One social studies textbook for fourth graders (10 year olds), entitled Our People, sums up aspects of this civil religion, including deliberately targeted national integration: “It opens with a discussion of a major national ceremony, the inauguration of a president, and a visit to the Lincoln Memorial and other Washington sites. This presentation is clearly intended to elicit feelings of membership in a national community. The chapter concludes with a comment by a fictitious character: ‘Yes,” said Maria to Pedro, ‘This is a great country. We are all Americans.’”42
The conformism of ideological attitudes reflects in part the self-definition of the great majority of Americans as “middle class.” This definition by now has little to do with class in the economic sense, but everything to do with being “respectable,” which means, above all, sharing a certain set of common values, including the American Creed and American nationalism.
The legacy of the 1960s and of older radical traditions lives on today in American universities—though these often suffer from their own form of liberal conformism. Moreover, it must be noted that these myths are both in their origin and in their location today principally white myths. Like President Barack Obama and General Colin Powell, blacks and others who wish to join the establishment must worship the gods of the American civilizational empire, at least in public; but as Richard Hughes has noted, although blacks believe in and have appealed to the American Creed, every one of its attendant myths takes on a highly ironic aspect when viewed from the perspective of black or Native American history.43
As far as the official and semiofficial world of Washington, DC, is concerned, I can testify from my own experience to the continuing truth of the following passage from Louis Hartz, written in the 1950s:
When one’s ultimate values are accepted wherever one turns, the absolute language of self-evidence comes easily enough. This then is the mood of America’s absolutism: the sober faith that its norms are self-evident. It is one of the most powerful absolutisms in the world…It was so sure of itself that it hardly needed to become articulate, so secure that it could actually support a pragmatism which seemed on the surface to belie it. American pragmatism has always been deceptive because, glacierlike, it has rested on miles of submerged conviction, and the conformitarian ethos which that conviction generates has always been infuriating because it refuses to pay its critics the compliment of an argument.44
There is a strong tendency in consequence to treat even licensed dissidents essentially as jesters. They ring their bells, and even dare on occasions to hit the democratic sovereign over the head with a bladder and tell him that he is a fool. The king laughs loudly and tosses them a chicken bone, but does he listen to them? Often, like King Lear, he listens only when evident facts have given him no choice, and the jester’s advice is too late to be of much use to him. And perhaps one should not complain. America is not at present physically repressive of dissent, and it is, after all, better to wear a jester’s cap than a prisoner’s chains, let alone a hangman’s noose.
This conformism is nonetheless dangerous both to liberty and to the frank and honest discussion of public issues, especially in time of war, when it is exacerbated by a heightened nationalism.45 It is particularly alarming when combined with the loyalty and trust that many Americans in time of war instinctively feel toward their president and administration, and which was reflected for many months in the deference paid to the Bush administration by the mainstream American media after 9/11.46
One consequence of a national language based on a rigid ideological consensus is that it gives to certain words the power of what W. H. Auden called in 1967, “black magic”—the power to suspend a capacity for independent thought in audiences: “More deadly than the Idle Word is the use of words as Black Magic…For millions of people today, Communism, Capitalism, Imperialism, Peace, Freedom and Democracy have ceased to be words the meaning of which can be inquired into and discussed, and have become right or wrong noises to which the response is as involuntary as a knee reflex.”47
When President Eisenhower, in his Inaugural Address of 1952, declared that “freedom is pitted against slavery; lightness against the dark,” he was of course expressing a truth about Stalinist Communism, but he was also summoning up a spirit of absolutism in America that he himself seemed later to regret.48 Indeed, this later repentance from messianism has been true of some of the most famous praise-singers of that messianism, including Herman Melville (in his poem Clarel), Walt Whitman, and indeed Reinhold Niebuhr, who coined the phrase “the children of light and the children of darkness” for the battle against totalitarianism during World War II, but later became one of the most incisive critics of American arrogance, mythopoeia and self-deception.49
It has been widely remarked how the Bush administration’s use of the words “terrorism” and “evil” after 9/11 partially shut down the possibility for intelligent discussion of American strategy. But this is no less true of their use of the word “freedom” and identification of this word both with America and with American policies in the Middle East. Under Barack Obama, “the Constitution,” “individualism,” and “the American way of life” were used by the Right in a largely successful attempt to stifle serious debate on economic reform and the terms of state revenue collection. The Bush administration composed rhetorical spells drawn from the basic elements of the American ideological consensus, and until the situation in postwar Iraq spoiled the magic, this allowed them for a while to play the Pied Piper to much of America.
Lines written by the historian of the South and political thinker C. Vann Woodward on this subject during the Vietnam War are no less valid today: “The characteristic American adjustment to the current foreign and domestic enigmas that confound our national myths has not been to abandon the myths but to reaffirm them. Solutions are sought along traditional lines…Whatever the differences and enmities that divide advocates and opponents (and they are admittedly formidable), both sides seem predominantly unshaken in their adherence to one or another or all of the common national myths.”50
It may seem surprising that passages like these should still ring so true decades later, given both the horrible lessons that the experience of Vietnam supposedly taught, and the great example of Franklin Roosevelt in successfully reforming the American system in response to economic crisis. Like so many of the better literary and cinematic works on Vietnam, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) is, among other things, a profound questioning of civic nationalist myths about America, including inevitable American success, American innocence, American benevolence, and America’s national mission. And as its protagonist, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), says of his task, “I wanted a mission, and for my sins they gave me one…It was a real choice mission. And when it was over, I’d never want another.”51
At the time, this conclusion would have been agreed to by the vast majority of Americans. A quarter of a century later, in the wake of 9/11, it sometimes seemed as if this entire historical episode had been erased from American public memory. In Loren Baritz’s bitter words of 1985, in a chapter entitled “The American Lullaby”:
Our power, complacency, rigidity and ignorance have kept us from incorporating our Vietnam experience into the way we think about ourselves and the world…For one brief moment, later in the 1970s, it looked as if we had developed some doubts about our international and cultural moorings. It looked as if we might have the nerve and wisdom to be concerned not only about Vietnam, but about ourselves. But there is no need to think unless there is doubt. “The era of self-doubt is over,” President Reagan assured the West Point cadets. Freed of doubt, we are freed of thought. Many Americans now seem to feel better about themselves.52
This initial impression is, in part, a false one. Some of the bitter lessons of Vietnam have in fact sunk deeply into the American consciousness. In the years after 2003, the bloody and chaotic aftermath of victory in Iraq and Afghanistan recalled them to life. In the two years after 9/11, however, they
were largely swept away by a tide of myth-based nationalism against which it was very difficult to argue. The period when the memories of Vietnam were suspended was not very long—but it was long enough to get America into Iraq.53
The figure of Ronald Reagan is critical to an understanding of how America dealt with the legacy of Vietnam, and the consequences for America today and in the future.54 On the one hand, Reagan’s external policy demonstrated that he and most of his administration were determined not to get involved in any major conflict, and realized full well how bitterly unpopular this would be with a majority of Americans. The common left-wing image of Reagan as a warmonger is therefore quite wrong.55
The Reagan administration conforms to a key feature of the American security elites and military–industrial complex that will be examined in chapter 5: namely, that they tend to be “militarist, but not bellicose.” In Reagan’s rhetoric, however, the “Great Communicator” was a superb restorer of the founding myths of American nationalism, so badly tarnished by Vietnam, and this was without question because he believed them to the full himself. Above all, this was true of his beliefs in American innocence, American beneficence, and America as the heartland of human freedom and progress. He held “an innocent and unshakeable belief in the myth of American exceptionalism.”56 In Garry Wills’ superb phrase, Reagan was “the demagogue as rabble-soother.”57
Reagan’s mixture proved the perfect one to reassure Americans after the combined traumas of defeat in Vietnam, bitter political divisions at home, Watergate, and the Iranian hostage crisis. But by far the most important ingredient in the mixture was that, in Woodward’s words, Reagan “reaffirmed” America’s national myths. He also did so in a style that not only calmed, but united most Americans. In this, Reagan’s geniality, his acting skill, and his genuine identification with his country and countrymen made him a far more uniting figure than George W. Bush, who represents the same nationalist mixture, but in a considerably harsher form.
In his brilliant essay of 1982, “The Care and Repair of Public Myth,” William H. McNeill examined classic American myths of superiority and benevolence, and remarked that “no one is likely to reaffirm these discredited notions today, even though public rhetoric often assumes the reality of such myths without expressly saying so. Politicians and journalists really have little choice, since suitably revised national and international myths are conspicuous by their absence.”58
This passage depicts the character of Reagan and indeed those who voted for him. After all, they elected him in part precisely because he was so good at restoring their myths about their country, including the belief that Vietnam had been a noble crusade.59 As a result, while Americans remember in their guts that Vietnam was an unpleasant experience that should be avoided, its deeper lessons have remained largely unlearned, and in our own time it has proved entirely possible to “reaffirm these discredited notions.”
One reason for this was that while the Vietnam War was a dreadful experience for those Americans who fought in it, their numbers were small, and—quite unlike, once again, European and Asian wars, or for that matter the experience of the Vietnamese—Americans at home were physically unaffected: “for most Americans the tangible consequences of the debacle in Southeast Asia seem inordinately slight.”60 This lack of personal knowledge of war was of course true of Reagan himself, and was true of George W. Bush and all the other men in his administration of 2000–2004 who were of military age during the Vietnam War, but for some reason failed to serve.
In another way, however, the trauma of Vietnam is, if anything, too deep to be addressed: nothing less than “the death of the national god” and the national religion of American innocence, goodness, and God-given success. Without this, it was feared at some deep, semiconscious level that American civic nationalism itself would also wither and die. This fallen national god therefore had to be laboriously pieced back together and returned to its pedestal.61
It is interesting from this point of view that both McNeill in his essay and John Hellmann in his fascinating study of American literary and cinematic approaches to Vietnam call for American myths to be reformulated on a new basis—more progressive, honest, and morally courageous. Neither, however, suggest trying to do without national myths altogether.62 Clint Eastwood’s distinctly post-Vietnam western The Outlaw Josie Wales (1976) can also be seen as an attempt to heal the wounds of Vietnam by merging Hollywood western traditions with new cultural and social attitudes to create a more humane, open, and multicultural American mythology.63
Conformism and Political Correctness: Ignorance Is Myth
Perhaps a society as diverse and as bitterly culturally divided as America, with its diversity continually increased both by immigration and by the creative and destructive surges of capitalist change, cannot in fact live without strong common myths and a strong civic nationalism that depends on them. Thus, even as memories of Vietnam were being suppressed, other developments within U.S. society and culture were also encouraging a tendency to propagate soft, conflict-free, lowest-common-denominator versions of American nationalist myths and of American history. These have been based on a projection of the contemporary form of the American Creed back into the past.64
Curiously enough, Reagan’s own style can thus be seen as related in some ways to a phenomenon that at first sight appears absolutely alien to it: “political correctness” on the part of the academic Left and representatives of racial and ethnic minorities, especially when applied to American schools. In its original form, this was supposed to correct the prejudices, reflected in demeaning and contemptuous language, that for so long humiliated and oppressed a range of minorities in the United States. In this the political correctness movement has largely succeeded, though only in the context of much wider changes in society and culture. And this is an unequivocal good, if one remembers the revolting racist language of the past and the revolting treatment it encouraged.
The problem is, however, that the picture presented to schoolchildren as a result tends to conform to nationalist myths about America as an innocent, happy, conflict-free society, and propagates the American thesis in its purest and most basic form. Thus Frances FitzGerald paints a quite Soviet picture of the photography selection in school textbooks about the United States:
The treatment of European minorities is far more realistic than that of non-European minorities, whose sensibilities the publishers are anxious not to offend. The photographs in the mass-market texts rarely show a non-White person who is brutalized, dirty or even poor—unless the photograph specifically illustrates “pockets of poverty in America”…Most of them are smiling. You can find pictures of Chicano farmworkers, but the workers are always clean and look as if they’re enjoying their work. They’re always smiling at Cesar Chavez. The Puerto Ricans are smiling and healthy. The Chinese are smiling at healthy-looking vegetable stands. Indeed, everyone is smiling so hard you would think that all non-White people in the United States took happy pills. (The Russians, by contrast, appear to be a somber lot. Their grimness dates from a time in the fifties when a group of right-wing organizations made an enormous fuss about a photograph of smiling Russian children.)…Not only fundamentalists but progressives as well have a strong tendency to think that the schools should present the world, or the country, as an ideal construct. The censorship of schoolbooks is simply the negative face of the demand that the books portray the world as a utopia of the eternal present.65
Diane Ravitch describes how an American history textbook by Gary B. Nash, an historian of impeccable progressive credentials, was attacked by left-wing and minority representatives in the late 1980s, accused of being “anti-black, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, anti-American Indian, anti-gay and anti-Christian.”66
A few years later, in the mid-1990s, Professor Nash and his colleagues came under savage attack from the nationalist Right—with Lynne Cheney yet again playing a leading role—for their work in drawing up proposals for a new set of National History Standards
for teaching in classrooms that allegedly ignored America’s heroes, cast doubts on American myths, and undermined American patriotism. The groups responsible were largely the same as those that in 1994–1995 had forced the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, to abandon an exhibition showing the effects of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and compelled the director of the Air and Space Museum to resign.67
This tendency toward a bland patriotic picture of America—of “authorless crimes and sideless conflicts,” in FitzGerald’s words—is of long standing.68 Her portrait of smiling America was first published in 1979, but a British journalist, Andrew Gumbel, recorded similar feelings in 2003 when his son first went to school in California. His article is worth quoting at some length, as the appalled reaction of a politically centrist citizen of a vital English-speaking ally of the United States to behavior that most Americans take for granted:
Even after five years in the United States, I continue to be surprised by the omnipresence of patriotic conformism…With my son’s education at stake, I can’t help pondering the link between what is fed to children as young as six and what American adults end up knowing or understanding about the wider world. There is much that is admirable in the unique brand of idealism that drives American society, with its unshakeable belief in the constitutional principles of freedom and limitless opportunity. Too often, though, the idealism becomes a smokescreen concealing the uglier realities of the United States and the way in which it throws its economic, political and military weight around the globe. Children are recruited from the very start of their school careers to believe in a project one might call Team America, whose oft-repeated mantra is: we’re the good guys, we always strive to do the right thing, we live in the greatest country in the world. No other point of view, no other cultural mindset, is ever seriously contemplated …
America Right or Wrong Page 10
