MILITARY IN SOCIETY AND ITS EFFFECTS
According to Catherine Lutz’s anthropological ethnographic study, Homefront, the United States government’s infatuation with military power has become the catalyst for the unremittingly abating boundary separating military society from civilian society. ... The economic quandaries are merely a preface to the book of perplex tribulation stemming from the nation’s military mania. Lutz asserts that, “A tension exists between the impulse to clearly distinguish between the two cultures of military and civilian worlds, and the desire to see a single America” (Lutz 235). ... Buford’s text is implemented to juxtapose and elucidate how violence in the ranks of soccer fans is derived from the same fear and organization, which the military presence in the United States continues to create as seen in Lutz’s book. Tying both Lutz’s and Buford’s texts together, Michael Moore’s movie, Bowling for Columbine, questions the level of military presence within the borders of the United States, the size of the nations military, and its effects on civilian society. In his movie, Moore seeks to discover the stem behind the high levels of violence in the United States, pointing towards two main sources, the media and the military. Through the comparison of Lutz’s text to the works of Buford and Moore, it is seen that the fading line between military and civilian societies and the dilemma of government spending, are not the greatest problems embedded in American culture and society. ... society is what will be discovered. ... It is through all three of these works that we will find out how fear, violence, and an increasing military presence in society are all connected. In Homefront, there are several different ties with the military and affects stemming from those ties, which Catherine Lutz scrutinizes. The first is the economic ties and affects that the military has with and on the United States. The military is by far the largest consumer of tax dollars in the United States, and their percentage of consumption is increasing yearly. “From 1946 to 1991 some fifteen trillion dollars were spent on the military amenities such as weapons, barracks, training, worriers, and the maintenance of roughly 1,250 military bases around the world” and “In 1992, fully 44 percent of all federal tax dollars collected went to military purposes” (Lutz 172).