Extended Acknowledgments and Notes for Pain is Weakness Leaving the Body
I ran out of space in the book to thank and credit everyone I would have liked. I also realize I may be leaving people out here too, so please let me know if you think that’s the case. In the meantime consider this an addendum to the printed acknowledgements, where I try my best at drawing attention to those whose efforts shaped my own.
Neither my dissertation advisor Dan Borus nor my second reader Robb Westbrook had direct parts in Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body but their indirect influence has proven incalculable. I’m tempted to list their relevant seminars or lectures one by one or offer paragraph-length explanations for how Dan’s Twentieth-Century Multiplicity or Robb’s John Dewey and American Democracy set me on various intellectual paths. Suffice it to say they both played tremendous roles in teaching me how to think as both a critic and a pluralist.
I can say the same for my other professors and friends in the University of Rochester’s history department, especially Stewart Weaver (Exploration), Dorinda Outram (The Enlightenment), Thomas Slaughter (Independence), Ted Brown (Comrades in Health and Making Medical History), and Joan Rubin (The Making of Middlebrow Culture). And the same for a handful of historians at other institutions who have shared my obsession with the Pragmatist philosophers, Randolph Bourne, and related figures. Casey Blake (Beloved Community), Howard Brick (Transcending Capitalism), and James Livingston (Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution) spring to mind.
Then there are those thinkers whose work left more obvious imprints on my memoir. Some like George Scialabba (What Are Intellectuals Good For?), Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (An Indigenous People’s History of the United States and Loaded), Greg Grandin (Empire’s Workshop and The End of the Myth), or Patrick Blanchfield (whose Gunpower is forthcoming) are mentioned in the book, although I feel obligated to mention them here too. Others who weren’t cited in the final version, like Sam Moyn (Humane), Gail Bederman (Manliness and Civilization) and Nikhil Singh (Race and America’s Long War), had equally profound impacts.
Singh’s scholarship, including Black is a Country and Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder (an edited anthology of Jack O’Dell’s writings), helped guide me through the anti-imperialist legacies of Cedric Robinson (Black Marxism), C.LR. James (The Black Jacobins), Walter Rodney (How Europe Underdeveloped Africa), Aimé Césaire (Discourse on Colonialism) and W.E.B. Du Bois (Black Reconstruction, The World and Africa, et al.). In time I would pore over Angela Davis (Lectures on Liberation and Abolition Democracy), Robin Kelley (Hammer and Hoe), Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Golden Gulag), Nick Estes (Our History is the Future), Barbara Ransby (Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement), Aziz Rana (The Two Faces of American Freedom) and myriad others steeped in critiques of racial capitalism.
I have been granted multiple opportunities to explore these themes with wider audiences thanks to the generosity of peers or colleagues like Joe Henderson (Teaching Climate Change in the United States), Jonathan Strassfeld (Inventing Philosophy’s Other), Danny Bessner (Democracy in Exile), Stephen Wertheim (Tomorrow, The World), Chase Madar (The Passion of Chelsea Manning), Dominic Erdozain (The Soul of Doubt) and Tej Nagaraja (whose Soldiers of the American Dream I am very excited about). I am also grateful to Evan Dawson for hosting similar discussions on Connections and my dear friends Holden DP Miller and Jeremy Wattles for serving as daily sounding boards for almost a decade now.
As for superb, past editors not named in the book, my sincerest gratitude goes to Eitan Freedenberg, Lauren DiGiulio, Nicole Aschoff, Shawn Gude, Steve Fraser, Paula Finn, Harry Siegel, Josh Greenman, Jacob Brogan, David Heim, Seth Ackerman, Nathan Robinson, Christopher Shay, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Nausicaa Renner, Dayna Tortorici, David Wolf, Jenny Rogers, Slawek Blich, Kevin Lozano, Jess Bergman, Mark Hannah, Ben Armbruster, Aaron Anderson, Natasha Lewis, and Sean Elias. To Tim Shenk for helping with my grad school application statements. And to n+1’s exceptional fact-checker Asprey Liu.
There have been numerous studies, articles, exposés, essays, and interviews that have directed—or haunted—this project. Some I cite below. But there are three I’d like to highlight now: Elizabeth Schambelan’s “Everybody Knows” and “Special Journey to Our Bottom Line”; and Yasmin Nair’s conversation with Michael Kinnucan titled “The Ideal Neoliberal Subject is the Subject of Trauma.”
I’ve found myself returning to these pieces as sources of fruitful motivation or disagreement. I’ve also returned to them as reminders of what I still might be missing or ignoring. Or where I’m altogether wrong.
The same holds for the many books and articles I read and taught for my (and Jonathan Strassfeld’s) course on the American war in Vietnam. This includes the contributions of Lien-Hang Nguyen (Hanoi’s War), Andrew X. Pham (Catfish and Mandala), Heather Marie Stur (Beyond Combat), Christian Appy (Working Class War and American Reckoning), Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim (Four Hours in My Lai), Nick Turse (Kill Anything that Moves), Marilyn Young (The Vietnam Wars), Wallace Terry (Bloods), David Elliot (The Vietnamese War), Bao Ninh (The Sorrow of War), Tran Tu Binh (The Red Earth), Truong Nhu Tang (A Viet Cong Memoir), Duong Thu Huong (Novel Without a Name), and Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer and Nothing Ever Dies).
As for contributions from fellow veterans on the imperialist side, the list runs long. The craftsmanship of novelists like Phil Klay (Redeployment and Missionaries) and Roy Scranton (War Porn) have encouraged me to take risks of my own. So has the work of less self-conscious veteran writers like Nico Walker (Cherry). I’d say the same for my friend Adrian Bonenberger’s latest short story collection, The Disappointed Soldier, which accompanied me at the tail end of my writing. That and Talia Lugacy’s film, “This is Not a War Story.” And Nicole S. Goodwin’s Warcries (“She became a doppelganger of herself. / The original, I never saw again.”).
A few years after coming home from Afghanistan I read Rory Fanning’s Worth Fighting For, and I’ve admired the prolific engagement and activism of likeminded veterans like Danny Sjursen (A True History of the United States). My readings sometimes coincided with organizing, and it’s hard to overstate how much I’ve been inspired by people like Karen Vitale, Alfred Vitale, Andrew Thomas, Rachel Simpson, Miles Meth, Conor Reynolds, and the late Corinne Sutter-Brown; John Motter, Jovanni Reyes, Matt Howard, and Brittany Ramos DeBarros; as well as organizations or movements like We Are Not Your Soldiers, About Face (formerly Iraq Veterans Against the War), the Rochester chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, Metro Justice, and Fight for $15. I have been especially inspired by the brave sacrifices of those involved in these struggles and kindred struggles around the world.
LJR
The following notes correspond to the seven parts and epilogue of Pain is Weakness Leaving the Body. They are not exhaustive, and I welcome recommended additions. Corroboration for claims related to Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, Cornelius Blatchley, Robert Owen, Fanny Wright, Frederick Douglass, Rutherford B. Hayes, Henry George, and the Port Royal Experiment can be found in my dissertation (The Invisible Left Hand).
I
“A first lieutenant by the name of William J. Quigley”
Jim Andrews’ “50 years later ‘The Quigley’ has the same wicked reputation”
“Preserving and combining their gains”
Maya Jasanoff’s Edge of Empire
“The United States remains one of the most undertreated civilizations in modern times”
The Commonwealth Fund’s “Mirror, Mirror 2021: Reflecting Poorly”
OECD’s poverty rate indicator
Rob Picheta and Henrik Pettersson’s “American police shoot, kill and imprison more people than other developed countries”
Miriam Berger and Rick Noack’s “From guns to neck restraints: How police tactics differ around the world”
Zach Beauchamp’s “America doesn’t have more crime than other rich countries. It just has more guns”
Amelia Cheatham and Lindsay Maizland’s “How Police Compare in Different Democracies”
“Aggressive gun regulations and buybacks”
Danny Katch’s “What a Socialist Approach to Gun Violence Should Look Like”
“We may know that 15 percent of women and 4 percent of men”
The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS): 2010 Summary Report
Children’s Bureau’s Child Maltreatment Survey 2016
Amy M. Young, Melissa Grey, Carol J. Boyd’s “Adolescents’ experiences of sexual assault by peers”
“An inertial discourse on violence”
Yasmin Nair in conversation with Michael Kinnucan in Hypocrite Reader
II
“Destructions that have claimed the lives of millions”
Neta C. Crawford and Catherine Lutz’s “Human Cost of Post-9/11 Wars: Direct War Deaths in Major War Zones”
Azmat Khan, Lila Hassan, Sarah Almukhtar and Rachel Shorey’s “The Civilian Casualty Files”
John Tirman’s The Deaths of Others
“Philosophy for winners”
Louis Menand’s “What Comes Naturally”
“Upon reaching the age of majority, Fred Durst, the future frontman for Limp Bizkit, joined the Navy”
Steven Daly’s “Send Porn Stars, Funk and Money: The Limp Bizkit Story”
Gavin Martin’s “Durst Bag: Is Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst Really the Osama Bin Laden of Rap Metal?”
“All the hats croaked from the diaphragm like frogs”
Wade Livingston’s “Here’s how Marine Corps Drill Instructors Prevent ‘Frog Voice’”
Marine Corps Director of Analytics and Performance Optimization’s “Impacts of Special Duty Assignments”
“In 2014, the American Medical Association’s Journal of Ethics published an academic literature review”
Gia A. DiRosa and Gerald F. Goodwin’s “Moving Away from Hazing: The Example of Military Initial Entry Training”
“During the Revolutionary War, Albigence Waldo, a medic at Valley Forge, wrote in his journal”
Michael Bellesiles’ A People’s History of the U.S. Military
“His granddaughter, Eslanda Cardozo Goode, would achieve comparable distinction”
Barbara Ransby’s Eslanda
III
“We should have learned from our frontier forebears that there is little use planting corn outside the stockade if there are still Indians around in the woods outside”
I am indebted to Tim Barker for drawing my attention to this quote.
“In the fall of 1992, Democratic Presidential Candidate Bill Clinton chose West Hartford for a speech”
Michael Kelly’s “Clinton Says He’s Not Leaning Left but Taking a New ‘Third Way’”
Alex Putterman’s “West Hartford is mostly white, while Bloomfield is largely Black”
Jake Blumgart’s “Redlining Didn’t Happen Quite the Way We Thought It Did”
Jill Lepore’s The Name of War
“Regardless of racial identity, the more capital one accrues, the more likely one is to oppose any significant redistributions”
Xavier Romero-Vidal and Steven M Van Hauwaert’s “Polarization Between the Rich and the Poor?”
Melissa Hung’s “Low-Income PoC’s Still Don’t Trust The Police, But Would Work With Them”
Aaron Ross Coleman’s “How black people really feel about the police, explained”
Matt Grossmann’s “How the Rich Rule in American Foreign Policy”
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s “Making U.S. Foreign Policy Work Better for the Middle Class”
Lily Geismer and Matthew D. Lassiter’s “Turning Affluent Suburbs Blue Isn’t Worth the Cost”
Jacobin Center for Working-Classing Politics and YouGov’s “Commonsense Solidarity: How a working-class coalition can be built, and maintained”
Tasha S. Philpot’s Conservative but Not Republican
Ismail K White and Chryl N. Laird’s Steadfast Democrats
Council on Foreign Relations’ “Demographics of the U.S. Military”
Douglas L. Kriner and Francis X. Shen’s “How the Burden of Afghanistan Could Fall on Trump’s Supporters”
“Those who exhibit the personality trait of ‘fearless dominance’ gravitate more toward professions of domination”
Désiré G.C. Palmen, Emile W. Kolthoff, and Jan J.L. Derksen’s “The need for domination in psychopathic leadership”
Meghan E. Pierce’s The Psychophysiological Correlates of Personality, Trauma, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Social Support
“They looked to indigenous genocide and eugenics in the United States”
James Q. Whitman’s Hitler’s American Model
“I’d yet to come across Hannah Arendt’s writings on the subject”
Michael Selzer’s Zionism Reconsidered
Adam Shatz’s Prophets Outcast
“A direct line runs from U.S. involvement in the slaughter of a million civilians in Indonesia in 1965 (all suspected leftists) to kindred U.S.-backed extermination campaigns across the planet”
Vincent Bevins’ The Jakarta Method
“It went by another name: Atomic City”
Matt Blitz’s “Miss Atomic Bomb and the Nuclear Glitz of 1950s Las Vegas”
“The Resolution was used by those in power to suppress scholarship”
H. Bruce Franklin’s “Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and American Militarism”
Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine
“Learn to love her ravishers”
Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth
IV
“The racist boot, the capitalist boot, most of all the racial capitalist boot”
John Logan’s “The new union avoidance internationalism”
Duncan Money and Limin The’s “The Global History of Labor and Race: Foundations and Key Concepts”
“The last book I managed to skim before picking up my TBS class was Dave Grossman’s On Killing”
Jasper Craven’s “The Police’s ‘Sheepdog’ Problem”
Stuart Schrader’s Badges Without Borders
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
Baz Dreisinger’s “Prison: America’s Most Vile Export?”
Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop
“In 1989, for example, a senior drill instructor at Parris Island had his recruits march beside a picture of a naked woman”
Diane Duston’s “Marine Instructor Recants, ‘Rape, Pillage’ Slogan”
“The perpetual avowal and disavowal loop”
Nikhil Singh’s Race and America’s Long War
“First there was the pog, a late nineteenth-century word for kiss”
John Loughery’s The Other Side of Silence
“We were also assigned General Victor ‘Brute’ Krulak’s First to Fight”
Blanca Gonzalez’s “Obituary: Victor H. Krulak; general devised strategies used during 3 wars”
Steve Liewer’s “‘Brute’ Krulak commemorated”
Maureen Cavanaugh in conversation with Robert Coram on KPBS
Anita S. Brenner’s “Around Town: At what cost toughness?”
“The fort was also where I was briefed on Real Time Regional Gateway (RT-RG)”
Henrik Moltke’s “Mission Creep: How the NSA’s Game-Changing Targeting System Built for Iraq and Afghanistan Ended Up on The Mexico Border”
“In 1966 a marine had stabbed his wife and mom to death and climbed to the tower’s top, where he proceeded to shoot dead thirteen people below”
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Loaded
V
“An NBC report described one such village in the Mojave Desert”
Cynthia McFadden, William M. Arkin, Kevin Monahan and Rich Schapiro’s “With little oversight, the Pentagon uses role players for military training exercises”
Tanner Mirrlees’s “The Military-Entertainment Complex”
“War does more than just entertain, it arouses and titillates”
Valentina Georgieva’s “Military Language and Sexual Language”
Col. Austin Bay’s Embrace the Suck
“Afghanistan has seen a turning point”
Colonel Richard Kemp’s “Afghanistan has seen a turning point”
Dexter Filkins’ “Afghan Offensive is New War Model”
Charles Creitz’s “Former UK commander in Afghanistan says Biden shouldn’t be impeached: ‘He should be court-martialed’”
Richard Kemp’s “Biden’s Withdrawal from Afghanistan Undermines His Own Global Strategy”
VI
“One of the greatest men this World has ever produced”
Personal papers of Joseph Henry Pendleton, compiled by Martin K. Gordon
Linda McIntosh’s “Historical Society spearheads building monument of Maj. Gen. Pendleton”
“General Kelly, who would later spearhead President Trump’s ‘zero tolerance’ family separation policy”
Spencer Ackerman’s Reign of Terror
Greg Jaffe’s “Lt. Gen. John Kelly, who lost son to war, says U.S. largely unaware of sacrifice”
“Today the racket has extended in its reach and complexity”
“Big Tech made huge profits from war on terror, US activists say” in Deutsche Welle (DW)
Worldwide Armed Banks Database
William D. Hartung’s “Profits of War: Corporate Beneficiaries of the Post-9/11 Pentagon Spending Surge”
Shana Marshall’s “The Defense Industry’s Role in Militarizing US Foreign Policy”
“I am drawn to the outside, to the impersonal aggregate, to the statistics”
Maggie Fox’s “Military Suicides: Most Attempts Come Before Soldiers Ever See Combat”
Joe Gramigna’s “Military service member suicide rates increase after separation and vary by demographics”
Nancy Montgomery’s “Enlisted soldiers at highest risk of suicide soon after joining”
Rajeev Ramchand’s “Suicide Among Veterans”
Sally C. Curtin’s “State Suicide Rates Among Adolescents and Young Adults Aged 10-24: United States, 2000-2018”
Holly Hedegaard, Sally C. Curtin, and Margaret Warner’s “Increase in Suicide Mortality in the United States, 1999-2018”
VII
“Void at the center of experience”
Didion in conversation with Susan Stamberg on NPR
“Like all histories, that of the matanza remains contested”
Héctor Lindo-Fuentes, Erik Ching, and Rafael A. Lara-Martinez’s Remembering a Massacre in El Salvador
Guy Gugliotta and Douglas Farah’s “12 Years of Tortured Truth on El Salvador”
Greg Grandin in conversation with Sasha Lilley in Jacobin
Laura Aguirre’s “Why El Salvador turned its back on the left”
International Crisis Group’s “El Salvador’s Politics of Perpetual Violence”
Paul Heideman’s “The War Criminal Elliott Abrams and the Liberals Who Love Him”
Mark Engler’s “The Latin American Roots of U.S. Imperialism”
Mona Mahmood, Maggie O’Kane, Chavala Madlena, and Teresa Smith’s (et al.) “From El Salvador to Iraq: Washington’s man behind brutal police squads”
Matthieu Aikins’ “Inside the Fall of Kabul”
Robert E. May’s Manifest Destiny’s Underworld
“The millions directly killed in America’s cold and hot wars, and the tens of millions more killed indirectly”
Paul Thomas Chamberlin’s The Cold War’s Killing Fields
Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire
Benjamin Madley’s “Reexamining the American Genocide Debate: Meaning, Historiography, and New Methods”
David Vine, Cala Foffman, Katalina Khoury’s (et al.) “Creating Refugees: Displacement Caused by the United States’ Post-9/11 Wars”
International Rescue Committee’s “Emergency Watchlist 2022”
The World Bank’s “By the Numbers: The Cost of War & Peace in the Middle East”
Odd Arne Westad’s The Global Cold War
Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin’s The Making of Global Capitalism
“The intelligence services of the United States and Europe protected Japanese and Nazi war criminals well after the second world war”
The Final Report of the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group
Eric Lichtblau’s The Nazis Next Door
Kathleen Belew’s Bring the War Home
“Elliot Abrams was born into a Jewish family”
Dina Hampton’s Little Red
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Moynihan, Mass Incarceration, and Responsibility”
Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking After Empire
Bashir Abu-Manneh’s “Israel in the U.S. Empire”
“The reinforcing fraternity between the racial and gender politics of the United States”
Nikhil Singh’s Race and America’s Long War
“The Congressional Black Caucus’s pushback on the empire in the seventies and eighties”
R. Joseph Parrott’s “Boycott Gulf! Angolan Oil and the Black Power Roots of American Anti-Apartheid Organizing”
“Although King was a supporter of nonviolent protest, it was a qualified support”
Simone Sebastian’s “Don’t criticize Black Lives Matter for provoking violence. The civil rights movement did, too”
“Abraham Lincoln wasn’t a socialist, but surrounded himself with them”
Gillian Brockwell’s “You know who was into Karl Marx? No, not AOC. Abraham Lincoln”
“The veteran mystique”
Brian Mockenhapt’s “Military Resistance at the RNC”
Vasquez in conversation with Tim Shenk before the Committee on U.S.-Latin American Relations
Epilogue
“A reporter has shared a fundraising text from the National Republican Congressional Commmittee”
Erin Snodgrass’ “A top GOP committee sent a message accusing supporters who hadn’t donated of being traitors: ‘You abandoned Trump.””
“Jewish Republicans like Stephen Miller or Josh Mandel”
Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck’s “Ohio Senate Candidate who compared refugees to alligators is the grandson of refugees aided by resettlement organizations”
Branko Marcetic’s “You Know Who Else Opposed Vaccine Mandates? Hitler.”
“For empires in their terminal phase, everything becomes permissible”
Spencer Ackerman’s Reign of Terror
Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism
“Past Thomas Edison Drive on my left”
Edmund Morris’ Edison
“More native advertising attempting to scam vets”
Jim Absher’s “There’s a New Wave of Scammers Targeting VA Home Loans”
“About a marine who murdered a family thinking they were part of a child sex-trafficking ring”
“Ex-Marine’s chance encounter with girl he thought was sex trafficking victim led to killings of 4 Florida family members: Sheriff” in Associated Press
“I happen upon a state Medicaid page featuring the mugshot of a black woman”
“Mississippi Woman Charged with TennCare Fraud,” Tennessee Department of Finance and Administration, 27 May, 2020. The website’s TennCare Fraud section mixes Kafkaesque press releases of this kind with regular monthly boasts about revenues exceeding budget estimates. See Amy Yurkanin’s “The TennCare Trap: How one state’s war on Medicaid fraud ensnares working moms in Alabama.”
“Freud wrote about the phobia being thrown before the anxiety like a fortress on the frontier”
Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth