Billy Lynn and the ubiquitous, omnipotent Man

Andrew Hurst

            Near the middle of Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, the audience is introduced to the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, Norman Oglesby. He gives a speech before the assembled media. In his speech, he criticizes Saddam Hussein’s government and rule, citing Hussein’s lavish spending at the expense of Iraq’s school system, his personal spending at the expense of Iraq’s healthcare system, his armament spending at the expense of infrastructure, and the corruption and crony politics that ran rampant throughout his government at the expense of the wealth of the people (130). He finishes the speech:

Because what is America for, if not to fight this kind of tyranny, to promote freedom and democracy and give the peoples of the world a chance to determine their own fate? This has always been America’s mission, and it’s what makes us the greatest nation on earth (131).

Obviously, this speech is saturated with irony: America’s faltering public school structure, lack of an easily understood and cheap healthcare system, crumbling infrastructure, and political corruption have been chief criticisms from the American Left and Center for the past decade and a half, if not longer. Through this irony, Fountain wishes to call his readers’ attentions to the blatant double-talk and shallowness of the sort of jingoism that numerous citizens respond to with patriotic fervor.

Moving deeper into Fountain’s message, past the surface irony, he is emphasizing, in this quotation, the ethos of American politicians and the inaction of the general public, especially given Lynn’s reaction, “If there’s a grating artificiality in the performance . . . it’s no worse than any other fixture of the public realm. Billy has noticed that audiences don’t seem to mind anyway” (131). The American public seems content throughout the novel to listen to these types of speeches and parrot buzzwords such as “freedom” or “democracy,” (the pages in which such words fall pell-mell across the book symbolize this phenomenon) so as long as, like Lynn’s own father, their intellects are affirmed: America is the greatest country in the world, America is for fighting tyranny.

Despite the obvious shallowness of these words, Fountain argues that the audience does not care to question them. In the first section of the book, there’s a very Pynchonian section that clues the reader in on the comfort that the public, including even Billy who had previously noted his place as it relates to the system of outside controls (121), feels in being a part of something, a cause, a country. Billy watches the Cowboys’ punter kick a ball, and in watching the parabolic arc, notes the “aspect of surrender, of grateful relinquishment as it yields to gravitational fate” (35) with a sense of tranquility and “relaxation of self-awareness” (36). While Fountain notes the public’s fondness for gullibility, he also mentions Billy’s sense of “intense pleasure” (35) that he gets as the ball reaches the top of its arc, signifying some anticipation at the prospect of breaking out of the fatalist parabolic structure. Perhaps Fountain has hope that politicians and people like Oglesby will no longer have a hold over the public at some point in the future.