There are basically two American stories, and depending on which any given American thinks or feels is more true, so is his sense of identity shaped by it, and usually so does his politics flow from it. There are other American narratives that don’t quite fit into this bi-polar division, but American history has been shaped pretty much by which one is dominant at any given time. Fear drives the plot of one of these stories; hope the other.
Ira Chernus at TomDispatch provides the outline for the fear story as told by its current bard Karl Rove:
The GOP stories are the same ones white people have been telling each other ever since they first set foot on North American shores: If you want to be safe, go to the frontier and wipe out the Indians. As former State Department official John Brown has noted, our Indian wars are not over yet.
Now Rove and his President are trying to sell the Iraq war as a frontier conflict, too. They want us to see U.S. troops as the cavalry putting down the "Injuns." Or better yet, as pioneers creating small enclaves of civilization (in Iraq they’re called Green Zones) in the midst of a vast wilderness full of savages. What strength, what courage it takes to survive. But they have a job to do: They must teach the savages how to be free. And above all, like their pioneering forebears, they must have the guts to stick it out until the job is done.
How do we know our military in Iraq has such beneficent motives? The answer is simple — they are Americans, by definition the heroes, the good guys. Every time they kill a bad guy like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, they only prove once again what good guys they are. (In a recent Washington Post-ABC poll, 68% of Americans said that the U.S. war against Iraq has "helped to improve the lives of the Iraqi people.")
Naturally they hope, one day, to be able to go home to their loved ones and live the peaceable lives they long for. But they aren’t quitters like those (Democratic) schoolmarms back East in the halls of Congress. They are real frontiersmen, with the will and the resolve to stay the course. They won’t be scared off by suffering or bloodshed; sometimes — let’s be honest — it takes bloodshed for life to get better.
That’s the archetype–the Indian Wars, and insofar as it functions as the dominant narrative in our national life, we realize our worst selves as Americans. And Americans are particularly vulnerable to the way it can be demagogued because as a nation we have lost our way and have no clear sense of our better self. Chernus gets at this later in his article when he says:
It plays on the insecurity of Americans who feel that their lives are out of control. Karl Rove knows that (as Gary Bauer, a religious right politico, once put it) "Joe Six-Pack doesn’t understand why the world and his culture are changing and why he doesn’t have a say in it." So Rove constantly invents simplistic good-against-evil stories for his candidates to tell. He tries to turn every election into a moral drama, a contest of Republican moral clarity versus Democratic moral confusion.
And let’s face it, it works. And it will keep working until the Democrats–or somebody–come up with an alternative narrative that appeals to what’s best in the American character rather than what is worst. And the appeal to fear always, always triggers what is worst. People who are good with hammers see every problem as a nail, said Abraham Maslow. And people who are good with hammers are usually people whose fear has made them insensate brutes incapable of imagining any other alternative.
Surely there are real threats that are potent stimulants to human fear. But a real leader, instead of fanning the flames of our fear, will help us to find a way to master it. The mastery of fear is courage. Courage is sobriety and clearheadedness in the face of a threat. Sobriety and clearheadedness are necessary prerequisites for finding the best solution. And one might also say that courage is the precondition for openness to the movement of grace. Nothing provides a more impenetrable barrier to the movement of grace than giving in to fear and flailing out at what threatens us with strategies developed by a brain soaked in adrenaline or a soul soaked in hatred. Our Indian War mentality is precisely this.
I don’t know. Maybe fear has always been the dominant motivator in the American story. The only thing that has changed is that after WWII, America evolved to beome the world’s greatest military power, and so now all we’re doing is extending the 19th Century Indian War frontier mentality to the 21st global situation. But our hope as a nation lies in whether we can frame a narrative that appeals to our best ideals not our basest instincts. I’m not naive enough to think that what is base in human nature can be eliminated, but there should be a competing narrative that gives people a choice, and right now there is none. The fear narrative dominates everything in our
American public life–and it even claims to have the moral high ground in doing so. But like some noxious, invasive weed, it has choked off the growth of anything more wholesome.
I’m not saying genuine hope died, but it has withered into something rather anemic. There were some rather crude attempts by the partisans of hope to break the fear narrative in sixties and seventies, but they were ineffective–too easy to dismiss by the fear-repressed grownups who said they knew better. They didn’t. But our own fear has inclined us to listen to the so-called grownups who falsely promise to make the fear go away, and instead they just make things worse. We have continuously put our trust in the hands of flat-souled, psychologically obtuse people who talk tough and don’t know what they are doing. Our own fear leads us to ally ourselves with the class bully. He may be a crude, stupid oaf, but he’s our crude, stupid oaf, and insofoar as there ain’t nobody gonna push him around, nobody’s gonna push me around.
But why all this fear? I don’t know for sure, but I think that what is so noxious in the Indian War narrative has been aggravated by the guilt and the fear we unleashed since dropping the bombs on Japan. We don’t talk about it; we don’t really want to think about it. But others around the world do. And the fact is that we Americans–the good guys–dropped the bomb–twice–on innocents. We crossed the line; we set the precedent. We’re the only ones who have unleashed such horror. So if we could do it, why shouldn’t someone do it to us? Wasn’t that really the source of the fear that permeated the American psyche during the Cold War?
I believe the American compulsion for nuclear dominance was based on the unconscious assumption that what goes around comes around. We let the evil genie out of the bottle, now we have to arm ourselves to the teeth to prevent it from getting us. We’ve been living in dread of the day we will finally get what we deep down fear is coming to us. 9/11 brought that fear from deep down to something we felt with renewed intensity. And it gave us a screen–Islamic terrorists–upon which we could project that fear. And so now everything we do is soaked in this fear of Islamofascism.
And so for good reason now we live in dread of the really big attack–the mushroom cloud that our leaders were telling us was inevitable if we didn’t take out Saddam. And the irony is that our flailing out at him out and all the money we’ve spent doing so has has made a nuclear attack on American soil more likely. The "Injuns" are madder at us than ever before, and they’ll get aholt of the white man’s big weapon somehow or another. And they will deliver it not on a missile tip but in a container ship. Iraq has distracted us from developing a clearheaded, prudent strategy for preventing such a thing, and it has diverted the funds necessary to implement such a strategy should we finally shake off our fear-induced stupor and develop one.
I’m trying to come up with the outline for a hope-driven narrative. I have to say I’m not feeling the hope impulse much these days, and so it’s hard for me to come up with anything I think anyone–even people who are groping for such a thing themselves–will find compelling. But I think it starts with understanding who the great partisans of hope have been, and then understanding the nature of their courage and the price they were willing to pay in their confronting the partisans of fear. And then asking how can I be now what they were then? More on this another time.
Leave a Reply