So, I was watching the late re-run of The O'Reilly Factor the other night. The Talking Points Memo was on "The Age of Anger." In the run-down, Bill talked about the rising tide of frustration and anger in America that is fuelling the insurgent and subversive campaigns of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. After the Memo, Juan Williams and Laura Ingraham were on as guests, and both of them noted that constituencies on both the right and left of American politics are well beyond frustrated with what they perceive as the state of the country, reaching a rather high pitch of anger.
Of course, I didn't really need Ingraham or Williams to tell me that. I see a string of malcontented comments and posts daily in my Facebook feed. Often enough, those posts and comments frustrate me a little myself -- sometimes at the particular political or cultural event that has frustrated the commenter and sometimes at the commentary itself. It's getting so that I don't even want to fritter away time on social media (see, there's a silver lining to everything).
Anyone with any sense of history knows that it isn't an unusual thing for Americans to be angry with their government. I mean, the nation is founded on anger with the government. If it weren't for anger with the government, we'd still be British colonies, or, more likely, a relatively inconsequential commonwealth country with a penchant for hockey and socialized medicine. (No offense, Canada.) What's become disturbing to me about this round of anger, though, is it seems like it's almost more cultural than political, and what that entails is that we Americans aren't just angry at our government; we're getting more and more ticked off at each other. Of course, we've been here before, too (cf. the years 1860-65).
The media has forwarded a number of causes for the anger, ranging from political disenfranchisement (particularly of American minorities), to a stagnant economy, to voters not seeing their values reflected in the political establishment, to racism itself, to what have you. It's a big country with, as the Donald says, "a loooot of problems." You want a reason to be pissed off? Pick one. There's plenty to go around.
But the thing is, there have always been a lot of problems, and that hasn't -- at least in my lifetime -- divided us against each other to quite the extent that it has here recently. I'm not going to presume to diagnose the illness definitively in the few (albeit probably too many) words of this blog post, but I've been ruminating for a while now on one thing that I think is a huge problem, which is this: I think we're losing the concept of "us," i.e. there's profoundly less and less of a sense of who we are as Americans, and I think that, in turn, is due in large part to our loss -- or even casting aside -- of our national narrative, that is to say, the story of America.
Notice I didn't say the history of America. I said the story of America. The mythos of the nation, if you will. They're not unrelated, of course, but the identity of America is more grounded in the legends surrounding George Washington, Pecos Bill, Geronimo, and Paul Bunyan -- or to use a more recent example, the heroism of the soldiers who Tom Hanks took along with him to save Private Ryan -- than it is in the economic vicissitudes of the Hawley-Smoot tariff or the politics of passing the Federal Highway Act. See, the stories of America, the legends of her heroes and such, build a set of ideals and values, an ethos that is felt in the blood, with which we can identify, which -- in a way -- forms our identity, gives us a sense of who we are. We seem to have lost a good bit of that recently, and that has had consequences that I don't think are terribly good.
I will say something about blame for the crumbling of the American narrative. A good bit of the blame for this can be laid right at the feet of Academia, and more particularly the feet of my colleagues in Literature departments. For years now, the handling of story in the halls of the Ivory Tower has been an exercise of deconstruction* and undermining of myths rather than extrapolating of meaning from stories. This process of deconstruction has been particularly damaging to our traditional American heroes. We are told repeatedly that Washington and Jefferson were slave owners, that most of the founding fathers were simply angling for lower taxes, that Patton and MacArthur were violent warmongers, that John Henry was an ignorant oppressed worker, etc. Kindergartners in our country think it folly to believe that Davy Crockett "killed him a bar when he was only three." Or they would if they had any idea who Davy Crockett was, which, of course, most of them don't, because the final stages of the deconstruction of any national mythos is throwing it out altogether.
Academia, which has always insisted on the virtue of being too clever by half, has been about this for quite a while, and the process has filtered down from university all the way to grade school. It seems we can't start too early demystifying everything for our citizens. I recently watched "A Very Goofy Christmas" with my 6 year old son on the Disney Channel. The cartoon is clearly geared towards very young kids, but nonetheless takes up the question of the empirical reality of Santa Claus. It's a sickness of sorts, the scientific and analytic habit of mind run completely amok, pulling the veil away from everything and showing it for what it "really" is.** The cultural result of this habit of mind is that we are left with no cultural heroes, really with no enduring concept of cultural heroism, and hence, with no enduring set of ideals and virtues which those heroes embody and which bequeath to a culture its touchstone of identity.
To put it more clearly, perhaps, heroes tell a culture how to act and who they are, i.e. people grow up saying, "I want to be like that guy or gal." When a whole nation grows up thinking this, you get a cultural identity, something which with everyone identifies and which, consequently, draws the people together in unity. It has always been this way, at least in the West. The ancient Greek city-states, history tells us, were constantly bickering with one another, politically speaking, but culturally, they all saw themselves as descended from the heroes of Homeric myth, and Achilles, Odysseus, Hercules, et. al. were, for them, embodiments of the very virtues and ideals they strove to live by. It is important to note that these ideals are rooted in story.*** And the stories have to be believed in. Not factually. Factuality is rather beside the point, as every "kid" who believes in Santa Claus can tell you intimately.
I've perhaps gotten off topic by way of explaining the importance of story, but what I'm driving at is that our lack of belief in our national stories and our corresponding lack of belief in the ideals that make up our national ethos, we have lost the sense of unity that binds us together as Americans.
Two objections must be countered before concluding. One is an objection often leveled against the collection of American narratives -- as it is against most all Western narratives: that the narrative of America is classist, misogynist and racist. It excludes people of color, women, and the poor. That objection is wrong on almost all counts. John Henry was an African-American, as was Frederick Douglas and Harriet Tubman.**** Abigail Adams and Calamity Jane were women, and the poor vastly outnumber the rich in American myths. Beyond its actual diversity, however, the nature of the American story is such that it is perennially subject to expansion and revision and therefore potentially includes anyone who wants to be included. At the bottom of Lady Liberty, it says, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these homeless, tempest-tossed to me." We have always welcomed anyone to add to the story. There is an important catch though, which is that, implicitly, though we invite anyone to contribute to the story, we'd rather not that they come in with a red pen and edit out large portions of our story, our ethos, what it is that makes us Americans, because it offends them. I don't mean this to be rude or xenophobic, but, honestly, if people vastly prefer their own culture to ours, they should stay in the geographic locale where their own culture is dominant. We like what we have and who we are, and we should. It's something to be proud of. Join us, please, but don't come to our home and piss in our Wheaties. But I digress. The point is that it is the nature of the American story to be inclusive. It is nothing to be ashamed of.
The second objection will be that the critiques of American heroes are, in fact, true. George Washington did own slaves. John Henry's sense of pride in his work probably was exploited by his greedy employers (and songs like "16 Tons" are much to the point here -- the other neat thing about the whole of American story is that it possesses the resources for criticizing itself). But none of these facts do away with the ideals and the virtues that these figures embody in American myth. The very idea that they would is rather absurd if you think about it. The honesty that is the moral of the story of George Washington not lying about chopping down the cherry tree has nothing to do with his slave owning as an adult. In fact, I might go so far as to say the flaws of our heroes are an integral part of the story itself. Just as the American story is always open for new contribution, it is always open for needed revision. To my knowledge, we have never claimed to be perfect as a people. We do the best we can and constantly try to do better.
Anyway, the conclusion of this whole long-winded affair is that we, like the Greeks before us, have traditionally found our unity in our story, in the mythos of America, in America as an embodiment of ideals that we all strive to live up to regardless of race, economic class, cultural heritage, or religion. E pluribus unum it says on the banner carried by the eagle on our national seal. Out of many, one. Initially, of course, this was intended to signify the unity of the 13 colonies, but we've retained it because the principle is larger than just that. We Americans come from many places, but we are one. We find that unity in our continually evolving -- but rooted in common ideals -- national story and myth, and we debunk that myth at the peril of our unity. We can see that process unfortunately playing out all around us. Sure, our myth has got some bad parts, but it still has a lot of effective good in it that might just save the country if we let go of our self-righteous clever analysis and believe in it again. I mean, there was enough good left in Darth Vader that he single-handedly saved the universe.***** Luke Skywalker believed the good was there, and he was not a fool for doing so.
I mentioned at the outset that the impetus for giving voice to this now and attempting to effect what societal change I might through the means of reaching 200 blog readers is the "anger" that is raging in the land. (Incidentally, I would argue that the success of Donald Trump is less due to anger than it is to the fact that his "Make America Great Again" campaign, with its decidedly un-analytic optimism about what we can and will do with the country through sheer force of will, taps into the vestiges of the American myth that I've been talking about in the above paragraphs. I may come back to this in a future post.) It is also due to the fact that, in the face of an attack from outside (the San Bernardino attacks) on our neighbors, rather than pulling together, the nation has pitted itself against each other again along familiar battle lines over the very incident. That is to say, the talking points about "gun-control", "Islamic extremism," etc. -- the traditional liberal vs. conservative B.S. has held court in national and social media. Admittedly, it was a small attack, but there were no American flag Facebook profiles; there was more argument. This sort of divisiveness in the face of attack from outside wasn't present even 14 years ago. Things have gotten bad. If we can't mend our bridges in the face of a common enemy, maybe we are in severe decline.
Perhaps it would behoove us all to rediscover a little vintage Charlie Daniels Band. In his '70s hit "In America", Daniels sings about the coming together of a fractured American populace in the face of (the then contemporary) Soviet threat. The second verse runs thusly:
From the sound up in Long Island out to San
Francisco Bay, and ev'ry thing that's in between
them is our home. And we may have done a little
bit of fighting amongst ourselves, but you outside
people best leave us alone. Cause we'll all stick
together and you can take that to the bank.
That's the cowboys and the hippies and the rebels
and the yanks.
Those are some opposed groups that come together in that last line, but that's part of the American mythos too. We healed after a bloody Civil War. E pluribus unum. Out of many, one. We, like the Greeks before us in the face of the threat from Persia, pull together. That's our story. We see the best in each other when it counts. "You [enemies] just go and lay your hand on a Pittsburgh Steeler fan," Daniels sings in the next line, "and I think you're gonna finally understand." Our divisions are big, and often they are real, but they don't need to finally separate us. I will not vote for Hillary Clinton, not under any circumstances that I can imagine. But I like to think that I would step in between her deplorably smarmy person and a bullet coming from a terrorist's pistol. That's what it means to be an American, eh?
*That is deconstruction with a lower case "d", not Deconstruction the particular system of linguistic analysis, which is not unrelated, but something else and not what I mean by my usage of the word here. Also, for any of my academic amigos reading this post, I am aware I am overgeneralizing a point, but I don't think it's in bad faith, and, in the interests of keeping as many of my 200 loyal readers as I can, I will not go into the tedious exactitude required to keep from overstating any case.
**Lest anybody miss it, the quotation marks around really in this sentence denote it as ironic, i.e. I mean to assert that 'really' here means exactly its opposite.
***In Greek, the word "myth" means story.
****Yes, I'm conflating historical figures and figures of American myth. They contribute equally and in the same way to what we might call American values and meaning. If that bothers you, you are miles away from my point. Start again at the beginning.
*****Yeah, it's a bad joke, but we're in need of comic relief at this point, yeah?
Of course, I didn't really need Ingraham or Williams to tell me that. I see a string of malcontented comments and posts daily in my Facebook feed. Often enough, those posts and comments frustrate me a little myself -- sometimes at the particular political or cultural event that has frustrated the commenter and sometimes at the commentary itself. It's getting so that I don't even want to fritter away time on social media (see, there's a silver lining to everything).
Anyone with any sense of history knows that it isn't an unusual thing for Americans to be angry with their government. I mean, the nation is founded on anger with the government. If it weren't for anger with the government, we'd still be British colonies, or, more likely, a relatively inconsequential commonwealth country with a penchant for hockey and socialized medicine. (No offense, Canada.) What's become disturbing to me about this round of anger, though, is it seems like it's almost more cultural than political, and what that entails is that we Americans aren't just angry at our government; we're getting more and more ticked off at each other. Of course, we've been here before, too (cf. the years 1860-65).
The media has forwarded a number of causes for the anger, ranging from political disenfranchisement (particularly of American minorities), to a stagnant economy, to voters not seeing their values reflected in the political establishment, to racism itself, to what have you. It's a big country with, as the Donald says, "a loooot of problems." You want a reason to be pissed off? Pick one. There's plenty to go around.
But the thing is, there have always been a lot of problems, and that hasn't -- at least in my lifetime -- divided us against each other to quite the extent that it has here recently. I'm not going to presume to diagnose the illness definitively in the few (albeit probably too many) words of this blog post, but I've been ruminating for a while now on one thing that I think is a huge problem, which is this: I think we're losing the concept of "us," i.e. there's profoundly less and less of a sense of who we are as Americans, and I think that, in turn, is due in large part to our loss -- or even casting aside -- of our national narrative, that is to say, the story of America.
Notice I didn't say the history of America. I said the story of America. The mythos of the nation, if you will. They're not unrelated, of course, but the identity of America is more grounded in the legends surrounding George Washington, Pecos Bill, Geronimo, and Paul Bunyan -- or to use a more recent example, the heroism of the soldiers who Tom Hanks took along with him to save Private Ryan -- than it is in the economic vicissitudes of the Hawley-Smoot tariff or the politics of passing the Federal Highway Act. See, the stories of America, the legends of her heroes and such, build a set of ideals and values, an ethos that is felt in the blood, with which we can identify, which -- in a way -- forms our identity, gives us a sense of who we are. We seem to have lost a good bit of that recently, and that has had consequences that I don't think are terribly good.
I will say something about blame for the crumbling of the American narrative. A good bit of the blame for this can be laid right at the feet of Academia, and more particularly the feet of my colleagues in Literature departments. For years now, the handling of story in the halls of the Ivory Tower has been an exercise of deconstruction* and undermining of myths rather than extrapolating of meaning from stories. This process of deconstruction has been particularly damaging to our traditional American heroes. We are told repeatedly that Washington and Jefferson were slave owners, that most of the founding fathers were simply angling for lower taxes, that Patton and MacArthur were violent warmongers, that John Henry was an ignorant oppressed worker, etc. Kindergartners in our country think it folly to believe that Davy Crockett "killed him a bar when he was only three." Or they would if they had any idea who Davy Crockett was, which, of course, most of them don't, because the final stages of the deconstruction of any national mythos is throwing it out altogether.
Academia, which has always insisted on the virtue of being too clever by half, has been about this for quite a while, and the process has filtered down from university all the way to grade school. It seems we can't start too early demystifying everything for our citizens. I recently watched "A Very Goofy Christmas" with my 6 year old son on the Disney Channel. The cartoon is clearly geared towards very young kids, but nonetheless takes up the question of the empirical reality of Santa Claus. It's a sickness of sorts, the scientific and analytic habit of mind run completely amok, pulling the veil away from everything and showing it for what it "really" is.** The cultural result of this habit of mind is that we are left with no cultural heroes, really with no enduring concept of cultural heroism, and hence, with no enduring set of ideals and virtues which those heroes embody and which bequeath to a culture its touchstone of identity.
To put it more clearly, perhaps, heroes tell a culture how to act and who they are, i.e. people grow up saying, "I want to be like that guy or gal." When a whole nation grows up thinking this, you get a cultural identity, something which with everyone identifies and which, consequently, draws the people together in unity. It has always been this way, at least in the West. The ancient Greek city-states, history tells us, were constantly bickering with one another, politically speaking, but culturally, they all saw themselves as descended from the heroes of Homeric myth, and Achilles, Odysseus, Hercules, et. al. were, for them, embodiments of the very virtues and ideals they strove to live by. It is important to note that these ideals are rooted in story.*** And the stories have to be believed in. Not factually. Factuality is rather beside the point, as every "kid" who believes in Santa Claus can tell you intimately.
I've perhaps gotten off topic by way of explaining the importance of story, but what I'm driving at is that our lack of belief in our national stories and our corresponding lack of belief in the ideals that make up our national ethos, we have lost the sense of unity that binds us together as Americans.
Two objections must be countered before concluding. One is an objection often leveled against the collection of American narratives -- as it is against most all Western narratives: that the narrative of America is classist, misogynist and racist. It excludes people of color, women, and the poor. That objection is wrong on almost all counts. John Henry was an African-American, as was Frederick Douglas and Harriet Tubman.**** Abigail Adams and Calamity Jane were women, and the poor vastly outnumber the rich in American myths. Beyond its actual diversity, however, the nature of the American story is such that it is perennially subject to expansion and revision and therefore potentially includes anyone who wants to be included. At the bottom of Lady Liberty, it says, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these homeless, tempest-tossed to me." We have always welcomed anyone to add to the story. There is an important catch though, which is that, implicitly, though we invite anyone to contribute to the story, we'd rather not that they come in with a red pen and edit out large portions of our story, our ethos, what it is that makes us Americans, because it offends them. I don't mean this to be rude or xenophobic, but, honestly, if people vastly prefer their own culture to ours, they should stay in the geographic locale where their own culture is dominant. We like what we have and who we are, and we should. It's something to be proud of. Join us, please, but don't come to our home and piss in our Wheaties. But I digress. The point is that it is the nature of the American story to be inclusive. It is nothing to be ashamed of.
The second objection will be that the critiques of American heroes are, in fact, true. George Washington did own slaves. John Henry's sense of pride in his work probably was exploited by his greedy employers (and songs like "16 Tons" are much to the point here -- the other neat thing about the whole of American story is that it possesses the resources for criticizing itself). But none of these facts do away with the ideals and the virtues that these figures embody in American myth. The very idea that they would is rather absurd if you think about it. The honesty that is the moral of the story of George Washington not lying about chopping down the cherry tree has nothing to do with his slave owning as an adult. In fact, I might go so far as to say the flaws of our heroes are an integral part of the story itself. Just as the American story is always open for new contribution, it is always open for needed revision. To my knowledge, we have never claimed to be perfect as a people. We do the best we can and constantly try to do better.
Anyway, the conclusion of this whole long-winded affair is that we, like the Greeks before us, have traditionally found our unity in our story, in the mythos of America, in America as an embodiment of ideals that we all strive to live up to regardless of race, economic class, cultural heritage, or religion. E pluribus unum it says on the banner carried by the eagle on our national seal. Out of many, one. Initially, of course, this was intended to signify the unity of the 13 colonies, but we've retained it because the principle is larger than just that. We Americans come from many places, but we are one. We find that unity in our continually evolving -- but rooted in common ideals -- national story and myth, and we debunk that myth at the peril of our unity. We can see that process unfortunately playing out all around us. Sure, our myth has got some bad parts, but it still has a lot of effective good in it that might just save the country if we let go of our self-righteous clever analysis and believe in it again. I mean, there was enough good left in Darth Vader that he single-handedly saved the universe.***** Luke Skywalker believed the good was there, and he was not a fool for doing so.
I mentioned at the outset that the impetus for giving voice to this now and attempting to effect what societal change I might through the means of reaching 200 blog readers is the "anger" that is raging in the land. (Incidentally, I would argue that the success of Donald Trump is less due to anger than it is to the fact that his "Make America Great Again" campaign, with its decidedly un-analytic optimism about what we can and will do with the country through sheer force of will, taps into the vestiges of the American myth that I've been talking about in the above paragraphs. I may come back to this in a future post.) It is also due to the fact that, in the face of an attack from outside (the San Bernardino attacks) on our neighbors, rather than pulling together, the nation has pitted itself against each other again along familiar battle lines over the very incident. That is to say, the talking points about "gun-control", "Islamic extremism," etc. -- the traditional liberal vs. conservative B.S. has held court in national and social media. Admittedly, it was a small attack, but there were no American flag Facebook profiles; there was more argument. This sort of divisiveness in the face of attack from outside wasn't present even 14 years ago. Things have gotten bad. If we can't mend our bridges in the face of a common enemy, maybe we are in severe decline.
Perhaps it would behoove us all to rediscover a little vintage Charlie Daniels Band. In his '70s hit "In America", Daniels sings about the coming together of a fractured American populace in the face of (the then contemporary) Soviet threat. The second verse runs thusly:
From the sound up in Long Island out to San
Francisco Bay, and ev'ry thing that's in between
them is our home. And we may have done a little
bit of fighting amongst ourselves, but you outside
people best leave us alone. Cause we'll all stick
together and you can take that to the bank.
That's the cowboys and the hippies and the rebels
and the yanks.
Those are some opposed groups that come together in that last line, but that's part of the American mythos too. We healed after a bloody Civil War. E pluribus unum. Out of many, one. We, like the Greeks before us in the face of the threat from Persia, pull together. That's our story. We see the best in each other when it counts. "You [enemies] just go and lay your hand on a Pittsburgh Steeler fan," Daniels sings in the next line, "and I think you're gonna finally understand." Our divisions are big, and often they are real, but they don't need to finally separate us. I will not vote for Hillary Clinton, not under any circumstances that I can imagine. But I like to think that I would step in between her deplorably smarmy person and a bullet coming from a terrorist's pistol. That's what it means to be an American, eh?
*That is deconstruction with a lower case "d", not Deconstruction the particular system of linguistic analysis, which is not unrelated, but something else and not what I mean by my usage of the word here. Also, for any of my academic amigos reading this post, I am aware I am overgeneralizing a point, but I don't think it's in bad faith, and, in the interests of keeping as many of my 200 loyal readers as I can, I will not go into the tedious exactitude required to keep from overstating any case.
**Lest anybody miss it, the quotation marks around really in this sentence denote it as ironic, i.e. I mean to assert that 'really' here means exactly its opposite.
***In Greek, the word "myth" means story.
****Yes, I'm conflating historical figures and figures of American myth. They contribute equally and in the same way to what we might call American values and meaning. If that bothers you, you are miles away from my point. Start again at the beginning.
*****Yeah, it's a bad joke, but we're in need of comic relief at this point, yeah?
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