Whereasthe Congressoftheunitedstates byaconcurrentresolutionadoptedon the4th-dayofmarch lastauthorizedthe Secretaryofwar to cause to be brought to theunitedstatesthe body of an Americanwhowasamemberoftheamericanexpeditionaryforceineurope wholosthislifeduringtheworldwarandwhoseidentiyhas notbeenestablished for burial inthememorialampitheatreofthenationalcemetaryatarlingtonvirginia. (1996)
John Dos Passos’ unconventional prose in “The Body of an American” begins with a mash of journalistic clichés and idioms that could be used to speak about any fallen soldier, just another “Americanwhowasamemberoftheamericanexpeditionaryforceineurope.” By smashing words together like this, Dos Passos is criticizing generalities; he wanted to bringing the American eye back to individual death, as opposed to thinking and speaking of dead soldiers—fresh-faced kids who were dying by the dozen—as mere casualties, a term that belittles and reduces the impact of the very real horrors and sorrows which dribbled from World War I like blood from a bullet-ridden corpse. Dead soldiers were not just a random loss for a greater good, they were people—individuals! Sadly, it’s even worse today. Our government has learned to keep certain images away from the public eye, namely images of war: piles dead bodies, pools of blood, grotesque displays of human violence. Such images had an immediate and profound impact upon many of the more conscious minds in America at the time, including John Dos Passos, who speaks about this Machiavellian tactic used by politicians to detach the American public from the horrendous acts and afflictions of war. Instead of showing a dead soldier, a “John Doe” or a “Richard Roe,” the newspapers and media talk about the dregs of war by pointing to statistics and death tolls to inform the masses. And when an individual soldier is given attention upon dying, the articles all come out sounding like the above quote: an empty, meaningless jumble of words that people have lost sight of in the fog of such generalities. Even the title, “The Body of an American,” is a bland, oversimplified way to speak of such a serious matter. Already, the reader imagines a G.I. Joe sort of character who died in the heat of glory and calamity.
Speaking of statistics and death tolls, a bit later on Dos Passos writes about John Doe as being just another number, explaining that the military “gave you…an identification tag stamped with your serial number to hand around your neck” (1998). They turn you into a number not only so the home front can look at a death toll rather than the gory pictures of reality, but also so they can justify the consequences of their war waging. Compared to today, ironically, censorship wasn’t as prominent; at least, one could pick up the morning paper and see some brutal stuff. But as Dos Passos is pointing out in his beautifully experimental piece, the brutal and extraordinarily devastating effects of war are being swept under the rug, whether it be by President Harding’s “impersonal tribute” to “a typical soldier” or President George W. Bush’s sweeping censorship of almost all brutal war information. When’s the last time you saw a picture of a pile of dead American soldiers, all being neatly lined up in body bags by grim soldiers who could very well have known a number of those corpses? It’s rare, but they do exist; never in the mainstream media though. Instead, the media floods society with generalities while distracting them with yellow journalism. Oh how the times haven’t changed.
The moral detachment and desensitization that politicians such as President Harding coldly endure is perfectly conveyed in Harding’s reaction to the funeral of a fallen soldier. As Dos Passos details, “and Mr. Harding prayed to God and the diplomats and the generals and the admirals and the brasshats and the politicians and the handsomely dressed ladies out of the society column of the Washington Post stood up solemn / and thought how beautiful sad Old Glory God’s Country it was to have the bugler play taps and the tree volleys mad their ears ring” (2000). It goes without saying that this radical description sheds a light on the contrast between the John Doe’s of the world and the upper-class, American aristocrats who are responsible for the macrolevel decisions they make and the impact those decisions have upon innocent people caught up in war. And unfortunately (and inevitably), a major portion of the mainstream masses blindly do what they are told to do by their government, given the option to kill or be killed, to be a brave hearted hero or a coward. There were no two ways about it. Harding’s speech, in the eyes of John Dos Passos, is emblematic of the American government. It is an investigational, poetic statement against the United States’ continual participation in war, especially in such massive and globally spread wars (ie, the World Wars). The more war we have, and the bigger that war is, the more nameless and insignificant a soldier’s death will be.
20th Century Literature 