A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich

In reading Walker Percy, Paul Virilio and Catherine Belsey this past week, at one point I remembered being in Charles Long's Religion in America class in Chapel Hill and later sitting in on a seminar he conducted over in Durham, North Carolina. He was fabulous. Long, who'd studied with Mircea Eliade, did not discuss Mormons and Baptists and such, but instead the ground from which these Christian sects sprang.

One of Long's deeper cultural ideas ties in with my current reading: the underlying power of names.

What does the dominant culture consider important? In the USA, one of the most important things or aspects of society and culture is war. War and the instruments of war -- from war leaders to technology to "heroes" -- suffuse our every day living like a continuous spectral presence. Right down to popular food.

Consider the submarine sandwich. It is named after the submarine (or U-Boot / Unterseeboot / U-boat ). Why? No one really seems to know precisely and definitively, except it generally has the shape of a submarine, and also because, apparently, the sandwich was developed to feed workers at Naval docks during the time of the first major wave of submersible ship production (about a hundred years ago).

Along the same lines, this or very similar sandwiches are called blimp and zep. Both of the variant airship types for which they are named were widely used during the First World War and beyond -- even now in today's mass Roman arena style sporting events.

Yet another name for these sandwiches is, of course, the torpedo.

When one eats a submarine, blimp, zep or torpedo, it is like taking the Eucharist for Holy War. One is taking communion with one of America's most privileged activities and perhaps with Ares and Mars, gods of War.

On the other hand, these sandwich names are silly and perhaps subvert the dominant delight in and acquiescence to war.

Lest anyone think I'm joking, consider the widespread American reaction when the French government refused to join the "coalition of the willing" in the Iraq War of 2003-present: the renaming of "French Fries" to "Freedom Fries." This serious silliness is certainly not just a recent phenomenon. During the First World War, sauerkraut was re-baptised in the USA as "Liberty Cabbage;" hamburger was morphed into "Salisbury Steak."

Competing with the war names of sandwiches, however, are other names that suggest socio-economic class and ethnic conciousness: the Po' Boy / Poor Boy and the hoagie. Even the hot hoagie, or grinder, has an ethnic-class tinge, sharing its name with slang for working class (dock) laborer. "Meat grinder" takes us back to war again, but may suggest opposition to or a recoiling from its horrors: "the meat grinder" was a nickname for trench warfare during the First World War, a modern variant on "cannon fodder."

This all makes me wonder: how far can any of us go through a day without in some way invoking or evoking the "everlasting" presence of war, socio-economic class or ethnicity?

Today's Rune: Initiation.