karoly. 2012. The Analogical Alien: Constructing and Constraining
Extraterrestrial Invasion in Wells’s ‘War of the Worlds. Hungarian Journal of
English and American Studies 18 (1-2): 133–149.
Predator. Dir. John McTiernan. 20th Century Fox, 1987. 20th Century Fox Home
Entertainment, 1996. DVD.
Rowe, John Carlos. 2004. Culture, U.S. Imperialism and Globalization. American
Literary History 16 (4): 575–595.
Starship Troopers. Dir. Paul Verhoeven. Tri Star Pictures, 1997. Sony Home
Entertainment Pictures, 2010. DVD.
Star Trek: First Contact. Dir. Jonathan Frakes. Paramount Pictures, 1996.
Paramount Home Entertainment, 2009. DVD.
The Thing from Another World. Prod. Howard Hawks. RKO Radio Pictures, 1951.
Warner Archive Collection, 2018. Blu-Ray.
Williams, William Appleman. 2009. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. 5th ed.
New York: W.W, Norton Co.
The X-Files: Fight the Future. Dir. Rob Bowman. 20th Century Fox, 1998. 20th
Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2013. Blu-Ray.
Young, Iris Marion. 2003. Feminist Reactions to the Contemporary Security
Regime. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 18: 223–231.
 CHAPTER 2

An Overview of the History of American

Imperialism and the American Security State

This chapter describes how imperialism has been commensurate with

America’s perceived special sense of purpose in the world since this coun-
try’s inception. The chapter then moves on to describe how this sense of
purpose eventually leads to a non-colonialist type of neo-imperialism that
informs the rise of the U.S. security state after World War II, as America
takes the place of the British Empire as a global leader. This brief history
is necessary for characterizing the evolution of the neo-imperialist
American state after World War II in order to illustrate in later chapters
how invasion narratives in science fiction films also evolve as they either
implicitly support or criticize the American security state’s expansionist
tendencies. Thus, this chapter also outlines the history of how America
not only invested in imperialist modes of proceeding that led to its hege-
monic tendencies in American society and overseas, but also how America
itself became aware of those tendencies and became critical of its oppres-
sive potential at home and abroad, or fostered reactions against that criti-
cism. The negative critiques of the state’s oppressive tendencies typically
focus on how the expansionist state, while initially devised to ensure unity
and economic stability, as well as national security and national identity, at
least seemed instead to help foster regimes where paranoia, divisiveness,
and fear of technologies exerting control over the citizenry dominate the
cultural discourse, as these concerns were fueled by implicit millennial
mythologies shaping the American nationalist state from its inception.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 13

Switzerland AG 2022
M. E. Wildermuth, Alien-Invasion Films,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11795-4_2
14 M. E. WILDERMUTH

Reactions to those critiques emphasize the necessity of establishing hierar-

chies at home and abroad to maintain order and security in the nation state.

The Inception of American Imperialism

Since the beginning, Americans have had a special sense of their mission in
the world. As James Berger says in his 1999 work After the End, a study of
apocalyptic motifs in American culture, “The European settlement of
America had an apocalyptic sensibility from its inception.” Even Columbus
conceived himself as a messenger of a new heaven and earth as described
in Revelations, while New England colonists “portrayed their colony as a
‘city on the hill,’ an apocalyptic break with the past” (133). Thus, “A sense
of achieved, or at least potential, post-apocalyptic perfection coexisted in
the developing American apocalyptic ideology with a violent terror of
some darkness that loomed outside and dwelled within” (134).
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian H.W. Brands highlights this theme in
his 1998 What America Owes the World, as he shows how this mindset has
helped enable America to develop a paradigm for instantiating the devel-
opment of imperialism in the times before the rise of the postwar security
state. Because of our special sense of status, Americans “think that the
United States has a peculiar obligation to better the lot of humanity” as if
“the salvation of the world depended on them.” However, we have a
decided disagreement regarding the “precise nature of this obligation”
(vii). Two approaches emerge here: exemplarism and vindicatorism.
Exemplarists wish to perfect America and draw other countries to our way
of life, believing that intervening in the fortunes of other countries “could
jeopardize American values at the source. In attempting to save the world,
and probably failing, America would risk losing its democratic soul.” By
contrast, vindicatorists argue that “America must move beyond example
and undertake active measures to vindicate” the just, for the “sword of
wrath must compliment the lantern of virtue.” So “until human nature
changes—a development most vindicators anticipate about the time of the
second coming—military might […] can certainly restrain wrong.”
Meanwhile, exemplarists reply “humanity […], seeing heaven approach
nearer to earth in the latitudes of North America than anywhere else,
would be motivated to adopt America’s methods of social organization”
(viii). The vindicator response: “if Americans didn’t bring the world up to
their own standards, the world would bring America down to its” (ix).
The two sides “staked out and initially articulated their positions” in “the
 2 AN OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN IMPERIALISM… 15

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (ix). The debate today “is as conten-
tious as ever” and has constituted “the struggle for the soul of American
policy” (ix-x).
William Appleman Williams, criticizing American foreign policy in edi-
tions of his The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, published in 1959, 1962,
and 1979 (with a posthumous edition in 2009), argued that what results
from this dichotomy is an American form of anti-colonialist or non-­
colonialist imperialism. In the beginning, “having matured in the age of
empires […], the colonists saw themselves in the same light once they
joined issue with the mother country” (21). Prosperous colonial farmers
began to sell surplus produce, and by the 1830s, Americans began to real-
ize they needed to sell more overseas in order to profit financially (23–24).
Much later, the economic crisis of the 1890s led Americans to conclude
that any and all means must be considered to solve and prevent such crises
from happening again. Hence, an expansionist foreign policy became
essential to responding to this type of crisis (29). Thus, a consensus devel-
oped between Democrats and Republicans indicating “expansion was the
way to stifle unrest, preserve democracy, and restore prosperity” (30–32).
This was part of the context of the Spanish-American war (36). By 1896,
America was anticipating economic involvement with China (40).
Economic security, in short, was becoming synonymous with national
security.
The ensuing debate between “imperialists […] and anti-imperialists”
led to the Open Door Policy “through which America’s preponderant
economic strength would enter and dominate all the underdeveloped
areas of the world,” and this would become “the strategy of American
foreign policy for the next half-century” (45) since, as Brands might say, it
could potentially appease both exemplarists and vindicatorists. By 1900
there emerges “a classic strategy of non-colonial imperial expansion”
avoiding for the most part “the embarrassment and inefficiency of tradi-
tional colonialism” (50). This policy could even be justified by both pro-
gressives and liberals since this “free trade imperialism” (96) and the
“national pursuit of self-interest would, according to the doctrine of har-
mony of interests, produce peace and prosperity throughout the world,”
thus instantiating “the principles of […] liberalism” (101). Such a policy
always showed potential for subverting its ideal of self-determination in
the countries coming under its influence (88). Nevertheless, by World War
II, most Americans were convinced that they were defending an “anti-­
colonial democracy charged with a duty to regenerate the world. They had
16 M. E. WILDERMUTH

come firmly to believe that their own prosperity and democracy depended
on the continued expansion of their economic system under the strategy
of the open door” (201). They were pursuing “an industrial Manifest
Destiny” (52) that would bring marginalized people in underdeveloped
countries into the American system (60). This strategy “was followed
through the Potsdam Conference at the end of World War II, when
President Harry S. Truman sought […] to re-establish the open door for
American economic and political influence in Eastern Europe and on the
Asian mainland.” So this policy became essential to American foreign rela-
tions from 1900 to 1958 (52).
This period conjoins with the rise of the American security state as we
know it today, a state which draws much of its form and substance from
the rise of this free trade non-colonialist imperialism. As we will see in the
historical review below, attempts to implement policies and practices to
appease both exemplarists and vindicatorists in order to quell social divi-
sion and prevent economic hardship would often seem to have just the
opposite effect after World War II, as policies continued to evolve thereaf-
ter. This at least in part is because the state would often impose hegemonic
social hierarchies on its citizenry based on race and gender (as well as
sexual preference) to maintain an order that many would characterize as
unjust, just as they would criticize hegemonic tendencies in American
global relations. The result is ongoing social and cultural conflicts that sci-
ence fiction alien invasion films will reflect in their imaginings of imperial
conquests of the American and earthly homeland.

The Earliest American Security States

The first American security state emerged in World War II to resist and
overcome the threat of fascism in Europe and Asia in the 1940s. As indi-
cated above, it was seen as a counter to colonialist domination in the
world, and its rhetoric and policies would be quite different from the next
regime after the war. In an age of industrial warfare, the first security state
focused on a rhetoric of inclusion because so many individuals were needed
to keep the war industry booming to allow the United States to combat
other industrialized nations like Germany and Japan. Hence, the war and
the security state provided opportunities and some social and financial
liberation for marginalized groups like women and ethnic/racial minori-
ties. As Henry William Chafe points out in his 1975 study The American
Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles, the jobs
 2 AN OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN IMPERIALISM… 17

women now had to perform as substitutes for men gone to war challenged
the “many stereotypes of women’s work” (139). Meanwhile, Ken Burns’
documentary on World War II implies the civil rights movement for blacks
may have had roots in the war when African Americans also moved into
jobs in civilian life and the military that had previously been forbidden—a
process culminating in full integration of the armed forces by 1947. The
status quo resisted, but overall the implicit anti-colonial stance of the war
and the state seemed to create unexpected opportunities for marginalized
Americans as they began to move away from traditional hegemonic
social roles.
This would change with the rise of a new security state after the war
which would be organized against Soviet imperialist expansionism and, in
the course of resisting it, reassert the neo-imperialist stance of Open Door
America. And, as it resisted communist ideology, it began to reassert ear-
lier hierarchic social paradigms on race, gender, and even sexual prefer-
ence, ensuring that hegemonic practices would prevail in American society
as well as abroad—a cultural motif that will be interrogated by some films
in this study, just as some movies will implicitly question imperialist prac-
tices abroad as they link these oppressive social tendencies at home to the
rubric of the new imperial state.
As H.W. Brands shows in his 1993 The Devil We Knew, there was first
of all in this state a wish to avoid a return to the kind of economic depres-
sion preceding World War II, and so there was much emphasis on securing
markets abroad (11). This was seen as a means of safeguarding America’s
“strategic position both by strengthening the liberal-capitalist countries
and by circumscribing the sphere of socialism” (12). But this policy would
go beyond the Open Door tradition of “non-entangling relations with
foreign powers” after the implementation of the Truman Doctrine and the
North Atlantic Treaty of 1949 (23). The Truman Doctrine “held that a
victory for communism anywhere was a defeat for non-communism every-
where” (931). American involvement in other countries would become
more direct than it had with the Open Door, as Truman and later
Eisenhower would empower the CIA, and America would topple procom-
munist regimes in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954), while troops would
be sent to Lebanon in 1958, just as they had been sent previously to Korea
a few years earlier (58). This would raise the first debates about American
involvement overseas, even though “most Americans rejected any intima-
tion that their sphere of influence was an empire.” Still, as Brands says,
18 M. E. WILDERMUTH

“the American sphere functioned as an empire, regardless of what

Americans preferred to label it” (58).
The rise of these more overtly imperialistic tendencies in the new secu-
rity state would have a profound effect on the internal politics and culture
of the country. The characteristics of state culture and politics require
review since they are a key to discerning the implicit cinematic critiques
and defenses of America’s imperialist tendencies in the coming decades
leading up to the twenty-first century.
Robert Corber’s study In the Name of National Security (1993) shows
how squaring off with the Soviet Union would bring renewed emphasis
on gendered and racial hierarchies and would also produce a society
focused on the effects of mind control and abuse of technology in the
deeply divisive and paranoid atmosphere of the 1950s, themes that would
continue to evolve, as we will see below, in later security states. Corber
says, “In claiming that the liberal tradition had been seriously compro-
mised in the 1930s, anti-Stalinist intellectuals such as [Arthur] Schlesinger,
[Lionel] Trilling, and [Leslie] Fiedler participated in the production and
consolidation of the political and cultural settlement often called the Cold
War Consensus” (1–2). Herein, “the only way in which white women,
Africa Americans and other historically disenfranchised groups [such as
gays] could gain recognition for their contributions to the war effort was
by limiting their demands for such effort” (2). This reflected a desire on
the part of these intellectuals to “distance themselves from the more con-
troversial aspects of the New Deal (recognition of the right of workers to
strike, the implementation of social programs that benefitted women,
African Americans and other disenfranchised groups)” like members of
the LGBTQ+ community. These groups instead would be “organized into
a popular and seemingly unified collective will dedicated to containing
communism” (2).
As a result of the need to produce such a consensus, a focus on using
media technology like film to control the thinking and consciousness of
human subjects emerged. The settlement “operated subconsciously” and
“determined without appearing to do so, a definition of reality to which
Americans consented freely and spontaneously because it seemed to cor-
respond to their lived experience.” By doing so the security state “gained
control over the postwar subject” (3) where individuals felt “constrained
to construct […] a relatively stable, or hegemonized, identity” (5). Hence,
visual media like film “virtually guaranteed that gender and nationality
functioned as mutually reinforcing categories of identity” (6). Indeed,
 2 AN OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN IMPERIALISM… 19

sexual preference became as important “a determinant of social identity as

race and gender” (9). Establishing hegemony over American citizens was
as crucial as establishing influence over other countries, as if some
Americans could be avatars of what Lionel Trilling called “the Stalinization
of America” (39). Therefore, “The ‘enemy within’ included the individu-
al’s own psyche” (10). America’s internal and external enemies were the
same, and anyone rejecting the terms of the settlement—such as women,
blacks, and gays who were beginning to mobilize politically at the time
(7)—“threatened to undermine national security” (10) and could be char-
acterized as engaged in an attempt to “overthrow the American govern-
ment” (21). What Brands would call vindicator politics would have to be
exercised at home and abroad as the antidote to Soviet expansionism that
could be imposed militarily, culturally, and psychologically for being part
of the Stalinization of America. The groundwork had been laid for a new,
highly paranoid, potentially deeply divisive, and thoroughly technologized
neo-imperial security state, despite the original hope for spontaneous
unity sought in America’s earliest non-colonial approach to imperialism.
This new type of American vindicatorism provoked critics in America
that feared its effects both at home and abroad. In editions appearing in
1952, 1954, 1964, and 1965, Richard Hofstadter’s book The Paranoid
Style in American Politics and Other Essays expressed his concern about the
shaping of the American policy and its attendant mass consciousness.
Hofstadter pointed to the “moral shock of our nascent imperialism, the
effect of resurgent fundamentalism on secular politics,” as well as the
impact of the cold war on the public consciousness (xxxii). He sensed the
apocalyptic underpinnings of the rhetorics we saw traced above by Brands
and Berger and feared them. On both the right and the left sides of poli-
tics, some were saying “If the warnings of those who diagnose the central
treachery are not heeded soon enough, it is argued we are finished: the
world confronts an apocalypse of the sort prefigured in the Book of
Revelation” where social issues are reduced to a battle between “a Good
and an Evil influence” (xxxvii). The effort to organize against Soviet
expansionism had produced a new kind of American security state where
he could see a “singular transition from a continental power with more or
less complete hegemony in the western Hemisphere to a world power
where aspirations now outran its reach” (xxxvii).
He saw especially disturbing tendencies emerging in the right-wing
approach to shaping the society and the culture. For them, conflicts over
ethnicity and religion were a major focus in the apocalyptic moralistic view
20 M. E. WILDERMUTH

where he could see “a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are
felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus […] not susceptible to the nor-
mal political process of bargain and compromise” (39). In this context,
the “especially poignant problem of the American Negro [sic] is only the
latest and most difficult of a number of ethnic mixture rising out of our
polyglot population.” And “this has made the achievement of a full
American identity a recurrent difficulty which has profound political
effects” (xxxvii). Hofstadter too was concerned about the issues of media
and consciousness-shaping but felt the right-wing, openly paranoid
approach was especially problematic. For the right-wing paranoiacs,
“Important changes can be traced to the effects of mass media,” and thus
their “theater of action is now the entire world” (24). Hofstadter observed
that for the political paranoiac the enemy “controls the press; he directs
the mind through ‘managed news;’ he […] has a secret for influencing the
mind (brain washing); […] he is gaining a stranglehold on the education
system” (32). The most unusual aspect of the mindset here was its obses-
sion with what we would call today the Other: the enemy is “a projection
of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are
attributed to him,” as when Klansmen adopted the vestments of the
Catholic priests they berated (32). When enemies desert or defect, they
bring with them a potential for redeeming or defeating them (35). This
was the price of neo-imperialist expansion of power in the name of national
security.
Also writing at the time was William Appleman Williams, discussed in
the previous chapter. Williams’ The Tragedy of American Diplomacy saw
the new American security state’s imperialist tendencies as a tragedy lack-
ing an appropriate tragic hero who could learn from mistakes and tran-
scend them. Williams too sensed other deeper changes in the American
psyche where “Even the American public came more and more to be
manipulated and controlled in the effort to establish and maintain the
American Way as the global status quo” (8). The extension of the Open
door had led “to the rise of a modern American empire” (56). The new
state’s policies’ “ideological and moral elements” had “served to create a
kind of expansionism that aimed at the marketplace of the mind and the
polls as well as the pocketbook” (57). The Cold War was “only the most
recent phase of a more general conflict between the established system of
western capitalism and its internal and external opponents.” Thus,
“American foreign policy has been criticized by conservatives as well as
well as [left-wing] radicals” (10). Internationally, America had revoked
 2 AN OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN IMPERIALISM… 21

economic independence from other counties. This has made them feel a
loss of financial and psychological independence (15). Hence, he observed,
this made them “resort to political and economic retaliation” (16).
The highly conflicted nature of the 1950s security state would deepen
and make difficult to maintain the cold war consensus in the 1960s. As
Corber shows, the state’s culture fostered “contradictions that eventually
led to the collapse of the Cold War consensus amid the crisis of cultural
legitimation in the 1960s” (2). Indeed, this crisis would focus on the
imperialist tendencies of the state and its internal hegemonic social orga-
nization when John F. Kennedy took office. William Appleman Williams
wrote, “Kennedy charted his course by the star of empire and generated
the confidence that sustained the interventionist momentum.” Hence, he
“stressed the need to cast aside Eisenhower’s caution and move more
boldly to realize America’s destiny as the leader of the world” (300).
Therefore, he crossed “the threshold of major intervention in Vietnam”
and with conflicts in Cuba (300–301).
In his 1993 The Devil We Knew, H.W. Brands paints an even more
detailed portrait of the dissolution of the consensus and the gradual yet
rising criticism of the neo-imperialist security state. He says initially in
1957 that JFK, criticizing Ike’s response to the Algerian crisis in 1957,
raised doubts about the security state’s newfound tendency to act like a
colonialist power. JFK said the enemy to the innate desire for freedom was
“imperialism, which came in two forms. First was Soviet imperialism,
and—‘whether we like it or not, and though they are not to be equated’—
Western imperialism,” which is to say the American brand modeled on the
European variety (87). Countries under the heel of colonialist imperialism
would break free of the West and regard it with suspicion (87).
Unfortunately, Brands says, Kennedy’s position changed after becom-
ing President, and he “succumbed to the […] disease of creeping com-
munophobia” and shifted to “a harder line against Third World radicalism”
under the “influence and responsibility” of the office (88). Hence, America
“aligned itself […] against the populations of countries the [nondemo-
cratic] regimes controlled” (91). This undercut the popular moral base on
which America’s containment policy rested (91), and so Americans “ques-
tioned—occasionally, at first, but more frequently late—the wisdom of
such alliances” (92). This left the United States as “a neo imperialist pariah
in the view of many—probably most—countries” (92). The situation
would only escalate under President Johnson who inevitably pursued the
same policies (89). Backlash against the security state’s culture was
22 M. E. WILDERMUTH

inevitable and enormous. It led to a challenge of fundamental American

values (93). There was a general attack on the Cold War and its institu-
tions (93). Political writers, sociologists, and economists like C. Wright
Mills, Paul Barron, and Paul Sweezy “saw America’s errors as the neces-
sary outgrowths of an entire oligarchic-capitalistic-imperialist system”
(95). The counter culture would intensify this critique of Cold War cul-
ture (96). The rise of a New Right culture among Republicans would
embroil these issues further as Robert Welch founded the John Birch
Society (98) and Barry Goldwater criticized LBJ and argued for going on
the offensive in the Cold War (100), but, as his failed bid for the presi-
dency showed, his rhetoric in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis stoked
fear (101). Indeed, as Margot Henriksen’s Dr. Strangelove’s America
(1997) has shown, the crisis and the Bomb had fomented “the kind of
countercultural rebelliousness that characterized America throughout the
1960s” (xix).
This in turn would impact perceptions of the security state’s hegemonic
hierarchies based on gender and race. As Susan Hartman shows in her
1989 From Margins to Mainstream, protests against the Vietnam War
would also influence the women’s movement as women joining in the
African American liberation struggle, Chicano activism, and the welfare
rights movement began to question hegemonic elements of the security
state’s Cold War neo-imperialist culture (23–24). As Brands notes, though,
in The Devil We Knew, there was backlash again on these fronts; the FBI
focused on links between black power and communism (108). Indeed,
under the influence of the New Right and other pro-status quo groups,
agitation by blacks and other ethnic minorities became seen as an anath-
ema to American values (115). Once again a kind of paranoia was gripping
America where the security state equated internal threats to the status quo
with external threats to America’s safety and its neo-imperialist influence
beyond its borders.
As William Appleman Williams wrote at the time, “The students, teach-
ers, and other dissenters who initiated and led to the movement to end the
war in Vietnam understood that the pattern of intervention was inextrica-
bly entwined with other inequitable and destructive aspects of American
society.” There was again that sense of the society being controlled by an
elite few (as clearly apparent in even a pre-Vietnam film not directly noted
in Williams’ text, The Manchurian Candidate of 1962) where mind con-
trol was something needing to be resisted. This was linked with “a convic-
tion that existing America had to be changed. Otherwise, there would be
 2 AN OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN IMPERIALISM… 23

more interventions and more deterioration at home” (307). The United

States technologically and philosophically needed “an acceptance of limits
upon America’s freedom of action” for otherwise “the traditional efforts
to sustain democracy by expansion will lead to the destruction of democ-
racy” (312). In short, the second stage of the early security state, like the
preceding stage, featured paranoia, concerns about mind control and
looming destructive technologies like the Bomb, with the result being an
internal divisiveness that would be second only to that emerging today in
the twenty-first century. The neo-imperialist state, as it leaned more
steadily toward the vindicator side of the equation, was sowing the very
discord it had sought to avert—providing fodder for alien invasion films
focusing on all of these themes as we will see.

The Next Stage in the American Twentieth-Century

Security State: Détente and Beyond
From the beginning to the middle of the 1970s, Americans would see an
intensification of paranoia, divisiveness, and their attendant fears under a
Nixon administration that would eventually move to mitigate some of the
conditions of the Cold War and the vindicatorism that had made the secu-
rity state so stunningly insecure for its citizenry.
Brands’ 1993 The Devil We Knew concisely summarizes what trans-
pired. Brands says that the policy of Vietnamization ironically led to a
widening of the war and increased demonstrations at home. Fatal demon-
strations in Kent State and Jackson State provoked even greater ire. And
the Pentagon Papers provoked the Nixon administration to actions that
led to the President’s downfall, and to more interrogation of the Cold War
premises of American foreign policy even as discussions began on a strate-
gic arms limitation (119).
Paranoia would run rampant not only in the public but inside the White
House itself. Daniel Ellsberg, after releasing the Pentagon Papers, became
celebrated and this led to the Ellsberg and Watergate break-ins, which
Nixon attempted to justify under the excuse of national security (120–121).
But this could not serve as justification at a time when Nixon was intro-
ducing a new approach to the Cold War that would become known as
Détente (121), a phenomenon that will help precipitate the expanding
presence of the friendly positive alien as exotic Other in invasion films.
Thus, Nixon reversed the Truman Doctrine and the idea that a victory
24 M. E. WILDERMUTH

anywhere for communism was a defeat for liberty everywhere. The open-
ing of China and the détente offered to Russia thus served to “de-­
ideologize American foreign policy” (123). No mean feat to attempt,
considering that exemplarist and vindicatorist aspects of American ideol-
ogy had been in effect for more than a century. Nevertheless, this was a
practical move since anticommunist rhetoric could foster unity between
Russia and China (122).
Agitation over racist hierarchies and imperialist involvement was
renewed when information was released regarding the FBI’s campaign
against socialist workers and Martin Luther King as information was also
disseminated on the CIA’s involvement with the overthrow of govern-
ments in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile, plus assassination attempts on
Lumumba and Castro, as well as attempts to use LSD to make American
operatives into real Manchurian Candidate style assassins (138). Writers
like Marchetti and Marks described the CIA as subsidized by American
corporatism. Americans sensed the moral implications of post-Open Door
tendencies to link economic expansion with geopolitical dominance in the
security state, and they began to reject the corporatization of American
crusader zeal that would lead us to act like a colonialist occupier of other
lands. The mindset after Nixon’s resignation underscored a deepening
rejection of Cold War mainstream culture (138).
Jimmy Carter would try to reverse all of this, only to find that the reali-
ties of the neo-imperialist security state had an almost existential power
that was nearly irresistible. As Brands says in The Devil We Knew, after
beating Jerry Ford in the election, Carter would declare that America’s
time of dominating other countries were over (142). In his 1977 speech
at Notre Dame, he would say we had become too much like other impe-
rialist countries. Thus, we needed to pursue a human rights initiative
instead of militaristic expansionism (143). The Open Door and the
national security state to all appearances had proven the worst imaginings
of exemplarists had come to pass—America had been losing its soul
through imperialist involvement, this time mixed with a desire for eco-
nomic power. All in the name of national security.
America, according to Carter, needed to reverse the negative effects of
imperialism by dealing with the gap between rich and poor through
benevolent use of technology, trade, education, and aid (144). Congress
followed suit by supporting human rights initiatives and banning sale of
weapons to racist South Africa (144–145). The administration pressed for
lower limits on strategic arms in the SALT II treaty (145). Carter’s focus
 2 AN OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN IMPERIALISM… 25

on the ethical use of technology, in the wake of the Arab oil embargo
(146) led him to outline steps to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil
and begin a strategic oil reserve (147).
But, Brands reminds us, in The Devil We Knew, Republicans and con-
servative Democrats could not reconcile themselves to détente. By 1979,
détente politics had, as Brands shows, dissolved (156). By 1980, nostalgia
for the 1950s prevailed and Americans sought a return to its past (163).
These conditions, plus inflation and unemployment in the late 1970s,
prompted any to vote for Reagan who would seek a return to the Cold
War (164). Not surprisingly, invasion films, as we will see in later chapters,
would again at times focus on negative Others, and at other times vacillate
toward other types of representations although, for reasons that will
become clear later in this study, they would struggle to stabilize differ-
ences between protagonists and antagonists as the Reagan era would fos-
ter conflicts and divisions even more complex and confusing than those of
the 1950s.

The Reagan Era: After Détente and After

the Apocalypse

James Berger in After the End (1999) posits an interesting and productive
way to view the Reagan security state as a product of mass trauma incurred
from the inception of the American experiment and growing in intensity
after the upheavals of the 1960s that had continuing cultural effects in the
decades following. Having already described the original sense of mission
for an America seeing itself as playing an exemplary role in preparing,
globally and domestically, for the establishment of a New Jerusalem, a city
on a hill, in America, the U.S. security state prepared itself to play a role in
that ordained process again in the Reagan era.
For Berger, the idea of apocalypse is connected to ongoing trauma in
American culture and history. He links “the idea of apocalypse with the
psychological concept of trauma” as “congruent ideas, and both effect
their own erasures from memory and must be reconstructed by means of
their traces, remains, survivors and ghosts: their symptoms. Post-­
apocalyptic representations are simultaneously symptoms of historical
traumas and attempts to work through them” (19). These symptoms are
revived in attempts to erase them that also fetishize the social-historical
events causing them (29–30). Reaganism, as a political and social
26 M. E. WILDERMUTH

phenomenon, certainly fits this pattern (as indeed do many later security
regimes) in many ways. As Berger says, Reagan, along with other post-­
World War II millennial thinkers, conjoined the Book of Revelation and
the conflict of the Cold War to characterize the struggle between the
United States and Russia as a war between Good and Evil (137).
This is because Reagan saw America as an achieved utopia, a concept
which we will see proves invaluable for understanding the rhetoric of many
films discussed in this volume. “In the view of the Reaganist or neo-­
Reaganist Right, the United States was perfect, and is perfect today—or
would be but for the efforts of identifiable enemies at home and abroad”
such as liberalism and communism (134). America’s flaws and traumas are
thus part of a redemptive narrative. This includes slavery, genocidal war on
Native Americans, and the Vietnam War. Reagan’s “narrative is a post-­
apocalypse that has repressed its apocalyptic moment” (134–135).
The logic of Reagan’s security state is based on that implied in posta-
pocalyptic discourse in general, one that allows him to discern and dis-
seminate the idea of America as achieved utopia. Apocalyptic discourse,
says Berger, “takes us after the end, shows the signs prefiguring the end,
the moment of obliteration, and the aftermath.” Hence, the discourse
takes us to a strange narratological temporalized paradox. “Every action
before the apocalypse is simultaneously an action after the apocalypse.”
Hence, the narrative of apocalyptic fiction and film insists the postapoca-
lyptic precedes the apocalypse. For “once the prophecy [of apocalypse] is
uttered, all the rest is post-apocalypse” (6). For Reagan, American victory
over communism was inevitable and the Soviet threat was negligible. The
Cold War was paradoxically a struggle to “install what had always existed.
[…] America, for Reagan, was an ‘achieved utopia’” (138). Its destiny was
implicit in its origin wherein its special mission was ordained and already
concluded.
This unusual yet thoroughly American mindset helps explain how and
why security states after World War II (since they all descended from this
mindset in their millennial pursuits of postimperial foreign policy), but
especially in the Reagan era, insisted on preserving hierarchies based on
race, gender, and sexual preference. The attitudes here are complex, para-
doxical, yet can be explicated. In an achieved utopia, traumas concerning
race and sexology can be repressed because they are dismissed as anomalies
that do not tell the true story of what makes America great and what can
make it great again. Hence, Reaganists attacked affirmative action
 2 AN OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN IMPERIALISM… 27

programs and supported gendered hierarchies (139). They returned to

the 1960s and sought to reverse or erase its changes (139).
And yet—Reagan could say that Marin Luther King “‘freed the white
man’ from any possible burden of guilt” because Reagan sees King as an
element insuring an already assured redemption. Meanwhile there came
the attack on abortion rights and feminism (144). And yet complex atti-
tudes toward women prevailed here too, in ways even Berger himself may
underestimate. As Susan Hartmann says in her 1989 From Margins to
Mainstream, much of this discourse had been revitalized in the 1970s and
1980s by the earlier supporter of Barry Goldwater, Phyllis Schlafly, who
argued that the greatest enemy of the security state was the equal Rights
Amendment which would, by capitulating to the Left, destroy the tradi-
tional family with its inherent gendered hierarchies and leave America vul-
nerable to its communist enemies (132–133). She was, in short, a career
woman who made her career, at least partly, by telling women not to have
careers. Such paradoxes can make perfectly good sense for the Reaganist;
for what emerges here, as Berger says, is “a vision of class, race, and gen-
der, the repair of all families, the achievement of utopia, [which] is at the
center of the Reaganist vision” (154). This, seemingly despite the fact that
apocalyptic visions show that no social reform can eradicate the world’s
problems. The world is so ethical decline and “technological, political, and
economic chaos and/or regimentation that it should end, and it must end
because in some crucial sense it has ended” (7). And so in the end every-
thing will be alright. As we will see in the studies of the films below, this
idea of the achieved utopia is often essential for understanding to what
degree these motion pictures accept or reject the dominant ideologies of
the security state.
H.W. Brands’ more conventional analysis of the Reagan security state
and its post-détente neo-imperialist tendencies in The Devil We Knew in
no way contradicts Berger’s reading of the Reagan culture. Paradoxes in
his view abound. Despite Reagan’s aggressive postapocalyptic rhetoric
against the Evil Empire, as Brands says, Reagan’s Cold War strategy never
prompted direct military confrontation (164). It was mainly a semiotic
war (165).
But be that as it may, Reagan could follow the vindicator path abroad
with direct military involvement as he sought to make America great again
by reviving the disheveled economy he inherited from Gerald Ford and
Jimmy Carter. America would defend its interests abroad. As Brands notes,
Reagan sent troops to Beirut and invaded Grenada in the early 1980s and
28 M. E. WILDERMUTH

bombed Tripoli in 1986 (168). He backed anticommunist fighters in

Angola, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and Cambodia (169–170). He ran the
same risk of criticism that had been made against Truman, Ike, JFK, and
Nixon because backed groups who often seemed to violate American val-
ues. This would result in the scandal of the Iran-Contra affair, the infa-
mous arms for hostages deal, which Reagan managed to survive (171–172).
Reagan and cohorts meanwhile endorsed the idea of Vietnam as noble
cause to reinstitute the original Cold War cultural paradigm (180). Hence,
as if to announce the retreading of the Open Door policy, in 1985 Charles
Krauthammer seemed to defend the idea of forcing American on cultures
beyond our shores (181).
The Cold War, however, did end, leaving Krauthammer to say that
America, as Brands notes in The Devil We Knew, needed enemies to define
itself (206), even as Francis Fukuyama predicted an end to history with the
end of struggle (209). Perhaps a strategic paradigm fraught with para-
doxes could end no other way. At the decade’s end, Reagan now accepting
the tides of change as no doubt part of America’s destiny implicit in its
inception (while also being a prudent politician) had joined antinuke
movement (190) and so the Berlin Wall came down. But the aim of
American domestic policy still sought to eradicate the welfare state (172).
The eventual result was “unprecedented deficits” and a strange tax situa-
tion where the poor’s federal taxes increased by 30% while the rich
Americans’ taxes decreased by 12% (173). Adding to the economic trou-
ble would be the end of the Cold War where military contracts would be
reduced or canceled and military bases would be closed. But in the wake
there would remain a right-wing populist culture that attacked secular
humanism, denounced relativism, homosexuality, abortion, euthanasia,
environmentalism socialist globalization (182). Such relic early Cold War,
neo-imperialist security state thinking no doubt seemed arcane to the Left
as the 1990s dawned, but its time would come. Even as the Cold War
ended, the felt need for maintaining the state’s gender and race hierarchies
and aggressive geopolitical stands would survive and provoke contrary,
strong, and often deeply disturbing questioning of Cold War norms, as we
will see, in the invasion films of the decade to come.
 2 AN OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN IMPERIALISM… 29

The 1990s: An Interregnum?

By the end of the 1980s, it seemed clear to many Americans and to many
around the world that the national security state had been tainted by
imperialism. As Brands says in The Devil We Knew, “The better to contain
communism, Washington aligned itself with colonial and reactionary
regimes that flouted principles Americans had just fought a war [in the
1940s] to vindicate.” Third world countries therefore associated America
with imperialism (225). Thus, both the right and the left questioned
America’s imperialist tendencies that had emerged in the fight against
communism (226). By the 1990s, the weakening of communism globally
made it unlikely that world conquest by Russia could happen (227). The
culture of the Cold War and the attendant security state at least seemed to
be coming to an end.
Writing in 1993 at the time this happened Cynthia Enloe in The
Morning After speculated that this might bring great changes to American
culture and its hegemonic society. She said that “because militarization of
the last three generations of Americans had been so deep and so subtle
[…] we scarcely know how to map its gendered terrain.” Still, she felt we
must study “the varieties of masculinity and femininity it took to create the
Cold War and the sorts of transformations in relationships between men
and women it will take to ensure that the ending processes will move for-
ward” (5). She was in short confident that an America that no longer
needed to assert hegemonic tendencies abroad might surrender them at
home as well. In the Cold War, pressing women back into the domestic
realm and re-masculinizing the military after World War II would “protect
U.S. citizens from the lure of communism” (15–16). But she noted that
as the 1980s segued into the 1990s, women had made progress in the
military, partly as a result of the actions of feminist lobbyists like Carolyn
Becraft (60). Enloe thus showed cautious optimism for change in the
new decade.
The decade itself, however, would prove to be as complex and as para-
doxical as the one that preceded it since fossilized structures from the
previous decades would endure even as the Cold War ended. As
H.W. Brands says in his 2010 study American Dreams, the military would
prove to be a testing ground for gender, sexual preference, and race. The
newly elected President Clinton would argue gays could join the military
openly. Conservatives and military people castigated the proposed policy,
General Colin Powell saying this would “diminish the effectiveness of
30 M. E. WILDERMUTH

American military units” (294), while Clinton replied such arguments

were much like those used against racially integrating the armed forces in
the Truman years (294). Clinton was forced to accept a compromise with
the “Don’t ask, don’t tell policy” that brought him criticism from both
gay leaders and Republicans (296). Later, Powell himself would consider
running for President; as a black man marginalized racial and ethnic
groups and white liberals simultaneously (315)—with the implication
being that in the new regime perhaps attitudes toward race were evolving.
Meanwhile, on the gender front things remained complex and con-
flicted. Mixed reactions emerged when President Clinton gave his wife
Hillary an office in the West Wing of the White House. This, says Brands
in Dreams, “struck some observers as a positive blow for women […] and
others as an end run around the Constitution, which makes no allowance
for co-presidents” (297). There were similar reactions when he appointed
her to revise health care policy in the United States (297). The plan failed
as Republicans weaponized Mrs. Clinton’s stance against her husband
(299). Paradoxically, President Clinton would come under scrutiny for his
relationship with Monica Lewinski, behavior that seemed to contradict his
association with progressive attitudes toward gender (319). Nevertheless,
he was not removed from office and his approval rating rose to its all-time
best, 73%, higher than Reagan’s at the height of his popularity (327).
America’s involvement in other countries was made complex as a result
of the fear of imperialist style engagements in countries besmirching
America’s image due to their nondemocratic tendencies. Clinton showed
caution in international affairs even though he could not absolve America
completely from military engagements abroad. For example, as Brands
asserts in American Dreams, in 1991–1992 as provinces seceded from
Yugoslavia, Serb troops in Bosnia were bombed by NATO and U.S. air-
craft. American troops were sent in to enforce the Dayton accords to con-
firm Bosnian independence, but Clinton assured the United States would
closely monitor their involvement (312) to avoid a situation like the
Blackhawk Down incident in 1993 when the military action Clinton had
inherited from George H.W. Bush spiraled out of control. Clinton had
originally defended his decision to stay in Somalia but departed (314).
Clinton’s caution notwithstanding, the 1995 Dayton peace accord did not
end the Balkan wars as other provinces broke away, and so sustained
involvement was inevitable. Hence, as Brands says, in 1999 the United
States and NATO began bombing campaigns consonant with the conduct
of America abroad after 1945. Conflict in Kosovo ended as a result of
 2 AN OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN IMPERIALISM… 31

American and NATO involvement (338). Changes in attitudes notwith-

standing, America was still acting like a postwar security state involving
itself in international conflicts.
Paranoia and concerns about technology and mind control also
remained in the culture. The looming threat of Y2K revived rhetorics of
technological apocalypse even as some feminists like Donna Haraway after
her “Manifesto for the Cyborgs” (1985) debated with N. Katherine
Hayles whose Chaos Bound (1993) said virtual technologies could not,
despite Haraway’s claims, transcend gender boundaries. Indeed, much of
Hayles’ 1997 How We Became Posthuman seemed to debunk New Age
cultural claims that many boundaries could be subverted by the virtual and
that human consciousness could be uploaded into technology to tran-
scend physicality. In the 1999 film The Matrix, Keanu Reeves’ character
Neo had invited us to imagine a world without boundaries of any kind, an
invitation that no doubt frightened some viewers even as it delighted oth-
ers. Invasion films, as we will see, also pick up on these themes on posthu-
manity, further complicating representations of alien Others as either
potentially positive reflections on our humanity or just the opposite, espe-
cially with regard to how we use technology and begin to merge with it.
These always disturbing themes in science fiction become pursued with
special urgency as cyber technologies render these questions as something
more than the stuff of pure fantasy and speculation.
In the material world, issues about technologies and moving beyond
boundaries, ideological, nationalistic, and physical, grew more complex
and potentially unsettling as changes took place in the techno-political
sphere that invoked, as always, genuine problems for the American citi-
zenry. Electronic technologies were complicating human life in the main-
stream world as new and traditional media technologies tested legal and
ethical boundaries. As Brands says in American Dreams, anxieties about
the dot com world of the 1990s were substantiated by present day reali-
ties. From 2000 to 2002, the “dot-com bubble burst” with palpable effect
on the economy (329). Meanwhile DOJ sued Microsoft for monopoly
infringement (330). Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ruled that Microsoft
was guilty, and this would require that the company would be broken in
half, with one part being operated by Internet Explorer and the other by
Windows (331). Yet this action never really materialized (332). The
greater problems of the ethical dimensions of all this would go unresolved
but further underscore the serious questions about moral use of technol-
ogy in invasion films of the period.
32 M. E. WILDERMUTH

In more traditional media, new situations would arise having even

greater impact on the post-Cold War culture. Reagan era practices, as
Brands shows in Dreams, had led to the FCC’s revocation of the fairness
doctrine, which said radio stations must provide both liberal and conserva-
tive expressions of outlook in their programming. Post-deregulation,
radio stations discovered that conservative stations, broadcasting mainly
on FM, sold more ads than liberal ones (319). This allowed commentators
like Rush Limbaugh, to attract large numbers of followers by characteriz-
ing liberals like the Clintons as villains (318). Hence, while the country
had the opportunity to move away from the paranoia and divisiveness that
had emerged in the Cold War, these tendencies could be sustained in part
by a medium that had once been legally prohibited from doing so with
this degree of aplomb. This would set the stage for continued problems
associated with media in the twenty-first century with the rise of social
media and algorithm-driven search engines fostering the so-called rabbit-­
hole effect for sustaining the deepening schism in America’s ideologi-
cal divide.
Globalization of a nonvirtual nature would also become a divisive
1990s issue oddly in the context of what initially seemed to be a non-­
imperialist, non-vindicatorist post-security regime. With free flow of goods
coming across American borders, economic competition abroad became
exacerbated as international products arrived on American shores, as
Brands shows in Dreams (334). American companies could not compete
with cheaper textile products, steel, and automobiles coming from abroad
(335). Globalization lowered prices of products, and so in the wake of the
Open Door, Clinton pressed Congress to approve the NAFTA agreement
negotiated by George H.W. Bush and thus endorsed globalization that
had been embraced since the days of Truman (335–336).
Everything hit the fan during the World Trade Organization confer-
ence in Seattle in 1999. Clinton defended his policy there but while some
agitators blamed Clinton for driving jobs overseas, others seemed to see a
re-emergence of imperialist-style oppressive tactics in American policy.
Environmentalists saw globalization as empowering multinational corpo-
rations while others saw a threat to national cultural identities as Brands
says in Dreams (336). So, violent protest ensued against a practice that had
been evolving since 1945 (337).
A decade that had begun with questioning the tenets of the neo-­
imperialist security regime ended with questions about its incapacity to
break with its past or create a better tomorrow along progressive lines. A
 2 AN OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN IMPERIALISM… 33

discredited post-Lewinski affair Clinton would be unable to support AL

Gore in the next election. The election itself, as if to confirm lingering
fears about technology being used to manipulate its citizenry, would end
with hand counted ballots, hanging chads determining George W. Bush to
be the next President with global leaders wondering whether he was the
legitimate heir to the office. All that was needed to reignite fully the cross-­
cultural conflicts of the preceding hegemonic security states would be an
incident that could sufficiently threaten America to return it to the past it
had tried so desperately to escape or reshape for the past ten years. The
films in this study show much concern about these issues. They reflect the
staggering of an American consciousness that at first rallies around the
idea of a full revival of the security state, and its reconstituted expansionist
tendencies, and then begins to lose faith in this enterprise as involvement
in Afghanistan and Iraq resuscitates old questions about exemplarism and
vindicatorism represented in the angst-ridden invasion films of the next
century.

The Post-9/11 Neo-imperialist Security States

In American Dreams, H.W. Brands says, “The shock of 9/11 was unlike
anything in American history” (350). In contrast to Pearl Harbor, this
time it all exploded onto American television screens (351). Bush’s
approval rating rose to 90% (352). Bush would go before Congress to
declare a “war on terror” and declare any country harboring terrorism to
be an enemy of America (353). Almost as if the speech were a rephrasing
of the Truman Doctrine, a victory for terrorists anywhere was a defeat for
free countries everywhere—regardless of whether terrorism was a more
transnational and polycentric threat than even communism had been. By
October 7, 2001, as Brands reminds us, bombing began in Afghanistan
with Afghan and British support while the caves of Tora Bora would be
taken by December—even as Bin Laden escaped to Pakistan (354).
A mindset had been revived with a completeness and urgency unknown
in the Clinton administration but not, as Brands says in Dreams, com-
pletely forgotten. In some cases, “actual descendants of the anti-détente
activists of the 1970s—had been agitating for a more assertive role for the
United States in the world” (354). Indeed, some in the 1990s advocated
a “Pax Americana, a global system in which American values, undergirded
by American arms, reigned supreme” as they rejected the policy of con-
taining Saddam Hussein. Both Clinton and George H.W. Bush had
34 M. E. WILDERMUTH

rejected this idea before 9/11, but by 2002 there was a codification of a
desired policy of deterrence (353). The vindicator mindset was returning.
By October 2002, Congress authorized action against Iraq, and by March
2003, we were at war with Iraq without UN support (358–359).
The vindicator tendency was once again emerging where economic
interests combined with a concern for disseminating and enforcing
American values became the prime order of the day. As Brands says in
Dreams, securing Iraqi oil for the future played a big role here, and hence,
American troops captured Iraqi oil facilities before they could be destroyed
(360). By May, Bush could declare victory (360). And even though WMD
were not found—their presence necessary to showing that invasion was
needed to defend America from a Cold War-like nuclear/biological/
chemical threat—Bush could nevertheless assert the other part of the vin-
dicator equation, exporting American values. Bush would now say
“‘Democracy for Iraq had always been part of the agenda’” (361).
But, as if to unwittingly support the exemplarist position on vindicator
politics, it was clear that something was going wrong. As Brands says in
Dreams, by 2004 a new insurgency was immanent (362). And then came
the international disgrace of Abu Ghraib prison when photographs of tor-
ture emerged on the internet, including those involving scantily clad
American women soldiers humiliating nude Iraqi male prisoners. As
Brands says, Americans wondered what impact this was having on America
soldiers. This in turn impacted the image of the United States negatively
around the world (364). In short, America’s exertion of its will overseas
once again called into question whether the soul of the country was being
corrupted by something that increasingly at least looked less like a crusade
for freedom and more like an imperialist escapade for energy resources and
economic dominance.
Things at home suggested old divisions and fears were being rekindled
as Americans took to the streets to protest the war as if to prove Berger’s
thesis on recurring traumas in the security state beginning in the 1960s.
Old hegemonic hierarchies also seemed to be reasserting themselves.
Writing in 2003 about the new 9/11 security state, feminist media scholar
Jayne Rogers said “It is as if the twentieth century never happened” (210).
Describing coverage of the attacks she said “While men […] were being
constructed a heroes, women were being constructed as victims” (207).
As early as 2001, Hilary Charlesworth and Christine Chinkin in The
American Journal of International Law argued on 9/11 “women were
invisible, except as victims alongside men.” Indeed, “The role of women
 2 AN OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN IMPERIALISM… 35

and police firefighters in the emergency work after the various crashes has
been given little exposure.” Responses to the attack were articulated
mostly by men with “Condoleeza Rice, head of the National Security
Council,” playing “a relatively limited overt role in responding to the
hijackings and the war in Afghanistan” (600). Of the 50 opinion pieces
appearing after the attacks in The New York Times, only 2 were authored
by women (601). Earlier in 2004 Lynn Spigel in her famous “Entertainment
Wars” essay said that “one of the central ways” in which America’s “moral
position” as an innocent country victimized by Islamic fundamentalist
aggression was established by the media and the White House was
“through the depiction of women victims” (246). Such myths of gender
“were often connected to age-old Western fantasies of the East in which
‘Oriental’ men assault (and even rape) Western women and more symboli-
cally the West itself” (246). The reverse imperialist trope had arisen again.
Spigel thought all of this was an attempt to restore order and information
flow (which equals flow of capital) after the catastrophe (235–239). Not
surprisingly, issues on gender and hegemony, domestically and abroad,
will appear in invasion films where women in both civilian garb and in
uniform will have their mettle tested as they face threats foreign and
domestic which challenge their capacity to stabilize subjecthood in a con-
text where gender roles are examined more openly and with greater com-
plexity than ever before.
Meanwhile, themes on information, technology, and control would
spike types of paranoia and divisions as they had in previous security
states. As Brands states in American Dreams, concerns arose that a
renewed surveillance culture had “eroded basic freedoms in the United
States,” especially in connection with the Patriot Act of 2001(365),
while concerns about the use of torture to illicit information also arose
(365–366). Bush’s approval rating dropped to 42%, yet he won the sec-
ond election, while alleged electronic voter fraud in Ohio indicated these
results might be questionable (366). Meanwhile the rise of internet cul-
ture, the availability of cell phones and iPod and iPhone technology,
contributed to what post-­humanists in the 1990s called the denaturing
of the human subject, or, as Brands says, “the continued erasure of time
and distance in communications and information” (373). This had an
impact on the society of the new state. Customization of technology led
to an “a la carte consumerism” (379) and “The result was an iconic con-
flation of the individual and the collective” (375). Whatever impacts this
may have had on Americans’ conceptualization of their identities
36 M. E. WILDERMUTH

collectively and individually, as they faced foreign threats and domestic

uncertainties, in the end this increased consumer debt just in time for
the bursting of the dot com bubbles (376). Many turned to investments
in “subprime mortgages” that led to “a classic speculative bubble” that
burst (377). As if to confirm the many fears about technology and con-
cerns about the security state that had evolved, the ensuing economic
crash of 2008 would have global impact, ushering in the worst economic
times the world had seen since the Great Depression.
Small wonder that in this atmosphere of dread where, as usual, the
regime conflated threats abroad with threats at home, a rising xenopho-
bia would complicate America’s struggles with immigration flow that
dated back for generations. Fear of low wage competition from immi-
grants had led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, as Brands reminds
us in American Dreams, while the 1924 Immigration Act set quotas that
favored Western and Northern Europeans (371). By the 1960s, prosper-
ity in Europe led to a shift to immigrants from Latin America and Asia
(371). The bracero program in World War II admitted “temporary work-
ers from Mexico to alleviate wartime shortages,” but even after its aboli-
tion in 1964 “workers continued to come, some with visas, some
without” (372). By 1986, a new law mandated penalties for those who
hired illegal immigrants but also grandfathered in pre-1984 illegals
(372). The booming economy of the 1990s attracted even more workers
so that by 2005 the country harbored some 10 million undocumented
immigrants, and this spurred many to call for reform (372). Some asked
for a wall to be built (Bush asked for funding and got it) and others
asked for amnesty (372). But the problem would continue to embroil
Americans through three future administrations as Americans in the
security state wondered just where its politics were taking them as a kind
of reversal of its imperial outward thrust seemed to shake the very foun-
dation of the security state and its ability to preserve America. As Ramirez
Berg noted in the previous chapter, the changing perceptions of immi-
grants from the 1980s to the twenty-first century would continue to
inculcate invasion narratives about naturalization, deportation, and
destruction of the alien Other in ways that would reflect the shifting
sensibilities regarding the value of visitors from other cultures, as repre-
sented in the extraterrestrial entity (407).
 2 AN OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN IMPERIALISM… 37

Later 9/11 Security States: The Obama

and Trump Administrations

In the 2009 afterword to Williams’ The Tragedy of American Diplomacy,

Andrew J. Bacevich argued that Williams’ thesis on imperialism held up in
the post-9/11 world of Bush, as Obama’s regime began. “In our own day
the lie [about the necessity of empire] finds expression in the Global War
on Terror, justified as a response to an unprovoked attack launched on
September 11, 2001” (323). American actions abroad show that
“Americans have persuaded themselves that American prosperity (and
therefore American freedom) demands that the United States must deter-
mine the fate of these energy-rich precincts” (324). Thus, “the strategy of
the open door has found a new lease on life in the Long War in places like
Iraq and Afghanistan” (324). What had changed was that the economic
advantage is now no longer rigged in our favor and “the rules now favor
others—ironically, given the provenance of the open door, the Chinese
above all” (324). America still had a military advantage, however, and so
“the revised and updated strategy of the open door de-emphasizes com-
merce in favor of coercion” (325). Hence, the new open door was “exac-
erbating American problems with debt and dependence” (325). The
military was “an inadequate substitute for America’s lost economic pre-
ponderance,” and so “the tragedy of American diplomacy promises to
continue” (325–326).
In American Dreams, H.W. Brands made similar observations regard-
ing the then budding Obama administration. Iraq had settled down, but
Afghanistan birthed increased insurgency (361). With the dollar weaken-
ing, “Beijing might demand adjustments that acknowledged China’s
growing strength” (383). This in turn had an economic impact at home
leading to economic decline in industrial cities like Detroit and Pittsburg
(383). Nevertheless, the beginning of the Obama era showed promise for
subverting gender and race hegemonic hierarchies at home. America’s first
black president put Sonia Sotomayor, a Hispanic woman, on the Supreme
Court, and women saw professional advancement while gays in some
states could now enjoy matrimony (384).
But other critics would see far more continuity with the past neo-­
imperial security regimes than progress toward change. In his 2016 com-
mentary on the Obama years, Nobel Neocolonialism, African American
teacher and writer Torrance Stephens said the Obama regime enhanced
the likelihood of radicalizing Islamic states because we were “ignoring our
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
bater de azas produz um arruido tão caracteristico e singular.
O nosso viajante, se caminhava distrahido e meio pensativo, não
parecia, comtudo, de genio sombrio ou pouco divertido.
Muito ao contrario, sacudia ás vezes o torpôr em que vinha e entrava
a cantarolar, ou assoviar, esporeando a valente cavalgadura, que na
marcha que tomava ia abanando alternadamente as orelhas com o
movimento cadencial da cabeça.
N'uma dessas reacções contra alguma preoccupação, disse em voz
alta, puxando por um relogio de prata, seguro em corrente do mesmo
metal:
—Ás duas horas pretendo sestear no paiol do Leal. Falta pouco para
o meio dia, e tenho tempo diante de mim a botar fóra...
Moderou, pois, a andadura que levava o animal e mais activamente
recomeçou a zurzir os galhos das arvores bocejando de tedio.
Tambem pouco tempo caminhou só, por isto que em breve ao seu
lado emparelhou outro viajante, escanchado n'um cavallinho feio e
zambro, mas muito forte, o qual, coberto como estava de suor, mostrava
ter vindo quasi a galope.
Homem já de alguma idade, o recem-chegado era gordo, de
compleição sanguinea, rosto expressivo e franco. Trajava á mineira e
parecia como realmente era, morador daquella localidade.
 Olá, patricio, exclamou conchegando a cavalgadura.

—Olá, patricio, exclamou elle conchegando a cavalgadura á da

pessoa a quem interpellava, então se vai botando para Camapoan?
 Olhou o nosso cavalleiro com desconfiança e sobranceria para quem
o interrogava tão sem ceremonia e meio-enviezado respondeu:
—Talvez sim ... talvez não ... Mas a que vem a pergunta?
—Ah! desculpe-me, replicou o outro rindo-se, nem siquer o saudei...
Sou mesmo um estabanado... Deus esteja comvosco. Isto sempre me
acontece... A minha lingua fica as vezes tão douda que se põe logo a
bater-me nos dentes ... que é um Deus nos acuda e ... não ha que
avisar: agua vae! Olhe, por vezes já me tem vindo damno, mas que
quer? É sestro antigo... Não que eu seja malcriado, Deus de tal me
defenda, abrenuncio; mas pega-me tal comichão de fallar que vou logo,
sem tir-te, nem guar-te, dando á taramela...
A volubilidade com que foram ditas estas palavras causou certo
espanto ao mancebo e o levou a novamente encarar o inopinado
companheiro, desta feita com mais demora e ar menos altivo.
Notou então a physionomia alegre e bonachã do tagarella e, com ar
de sympathia, correspondeu ao communicativo sorriso daquelle que, á
força, queria travar conversação.
—Pelo que vejo, disse elle, o Sr. gosta de prosear.
—Ora se! retrucou o mineiro. Nestes sertões só sinto a falta de uma
cousa: é de um christão com quem de vez em quando dê uns dedos de
parola. Isto sim, por aqui é vasqueiro. Tudo anda tão calado!... uma
verdadeira caipiragem!... Eu, não. Sou das Geraes[13] geralista como
por cá se diz; nasci no Parahybuna, conheci no meu tempo pessoas de
muita educação, gente mesma de truz e fui criado na Matta do Rio como
homem e não como bicho do monte[14].
—Ah! o senhor é de Minas?
—Geraes, se me faz favor. Baptizei-me em Vassouras, mas sou
mineiro da gemma. Andei séca e méca antes de vir deitar poita neste
paiz. Isto já faz muito tempo, pois tambem vou ficando velho. Ha mais
de quarenta annos pelo menos que sahi da casa dos meus pais...
E interrompendo o que dizia, perguntou:
—O senhor também é de Minas?
—Nhor-não, respondeu o outro. Sou caipira de S. Paulo: nasci na
villa de Casa-Branca, mas fui criado em Ouro-Preto.
 —Ah! na cidade Imperial[15]?...
—Lá mesmo.
—Então é quasi de casa, replicou o mineiro rindo-se ruidosamente.
Ora, quem diria! Por isto me batia a passarinha, quando vi o seu rasto
fresco na areia. Ahi vai, disse eu por vezes com os meus botões um
sujeitinho que não tem pressa de pousar. Tambem tocando o meu
canivete, tratei de agarral-o para não fazer a viagem a olhar para o céu
e a banzar. Acha que obrei mal?
—Não, senhor, protestou o moço com affabilidade. Muito lhe
agradeço a intenção. Assim alcançarei sem cansaço o Leal, onde
pretendo dar hoje com os ossos.
—Oh! exclamou o outro todo expansivo, a caminhada é a mesma.
Pois, meu rico senhor, eu moro a meia legua do Leal, torcendo á
esquerda, e se vosmecê não tem compromissos lá com o homem fár-
me-ha muito favor agasalhando-se em tecto de quem é pobre, mas
amigo de servir. Minha tapera[16] é pouco retirada do caminho, e quem
vem montado como o senhor, não tem que andar contando bocadinhos
de leguas.
Convite tão espontaneo e amavel não podia deixar de ser bem aceito,
sobretudo naquellas alturas, e trouxe logo entre os dous caminhantes a
familiaridade que tão depressa se estabelece em viagem.
—Com toda a satisfacção irei parar em sua casa, retrucou o joven.
Nunca vi o Leal, pois agora é a primeira vez que cruzo este sertão, e
ando de pouso em pouso, pedindo um cantinho de paiol ou de rancho
para passar a noite com os meus camaradas.
—Traz então tropa?
—Tropa, não; apenas dous bagageiros que vem com as minhas
cargas e uma besta á dextra.
—Olá! o amigo viaja á fidalga, observou o mineiro com gesto
folgazão.
—Qual!... Bastantes privações tenho já cortido.
—De certo não as sentirá em nossa casa todo o tempo que lá quizer
ficar. Não encontrará luxarias[17] nem cousas da capital, unicamente o
que se póde ter nestes mundos[18]: quatro paredes de páo a pique mal
rebocadas, uma cama de vento, bom feijão a fartar, hervas á mineira,
arroz de papa, farinha de milho torradinha, café com rapadura e talvez
até um lombo fresco de porco.
—Olá! exclamou o moço rindo-se com expansão, vou passar vida de
capitão-mór. Não queria tanto, bastava-me...
—O que sobretudo desejo é que tenha commigo o coração na boca.
Se não gostar do passadio, vá logo desembuxando. Na minha rancharia
pousa pouca gente, porque fica para dentro da estrada ... assim, talvez
lhe falte alguma cousa; em todo o caso farei pelo melhor...
Depois de breve pausa, continuou:
—Mas porem creio que já é occasião, agora que nos conhecemos
como dous amigos do tempo do Rojão, saber com quem lidamos. Eu,
quanto a mim, me chamo Martinho dos Santos Pereira e a minha
historia conto-lh'a em duas palhetadas... Sua graça, ainda que mal
pergunte?
—Cyrino Ferreira de Campos, respondeu o outro viajante, um criado
para o servir.
—Obrigado, agradeceu Pereira inclinando-se cortezmente e levando
a mão ao chapéu. Como lhe disse ha pouco, minha historia é historia de
entrar por uma porta e sahir por outra. Minha gente não é de má raça,
pelo contrario; meu pai, que Deus lhe dê a gloria, possuia alguma cousa
de seu e deixou aos seus muitos filhos um nome limpo e respeitado.
Cada qual de nós—eramos sete—tomou o seu rumo. Quanto a mim,
casei muito mocinho e fui morar na Diamantina, onde abri casa de
negocio. Depois de alguns annos, uns bons, outros caipóras, morreu
minha dona e mudei-me, a principio, para Piumhy e mais tarde para
Uberaba. A vida começou a desandar-me de todo, e fiz logo este
calculo: estar tão longe, antes afundar-me no matto de uma boa feita.
Vendi minha lojinha de ferragens e internei-me até cá com tres escravos.
Ha doze annos que moro nestes socavões[19] e, palavra de honra, até
ao presente não me tenho arrependido. Na minha situação ha fartura, e
louvado seja! nunca passei necessidade... Não posso por isto queixar-
me sem ingratidão. Deus Nosso Senhor Jesus Christo tem olhado para
mim, e me julgo bem amparado, sobretudo quando me lembro do
despotismo[20] de miserias, que vai por estas terras fóra... Cruzes! nem
falar n'isto é bom... Diga-me porém uma cousa: vosmecê para onde se
atira?
—Homem, Sr. Pereira, não tenho destino certo.
—Deveras? Então está caminhando á toa?
—Eu ponho-lhe já tudo em pratos limpos. Ando por estes fundões[21]
curando maleitas e feridas brabas.
—Ah! exclamou Pereira com manifesto contentamento, vosmecê é
doutor, não é? Physico, como chamavam os nossos do tempo de
dantes.
—É facto, confirmou Cyrino com alguma satisfacção.
—Ora, pois, muito que bem, cahe-me a sopa no mel; sim, senhor,
vem mesmo ao pintar ... a talhe de fouce.
—Porque?
—Daqui a pouco saberá... Mas, diga-me ainda... Onde é que
vosmecê leu nos livros, aprendeu suas historias e bruxarias? Na côrte
do Imperio?
—Não, respondeu Cyrino, primeiro no collegio do Caraça; depois fui
para Ouro Preto, onde tirei carta de pharmacia.
E acrescentou com infatuação:
—Desde então tenho batido todo o poente de Minas e feito curas que
é um milagre.
—Ah! a sabença é cousa boa... Eu tambem tinha geito para saber
mais do que lêr e escrever, isto mesmo malmente; mas quem nasceu
para carreiro, vira, mexe, larga e pega, sempre acaba junto ao carro.
Com o que, entonces, vosmecê entende de curar?...
—Entendo, affirmou Cyrino sem o menor constrangimento.
—Pois cahiu-me muito ao geito na mão; sim, senhor. Estou com uma
menina doente de maleitas, minha filha, e por essa causa tinha ido a
Sant'Anna buscar quina do commercio; mas lá não havia da maldita e
voltava bem agoniado. Ora...
—Trago, interrompeu o outro, muito remedio nas minhas malas. Para
sezões, tenho uma composição infallivel...
 —Já se sabe; entra composição de quina. Deveras é santa mézinha.
A pequena tomou a do campo; mas essa pouco talento[22] tem, de
maneira que a sezão não lhe deixou o corpo.
—Ha quantos dias appareceu o tremor de frio? perguntou o intitulado
doutor.
—Faz hoje, salvo engano, dez dias.
Até agora era uma rapariga forçuda, sadia e rosada como um jambo;
nem sei até como lhe entrou a maleita no corpo. Ninguem póde fiar-se
na tal villa de Sant'Anna; é uma peste de febres. Eu bem a não queria
levar até lá; mas ella pediu tanto que consenti! demais como era para
ver a madrinha, uma boa senhora, de muita circumstancia[23], a mulher
do major Mello Taques... Não conhece?
—Pois não.
—E dá-se com o major? perguntou Pereira para abrir novo campo á
sua garrulice.
—Quando pousei na villa, estive com elle.
—E não gostou? Aquillo sim é homem ás direitas. Tambem é páu
para toda a obra na Senhora Sant'Anna é o tutú[24] de lá. Em querendo
taramelar um pouco mais a meu gosto, busco o compadre. Isto arma
logo uma conversa que me dá um fartão... E depois pessoa de muitas
lettras... Escreve ao governo; é juiz de paz, major reformado, serve de
juiz municipal, já fez a campanha dos Farrapos lá no Rio Grande do Sul
para as bandas dos Castelhanos e merece muita estimação. Móra
n'uma casa de andar[25] e tem loja muito sortida, por signal que bem
baratinha para a distancia. E as historias que conta? É um nunca
acabar. O homem parece que sabe o Imperio de cór e salteado! Nem o
vigario! Olhe, Sr. Cyrino, vou dizer-lhe uma cousa, que talvez lhe pareça
embromação: ás vezes dou um pulo até á villa só para bater lingua com
o major, porque com esta gente daqui não se tira partido: escurraçada e
arisca que é um Deus nos acuda! Então, como lhe ia contando, galopeio
até lá, e pego n'uma mapiagem[26] que me enche as medidas. Não ha...
—Gabo-lhe a pachorra, atalhou Cyrino. Mas, diga-me, Sr. Pereira;
farei por aqui algum negocio?
 —Homem, conforme. Gente doente é matto[27]: mas tambem
mofina[28] como ella só. Meio arredado da minha casa, fica o Coelho
que está morre não morre ha muitos annos, e é homem de boas
patacas. Este, se vosmecê o curar, talvez caia com os cobres. Tudo o
mais é uma récula de gente mais ou menos.
—Vosmecê traz bastante quina do commercio? perguntou em
seguida.
—Trago, respondeu Cyrino, mas é cara.
—Que é cara, bem sei. Pois é quanto basta, porque no fundo aqui
tudo são sezões.
Começou então o bom do Sr. Pereira a desenrolar as diversas
molestias que o haviam salteado no correr da vida, raras na verdade,
mas todas perigosas; e com esse thema ás ordens achou meios e
modos de falar até quasi perder o folego.
Recolheu-se o outro ao silencio e ouviu talvez preoccupado, ou em
todo caso, muito distrahidamente, o que lhe contava o seu novo amigo,
sahindo, de vez em quando, da apathica attenção para instigar com a
voz e o calcanhar a cavalgadura, quando esta parecia querer por si
tomar descanso ou buscava comer os rebentões mais appetitosos do
capim a grelar.
Afinal notou Pereira o tal ou qual abatimento do companheiro.
—Vosmecê a modo que está triste? disse elle. Deixou alguma cousa
de seu lá por traz?
—Homem, para ser franco, respondeu Cyrino dando um suspiro,
deixei; e essa cousa é uma divida ... divida de jogo.
—Isso é mau, retrucou o mineiro fechando um tanto a cara. Por
causa desse vicio e das mulheres, é que as cruzes nascem á beira das
estradas. Mas é côco[29] grosso?
—Trezentos mil réis.
—Já é gimbo[30] graúdo. E com quem jogou?
—Com o Totó Siqueira, de Sant'Anna. Por isto pretendeu atrazar-me
a viagem; mas prometti mandar-lhe tudo do Sucuriú por um camarada e
passei-lhe um papel. No que estou pensando, é se acharei até lá meios
de cumprir a palavra.
—Se lhe pagarem como devem, com certeza. Em todo o caso aperte
um pouco com os doentes.
—Não imagina, replicou Cyrino com verdadeiro sentimento, quanto
me tem amofinado essa maldita divida. Não pelo dinheiro, que delle faço
pouco caso; mas por ter pegado em cartas, cousa que nunca tinha feito
na minha vida; isto sim...
—Pois meu rico senhor, proseguiu Pereira, sirva-lhe esta de lição e
tome tento com a gente do sertão, não com esses que moram nas suas
casas, socegados e amigos de servir, mas com viajantes, homens de
tropas e carreiros. Isso sim, é uma sucia de jogadores que andam
armados de baralhos e visporas e, por dá cá aquella palha, empurram
uma facada na barriga de um christão ou descarregam uma garrucha na
cabeça de um companheiro, como se fosse em melancia podre. Depois,
o demonio do jogo, quando entra no corpo de um desgraçado, faz logo
ninho e de lá pincha fora a vergonha. Da má vida com raparigas airadas,
fadistas e mulheres á toa, ainda a gente endireita; mas com cartas e
sortes, só na caldeira de Pedro Botelho é que se cuida em mudar de
rumo. Quem lhe fala, teve um tio morador nas Traíras, para cá de
Camapoan cinco leguas, que trabalhava todo o anno na terra para vir
jogar até perder o ultimo cobre nas rancharias do Sucuriú.
Pereira, de posse de tão largo assumpto, contou mil historias, umas
lugubres, outras jocosas, veridicas, inventadas na occasião ou
reproduzidas.
Haviam no entretanto os dous caminhado bastante. Inclinára-se no
horizonte o sol, e a briza da tarde já vinha soprando do lado do poente,
viva, perfumosa.
—Nós, observou o mineiro, com a nossa conversa deixámos os
nossos animaes vir cochilando. Também já está aqui a minha
estradinha. Metta-se nella, Sr. Cyrino; em frente ia parar no Leal: minha
fazendola começa neste ponto á beira do caminho e vai por ahi afóra até
bem longe, um mundo de alqueires de terra, que nem tem conta.
Ao dizer estas palavras, tomou elle a dianteira e dando a direita á
estrada geral, enveredou por uma aberta larga e muito sombreada que
levava com voltas e tortuosidades á margem rasa de copioso e limpido
ribeirão, de alveo areento, todo elle. Que sitio risonho, encantador, esse,
ensombrado por magestosa e elegante ingazeira, toda ponctuada das
mimosas e balsamicas floresinhas!
Os animaes, ao perceberem o bater da agua, apertaram o passo e,
entrando na fresca corrente quasi até aos peitos, estiraram o pescoço e
pozeram-se a beber ruidosamente, avançando aos poucos de encontro
ao fio caudal, para buscarem o que houvesse mais puro em lympha.
—Não deixe a sua besta se empanzinar observou Pereira. Upa!
continuou elle puxando pela redea do cavallo e batendo-lhe
amigavelmente na pá do pescoço, upa, Canivete! Vamos matar a fome
no milho!
Transposto o ribeirão, alargava-se a vereda e, depois de cortar
copada matta, abria-se n'uma verdadeira estrada, que os dous
cavalleiros tomaram a meio galope.
Trasmontava afinal o sol, quando, além de ralo mattagal, surgiu a
ponta de um mastro de S. João, que o mineiro saudou com mostras de
grande alegria, como signal percursor da querida vivenda.
Antes, porém, de n'ella penetrarmos, digamos quem era aquelle
mancebo que viajava ornado do pomposo titulo de doutor, e, o que mais
é, revestido de autoridade para ir, a seu talante, applicando remedios e
preconisando curas milagrosas.

[13]De Minas Geraes.

[14]Matto.
[15]É o titulo honorifico que tinha a capital de Minas-Geraes.
[16]Casa velha e abandonada.
[17]Superfluidades de luxo.
[18]Lugares.
[19]Buracos, lugares retirados.
[20]Grande quantidade.
[21]Sitios distantes, ermos.
[22]Força, valentia. É quasi sempre tomado no sentido material.
[23]Importancia.
 [24]Tutú, isto é, a pessoa de mais consideração e que tudo póde.
Pereira fala do major Martinho de Mello Taques, o qual morava com
effeito na villa de Sant'Anna do Paranahyba e gozava de merecida
influencia.
[25]Sobrado.
[26]Conversação.
[27]Isto é: ha abundancia.
[28]Pouco liberal.—Tambem quer dizer: ou doente ou covarde.
[29]Dinheiro.
[30]Quantia.

CAPITULO III

O DOUTOR

Semeai promessas: a ninguem causam desfalque, e o mundo é rico

de palavras.
A esperança quando outros n'ella creem faz ganhar muito tempo.
OVIDIO.
Ao morreres, dota a algum collegio ou o teu gato.
POPE.
Sganarello—De toda parte vem gente procurar-me, e se as cousas
continuarem assim, sou de parecer que de uma vez devo dedicar-me á
medicina. Acho que de todos os officios é este o preferivel por que, ou
se faça bem ou mal, sempre no fim ha dinheiro.
MOLIÈRE.—O medico á força.
 Nascera Cyrino de Campos, como dissera a Pereira, na provincia de
S. Paulo, na socegada e bonita villa de Casa-Branca, a qual demora
umas 50 leguas do littoral. Filho de um vendedor de drogas, que se
intitulava boticario e a esse officio accumulava o importante cargo de
administrador do correio, crescera debaixo das vistas paternas até á
idade de doze annos, completos os quaes fôra enviado, em tempos de
festas e a titulos de recordação saudosa, a um velho tio e padrinho,
morador na cidade de Ouro-Preto, em Minas-Geraes.
Este parente, solteirão, de genio rabugento, misanthropo, e dado ás
praticas da mais extrema carolice, recebeu o pequeno com máu modo e
manifesto descontentamento, tanto mais quanto a presença de um
estranho vinha interromper os habitos de completa solidão a que se
acostumara desde longos annos.
Era homem que trajava ainda á moda antiga usando de sapatos de
fivela, calções de braguilha, e cabelleira empoada com o competente
rabicho.
A sua reputação de pessoa abastada era, em toda a cidade de Ouro
Preto, tão bem firmada quanto a de refinado sovina, chegando a voz
publica a affirmar que o seu dinheiro, e não pouco, estava todo
enterrado em numerosos buracos no chão da alcova de dormir.
—Meu amigalhote, disse o tal padrinho a Cyrino, poucos dias depois
da chegada, fique sabendo que por qualquer cousinha lhe sacudo a
poeira do corpo. Dê-se por avisado e ande direitinho que nem um fuso.
O menino, transido de medo, passou a tarde a chorar n'um canto
sombrio da casa, onde relembrou, até lhe vir o somno, a alegre vida de
outr'ora, os folguedos que fazia com os camaradas na viçosa relva do
Cruzeiro á entrada da villa Casa-Branca e sobretudo os carinhos da
saudosa mamãe.
Em seguida áquella admoestação preventiva fôra o tio á casa de uns
padres que tinham influencia na direcção do Collegio do Caraça e com
elles arranjara a admissão do afilhado n'aquelle estabelecimento de
instrucção.
Como finorio que era, conseguiu este resultado sem muita
difficuldade, pagando-o, a juros compostos, com tentadoras promessas.
—Por ora, resmoneou elle, nada poderei fazer pela educação do
rapaz; mas ... emfim ... um dia ... estou já velho, e tratarei de mostrar
que não me esqueci dos bons padres que tanto me ajudam hoje.
Lançada, assim, a eventualidade de uma verba testamentaria, ficou
decidida a entrada de Cyrino na casa collegial.
O presentimento da falta de protecção natural torna as crianças
doceis e resignadas. Tambem não tugiu nem mugiu o caipirasinha ao
penetrar no internato em que devia passar tristonhamente os melhores
annos da sua adolescencia.
Optimo negocio fizera incontestavelmente o velho tio. Ia tão somente
desembolsando boas palavras e, por estar agarrado á vida, chegou até
a levar ao cemiterio dous dos padres que se haviam prendido ás
esperanças de valiosa recordação.
Afinal como tinha por seu turno que pagar o tributo universal, um
bello dia morreu quando menos se esperava, deixando muito
recommendado um seu testamento, que foi com effeito aberto com
sofreguidão digna de melhor exito.
Testamento havia, força é confessar; não já testamento, mas extenso
arrazoado todo da letra do velho; barras de ouro, porém, ou maços de
notas, nem sombra.
Esfuracou-se a casa de alto a baixo levantaram-se os soalhos;
escutaram-se todas as paredes; quebraram-se os moveis: nada
appareceu, nada denunciou esconderijo de riquezas, nem cousa que
com isso se avizinhasse.
Descobriu-se então que aquelle carola fôra um pensador
desabusado, antigo admirador de Xavier, o Tira-Dentes, que nunca
tivera vintem e vivera como philosopho, grazinando lá comsigo mesmo,
de tudo e de todos.
Era o seu testamento uma gargalhada meio de gosto, meio de ironia,
atirada de além tumulo e corroborada pelo legado sarcastico que em
pomposo codicillo, fazia aos padres do Caraça da sua bibliotheca «afim,
dizia elle, de ajudar a educação dos mancebos e auxiliar as boas
intenções dos seus honrados e virtuosos directores.»
Procuraram-se os taes livros, e topou-se com um bahú cheio de
obras, em parte devoradas pelo cupim, que foram, incontinenti,
entregues ás chammas de um grande auto de fé. Eram as Ruinas de
Volney, o Homem da Natureza, as poesias eroticas de Bocage, o
Diccionario philosophico de Voltaire, o Citador de Pigault-Lebrun, a
Guerra dos Deuses de Parny, os romances do Marquez de Sade e
outras producções de igual alcance e quilate, algumas até em francez,
mas annotadas por leitor assiduo e mais ou menos convencido.
A consequencia desse pesado gracejo posthumo, que destruia de
raiz o conceito de uma vida inteira, foi a immediata exclusão de Cyrino
do collegio do Caraça.
Tinha então dezoito annos e, como era vivo conseguiu, apezar da
natural pecha que lhe atirava o parentesco com o estrambotico e
defunto protector, ir servir de caixeiro n'uma botica velha e manhosa
onde entre drogas e receituarios lhe foram voltando os habitos da casa
paterna.
Leve era o trabalho, e o aviamento de prescripções tão lento que os
ingredientes pharmaceuticos ficavam mezes inteiros nos embaçados e
esborcinados frascos á espera de que alguem se lembrasse de tiral-os
daquelle bolorento esquecimento.
Em localidade pequena, de simples boticario a medico não ha mais
que um passo. Cyrino, pois, foi aos poucos e com o tempo creando tal
ou qual pratica de receitar e, agarrando-se a um Chernoviz, já seboso
de tanto uso, entrou a percorrer, com alguns medicamentos no bolso e
na mala da garupa, as visinhanças da cidade á procura de quem se
utilisasse dos seus serviços.
Nessas curtas digressões principiou a receber o tratamento de
doutor. Então para melhor o firmar, depois de se ter despedido da botica
em que servia, matriculou-se na escola de pharmacia de Ouro-Preto
com a intenção de tirar a carta de boticario, que o presidente de Minas
Geraes tem o privilegio de conferir, dispensando documentos de
qualquer faculdade reconhecida.
Antes, porém, de conseguir a posse d'aquelle lisonjeiro documento,
fez-se Cyrino, n'um dia de capricho, de partida decidida e começou
então a viajar pelos sertões povoados a medicar, sangrar e retalhar,
unindo a alguns conhecimentos de valor positivo outros que a
experiencia lhe ia indicando ou que a voz do povo e a superstição lhe
ministravam.
Toda a sua sciencia assentava alicerces no tal Chernoviz. Tambem
era o inesperavel vade-mecum; seu livro de ouro; Homero á cabeceira
de Alexandre. Noite e dia o manuseava; noite e dia o consultava á
sombra das arvores ou junto ao leito dos enfermos.
Contem Chernoviz, dizem os entendidos, muitos erros, muita lacuna,
muita cousa inutil e até disparatada; entretanto no interior do Brazil é
obra que incontestavelmente presta bons serviços, e cujas indicações
tem força de evangelho.
Conhecia Cyrino o seu exemplar de cór e salteado; abria-o com
segurança nos trechos que desejava consultar e graças a elle formara
um fundo de instrucção real e até certo ponto exacta, a que unira o
estudo natural das utilissimas e ainda pouco aproveitadas hervinhas do
campo.
Afim de augmentar os seus recursos em materia medica vegetal, foi a
pouco e pouco dilatando as excursões fóra das cidades, para as quaes
voltava, quando se via falto de medicamentos ou quando, digamol-o
sem rebuço, queria gastar nos prazeres e folias o dinheiro que ajuntara
com a clinica do sertão.
Afinal, afeito a habitos de completa liberdade, resolvera emprehender
viagem para Camapoan e sul de Matto-Grosso, não só com o intuito de
estender o raio das operações, como levado do desejo de ver terras
novas e longinquas.
Curandeiro, simples curandeiro, ia por toda a parte grangeando o
tratamento de doutor, que gradualmente lhe foi parecendo, a si proprio,
titulo inherente á sua pessoa e a que tinha incontestavel direito.
Bem formado era o coração daquelle moço, sua alma elevada e
incapaz de pensamentos menos dignos; entretanto no intimo do seu
caracter se haviam insensivelmente enraizado certos habitos de orgulho,
repassado de tal ou qual charlatanismo, oriundo não só da flagrante
insufficiencia scientifica, como da roda em que sempre vivera.
Afastava-se em todo caso, ainda assim com os seus defeitos, do
commum dos medicos ambulantes do sertão, typos que se encontram
frequentemente naquellas paragens, eivados de todos os attributos da
mais crassa ignorancia, mas rodeados de regalias completamente
excepcionaes.
Por toda parte entra, com effeito, o doutor; penetra no interior das
familias, verdadeiros gyneceos; tem o melhor lugar á mesa dos
hospedes, a mais macia cama, é emfim, um personagem cahido do céu
e junto ao qual acodem logo, de muita leguas em torno, não já
enfermos, mas fanatisados crentes, que durante largos annos se haviam
medicado ou por conselhos de vizinhos ou por suas proprias inspirações
e que na chegada desse Messias depositam todas as ardentes
esperanças do almejado restabelecimento.

CAPITULO IV

A CASA DO MINEIRO

Está a ceia na mesa. Torne o bom acolhimento desculpavel o mau

passadio.
WALTER SCOTT.—Ivanhoe.

Quando assomaram os dous viajantes á entrada do terreiro que

rodeava a vivenda de Pereira, correram-lhes ao encontro quatro ou
cinco cães altos e magros, que aos pulos saudaram o dono da casa com
uma cainçada de alegria.
Puzeram-se algumas gallinhas a girar atarantadas, ao passo que
varios gallos, ja empoleirados na cumieira da morada, bradavam
novidade e uns porcos e bacorinhos aqui e acolá se erguiam de entre
palhas de milho e, estremunhados, olhavam para os recem-chegados
com olhos pequenos e cheios do somno.
Do interior da habitação, não tardou a sahir uma preta idosa, mal
vestida, trazendo atado á cabeça um panno branco de algodão, cujas
pontas pendiam até ao meio das costas.
—Olá, Maria Conga, perguntou Pereira, que ha de novo por cá?
—A benção, meu senhor, pediu a escrava chegando-se com alguma
lentidão.
 —Deus te faça santa, respondeu o mineiro. Como vai a menina?
Nocencia?
—Nhã está com sezão.
—Isto sei eu, rapariga de Christo; mas como passou ella de
trasanthontem para cá?
—Todo o dia, vindo a hora, nhã bate o queixo, nhor-sim.
—Está bem... É que o mal ainda não abrandou... Daqui a pouco,
veremos. E a janta?... Está prompta? Venho varado de fome. Que diz,
sr. Cyrino? indagou, voltando-se para o companheiro.
—Não se me dava tambem de comer alguma cousa. Temos razão
para...
—Pois então, interrompeu Pereira, ponha pé no chão e pise forte,
que o terreno é nosso. Minha casa, já lh'o disse, é pobre, mas bastante
farta e a ninguem fica fechada.
Deu logo o exemplo, e descavalgou do cavallinho zambro, o qual foi
por si correndo em direcção a uma dependencia da casa com formas de
tosca estrebaria.
Apeou-se igualmente Cyrino, mas, ao penetrar n'uma especie de
alpendre de palha que ensombrava a frente toda, mostrou repentina e
viva contrariedade no gesto e na physionomia.
—Ora, Sr. Pereira, exclamou elle batendo com o tacão da bota n'um
sabugo de milho, só agora é que me lembro que as minhas cargas vão
todas tomar caminho do Leal e aqui me deixam sem roupa, nem
medicamentos. Que massada! Deviamos ter esperado na boca da sua
picada.
Respondeu-lhe o mineiro todo desfeito em expansivo riso:
—Olé, pois o doutor é tão novato assim em viagens? Então pensa
que lá não deixei aviso seguro á sua gente? Não se lembra de um ramo
verde que puz bem no meio da estrada real?
—É verdade, confirmou Cyrino.
—E então? D'aqui a pouco a sua camaradagem está batendo o
nosso rasto. Entremos, que a fome já vai apertando.
 Consistia a morada de Pereira n'um casarão vasto e baixo, coberto
de sapé, com uma porta larga entre duas janellas muito estreitas e mal
abertas. Na parede da frente que, talvez com o peso da coberta, bojava
sensivelmente fóra da vertical, grandes rachas longitudinaes mostravam
a urgencia de sérias reparações em toda aquella obra feita de terra
amassada e grandes páos a pique.
Ao oitão da direita existia encostado um grande paiol construido de
troncos de palmeiras, por entre os quaes iam rolando as espigas de
milho, com o continuo fossar dos porquinhos, que dalli não arredavam
pé.
Corrido na frente de toda a vivenda, via-se um alpendre de palha de
bority, sustentado por grossas taquaras, ligeiro appendice acrescentado
por occasião de alguma passada festa, em que o numero de convidados
ultrapassara os limites de abrigo da hospitaleira habitação.
Internamente era ella dividida em dous lanços: um, todo fechado,
com excepção da porta por onde se entrava, e que constituia o
commodo destinado aos hospedes: outro, á rectaguarda, pertencia, á
familia, ficando portanto completamente vedado ás vistas dos estranhos
e sem communicação interna com o compartimento da frente.
Era de barro compacto e socado o chão desta sala, vendo-se n'elle
signaes de que ás vezes alli se acendia fogo: pelo que estavam o sapé
do forro e o ripamento revestidos de luzidia e tenue camada, de picuman
que lhes dava brilho singular como se tudo fôra jacarandá envernizado.
—Isto aqui, disse Pereira penetrando na sala e sentando-se n'uma
tripeça de páo, não é meu, é de quem me procura. Poucos vêm cá de
certo parar, mas emfim é sempre bom contar com elles... Minha gente
mora na dependencia dos fundos.
E apontou para a parede fronteira á porta de entrada, fazendo um
gesto para mostrar que a casa se estendia além.
—Sr. Pereira, disse Cyrino recostando-se a uma solida marqueza,
não se incommode commigo de maneira alguma... Faça de conta que
aqui não ha ninguem.
—Pois então, retorquio o mineiro, deite-se um pouco, emquanto vou
lá dentro ver as novidades. A hora é mais de comer, que de cochilar;
mas espere deitadinho e a gosto, o que é sempre mais commodo do
que ficar de pé ou sentado.
 Não desprezou o hospede o convite. Tirou o pala, puxou as botas e,
cruzando-as, fez dos canos travesseiros, em que descansou a cabeça.
Quem se colloca em posição horizontal, depois de vencidas umas
estiradas leguas, adormece com certeza. Depressa veio, pois, o somno
cerrar as palpebras do recem-chegado a entumecer-lhe o peito com
socegada respiração.
Dormiu talvez hora e meia, e mais houvera dormido, se não fosse
acordado pelo tropel de animaes que paravam, e por grita de gente a
pôr cargas em terra. Assomou Pereira á porta com ar jovial.
—Então que lhe disse eu?
—De facto; estou agora socegado.
—E o Sr. tomou uma boa data[31] de somno.
—Quem sabe[32] uma hora?
—Boa duvida, se não mais. Fiquei todo esse tempo ao lado de
Nocencia, que de frio batia o queixo, como se estivesse agora em Ouro-
Preto, quando cahe geada na rua.
—Então não vae melhor?
—Qual!... Depois que o Sr. tiver comido, ha-de ir vel-a. Está,
pobresinha, tão desfeita que parece doente de uns tres mezes atraz.
—Felizmente, observou Cyrino com alguma enfatuação, aqui estou
eu para pôl-a de pé em pouco tempo.
—Deus o ouça, disse Pereira com verdadeira uncção.
—Patricios! Ó gente! gritou elle em seguida para os dois camaradas
chegados de pouco, vão mecês sentar naquelle rancho, alli. Perto ha
boa agua, e lenha é o que não falta: basta estender o braço. Olhem dêm
ração de fartar aos animaes. Aproveitem o milho, emquanto ha: é a
sustancia desses bichos. Aqui, vendo-o baratinho. Um atilho[33] por um
cobre[34] e não são espigas chochas, nem de grão soboró[35]. Eh! lá!
Maria Conga, vamos com isso!... janta a mesa!...
Foram o chamado e as indicações de Pereira cumpridas sem
demora.
 Appareceu a velha escrava, que estendeu em larga e mal aplainada
mesa uma toalha de algodão, grosseira mas muito alva, sobre a qual
derramou duas boas cuias de farinha de milho: depois, emborcou um
prato fundo de louça azul, e ao lado collocou uma colher e um garfo de
metal.
—Sente-se, doutor, disse Pereira para Cyrino, agora não manduco
com mecê, porque já petisquei lá dentro. Desculpe se não achar a
comida do seu agrado.
Vinha nesse momento entrando Maria Conga com dois pratos bem
cheios e fumegantes, um de feijão cavallo, outro de arroz.
—E as hervas? peguntou Pereira. Não ha?
—Nhôr-sim. Eu trago já, respondeu a preta que com effeito voltou
d'ahi a pouco.
Tornou o mineiro a desculpar-se da insufficiencia e mau preparo da
comida.
—Não lhe dou hoje lombo de porco; mas o promettido não cae em
esquecimento, isto lhe posso assegurar.
—Estou muito contente com o que ha, protestou com sinceridade
Cyrino.
E, de facto, pelo modo porque começou a comer, repetindo animadas
vezes dos pratos, deu evidentes mostras de que falava inteira verdade.
—Maria, disse Pereira para a escrava que se fora collocar a alguma
distancia da mesa com os braços cruzados, traz agora mel[36] e café
com doce[37].
—Ah! exclamou Cyrino com patente satisfacção estirando os braços,
fiquei que nem um ovo. O feijão estava de patente. Louvado seja Nosso
Senhor Jesus Christo, que me deu este bom agasalho.
—Amen! respondeu Pereira.
—Agora, amigo meu, disse o moço depois de pequena pausa, estou
ás suas ordens; podemos ver a sua doentinha e aproveitar a parada da
febre para mim[38] atalhal-a de prompto. Em taes casos, não gosto de
adiamentos.