"We've been poisoned by these fairy tales"

Now that my capstone paper's "final" draft is turned in, I have a little room to breathe -- or, no, wait. I still have 45 hours of internship work to do by Monday.

Okay, but I'm taking some breathing room anyway simply to register my intense irritation -- an irritation that's been building over the process of writing my paper on Criminal Minds, a paper that interrogates the fictions of the heteronormative patriarchal protector and how those are predicated on black-and-white categorizations of people who are actually, essentially, uncategorizable -- with the idea of the (pure, facist) war hero.

My objections have been stated better than I'm stating them here in Chris Hedges War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), and in The Hurt Locker, a movie that I thought successfully portrayed the ambivalence of war in our post-9/11 world in a compelling personal narrative.

In the context of my hating the Grand Narrative of the war hero (which doesn't mean hating soldiers, so don't send me any comments saying "WHY DO YOU HATE THE TROOPS??" [Actually, that would be pretty funny. Go ahead and send 'em.]), I've had a renewed interest in Don Henley's "End of the Innocence" of late. In my evangelical fervor to attain a holiness that amounted to 100% purity, I probably would have found this song scandalous as a kid and teenager. In my loosening, "maybe I'm not the boss of everyone," post-college liberalism, I probably didn't think much about it at all.

In my current state of mind, after so many months of reading about detective narratives and watching detective television shows, and seeing the connections between these (interpretive) narratives and the (heroic) war narratives we've heard -- in both their "conquering hero" and "ambivalent adrenaline-addict" iterations -- I've gone back to believing in its scandal.

In my reading of "End of the Innocence," Don Henley is proposing a personal stand against the narrative of purity that activates the "war myth" Chris Hedges refers to...in the form of loss of virginity.

Well, Don. Hold on there, buddy. I mean, how do we (women) know you don't just want to "do it," and that you're making up these political excuses for a base drive?

Except that I think women (or this one woman -- OR MAYBE IT'S NOT A WOMAN AT ALL -- who's in the song) have agency in this song. And I think that partly because the lyrics I'm focused on are contradictory, in a way that fails to fit the narrative of the virgin/whore. Henley says "let your hair fall all around me.../Offer up your best defense/But this is the end/The end of the innocence." It sounds like he might be giving an order. But it mostly sounds like he might be proposing a response to things that have already occurred, an acknowledgment that "the innocence" has already been taken. His proposed response is a political act, and one that really only women can make.

(Why can only women make this response? Basically, because theirs is the only virginity anyone cares about.)

To me, the message of this song as a whole is that there are ways to creatively and productively "opt out" of the Grand Narratives we're given, and that option necessarily involves both taking action and the renegotiation of identity in terms other than pure/impure.

In the first chorus, he's saying this in response, apparently, to a divorce. Heteronormative formations of family have failed, and his response is to propose that they (he and the person he's singing to) go back to a more natural setting (where "we'll sit and watch the clouds go by / and the tall grass wave in the wind"), a place removed from the constructs of the "normal family." The "naturalness" of this pastoral imagery is also suspect (again, is Don just trying to "get some" by going all Romantic on us?), but in combination with his statement that "we've been poisoned by these fairy tales," the relatively unscripted space of the "natural" setting allows for an alternative to the (fairy tale) heteronormative ideal.

In the second chorus (the one that makes me connect this directly to the war hero myth), he's responding to America "beating plowshares into swords" -- dystopic as that is -- and ends with "when daddy had to lie," which I think relates directly to the lie of "happily ever after" and the lie of the war myth.

[And then I took a break for several hours and when I came back I was no longer in what is obviously paper-writing mode.]

Anyway, I like that song. And you should probably like it, too.