academic research

Bad Veterans: Outcasts, Terrorists, Assassins, and Whistleblowers in the American Narrative.

My research project conducted at the Department of English, University of Toronto.

From the Introduction:

The phenomenon of the Bad Veteran: what began as the curious cultural outgrowth from America's most significant “just” war, World War II, has mutated from a set of qualities relegated to fringe characters, these standout representatives resulting from a highly-particular cocktail of forces related to military service and its effects, to a widely-shared set of cultural beliefs, in some ways, forming the backbone of the current American political and discursive style that now permeates and pervades our collective consciousness. The once-aberrant behavior and psychological makeup of figures such as Lee Harvey Oswald and Timothy McVeigh, their tendency toward risk, their distrust of American cultural norms, and allergy to assimilative expectations has blossomed into a much larger cultural force. This of course is evidenced by the myriad regressive and reactionary tendencies of current American politics, systems of belief and cultural discourse in which all the systems arrayed against Bad Veterans of the past half century have weakened in their effectiveness, represented now only tangentially and nominally by Democratic Party opposition to rapidly eroding “shared American norms and values” as they are dismantled by the Trump Administration and his Bad Veteran-in-Chief, JD Vance (Wendling).

The figure of the Bad Veteran now encapsulates the beginning or the seed of this increasingly prevalent American cultural mindset or mood, which, as the qualities of the Bad Veteran archetype prefigures, includes a set of beliefs (rightfully or wrongfully) informed by a sense of paranoia, anomie, disjointedness and disconnectedness, aggrievement and distrust of culturally encouraged perceptions of reality[1]. After decades of media depictions and fascinations with these once-fringe characters, the American public has effectively been Bad-Veteranized, settling into a popular, collective affect of pointed disaffectedness and cynicism that allows, perpetuates and even celebrates attacks on the state, be they violent, symbolic attacks such as the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021 (Duigan), or the dismantling of governmental and extra-governmental institutions occurring in the wake of Trump’s re-election in 2024 (Pager).

Throughout this project, I outline the parameters of the Bad Veteran archetype and track the shifting nature of this recurring phenomenon as each respective focalizing figure (Oswald, McVeigh, Vance, etc.) is shaped by the particularities of their concurrent cultural moment. Throughout, I discuss and examine the factors that bring about such a figure, scrutinizing their outsized impact, individually and then collectively, on America’s political and cultural trajectory through historical and literary analyses. I hypothesize that the figure of the Bad Veteran, ever-growing in the American collective consciousness through media, journalism, conspiracy theories and political movements, becomes powerful enough to shape and alter the American mood and political style from increasingly tolerant, liberal and somewhat progressive at the end of WWII, to the inverse: increasingly paranoid, insular, alienating and alienated from the country’s own, once agreed-upon story and foundational mythos and shared system of beliefs and values. With each era’s post-war media environment spurring the creation of a slightly new variation of the Bad Veteran, steering the country toward its current, turbulent reality; its fractured polity, its increasingly violent domestic disposition, the proliferation of various “trutherisms,” conspiracies, anxieties, and more.

A consideration of this particular phenomenon is significant because an examination of the Bad Veteran archetype and its ontology suggests a type of modality where national character (in the mood and qualitative sense) formation is synecdochized in turn by each era’s formation of this type of character (in the narrative sense). By understanding how American history and literary and media portrayal have come to create such figures, we can see, in a new way, how we have come to create the situation we are in. As David Ricci notes in Post-Truth American Politics:

[R]ather than data and logic, it is stories – which are increasingly promoted by post-truth people – that frame more and more of what we think and say about politics. In which case, we should pay considerable attention to those stories, which powerfully affect our public (and private) lives… more and more, such stories drive the course of domestic affairs. That is, they impinge constantly on how we talk to our friends and neighbors, with whom, by and large, we want to live decently and prosperously… [Furthermore,] much that takes place in politics is driven by large and shared narratives which not only shape the details of national life in the present but also seem likely to influence what citizens will do in the future. (3-14)

This premise, that shared narratives—these nationally-known fixations, mythologies, investigations, biographies and understood sequences of events, these conspiracies, debates, propagandistic fairy tales and recounting of tragedy—drive the trajectory of American affairs, shape the details of national life and influence the conception of the future is what concretizes the role that Bad Veterans come to play in America’s collective consciousness.

The examination and exploration of the Bad Veteran archetype, however, is not meant to be, nor does it purport to be all-inclusive and exhaustive, but rather suggests an avenue of exploration into the wider American metanarrative. Given that veteran and war narratives comprise a seemingly unending supply of examples and counterexamples of the type of figure under analysis, I suggest that in the relatively few examples of novels, films, biographies and other narratives under the microscope in this project, whatever throughline of cause and effect can be elaborated upon, multiplied and complicated with further study and scrutiny. The project, then, is meant to establish the Bad Veteran as an archetype, then to use that figure (as permeable and shifting in its manifestations as it may be) as a locus of analysis and lens from which and through which the trajectory of American political trajectory and its sporadic permutations can be examined and discussed, always with an eye towards the “influence,” in Ricci’s words, that this archetype, its figures, and their respective “shared narratives” have had and continue to have on the “details of national life” and the outlook for America’s future.

Each chapter is organized by historical post-war and interwar periods—from the Post-WWII/Cold War period to the present day, in the post-“Forever Wars” moment—and typically provides a study of a central Bad Veteran from that respective moment (Oswald, McVeigh, Snowden, etc.), discourse on their role in the American metanarrative and complementary analysis of literature, films and other cultural productions related to each era and it’s respective Bad Veteran. These parameters are not strict, as the most significant literature and art concerning the most significant Bad Veteran of each post-war period do not necessarily arise concurrently, but most (as in the case of Don DeLillo’s Libra a fictional novel about Lee Harvey Oswald published a quarter century after Kennedy’s assassination) take many years of production to manifest. It takes time for artists, writers, biographers and historians to account for paradigm-shifting events in American history and the role these characters come to play in the American narrative. In these cases, it speaks to the significance of these notable case studies, and the lasting impact that each Bad Veteran and their actions had/has on the country, as well as evidencing the fixation and preoccupation that artists, writers and filmmakers, as well as the public, have with Bad Veterans and their stories.

As such I focus on only the most notable and impactful manifestations of these eras’ correlative Bad Veterans, the literary and cultural productions most closely associated with them, authored by them or, in the case of Timothy McVeigh and The Turner Diaries, the literary and cultural productions most influential to their actions and worldview. This methodology comes to reveal the generation-by-generation impact of each Bad Veteran figure as they are created and shaped by their respective wars and conflicts (domestic and international) and tracks how the recurring phenomenon of Bad Veteran formation and their epoch-shifting actions (be they assassinations, acts of terror, whistleblowing or, in JD Vance’s case, strongarming legislation) shapes the nature of American society in their time.