Myth and Propaganda: Bush and the American Illusion

In the great causes of nations, myth and propaganda are essential political ingredients.

Myth tells a nation who they are, what they stand for and attempts to establish good purpose for sending its youth to spill their blood and lose their lives on foreign soil.

Propaganda is the means of propelling myth into motion. Remember the Maine...Make the world safe for democracy...Remember Pearl Harbor...United We Stand...Support Our Troops, etc.

Myth even evokes God as a faithful ally in the acts of murder and theft that war brings. All is 'just' because it is done in His name.

Myth by definition is not intended to be a scientifically sustainable hypothesis but an article of faith. Myth is part of the human condition and it can also be dangerous.

American Indoctrination 101: Freedom Is a Fallacy

I came across this top-to-bottom mosaic of thirty people explaining what it means to them “to be an American.”

Almost every answer was a variation on the theme of freedom, usually personal freedom, but in the abstract, as if they each were repeating by rote phrases from a hymnal than speaking truths they knew and felt first-hand, or could explain.

A 16-year-old: “To me, it means freedom and having the right to do what you want to do.”

An 8 year old: “It means that we live in a free country and that we get to do a lot of stuff that other people can’t.”

A 54-year-old: “To have personal freedom to do what I want to do, when I want to do it.”

A 60 year old: “It’s liberties and freedoms that are preserved and cherished in the Constitution of the United States.”

The sameness of the answers belied their very point: While almost all of them felt free in the abstract and could say the kind of flag-waving phrases that do sloganeering Elks and Rotary clubs proud, hardly any could go beyond the rote, and only a handful were safe from unwitting irony.

When a 25 year old says it’s about “living free to accomplish your dreams,” it’s difficult not to think of the near-bankruptcy of the notion, of the very real fact that upward mobility, once a staple of American life, is now far less of a reality in the United States than it is in supposedly stultified and class-full Europe.

This 26 year old seems to get it: “Everything is still within my reach, but to get it you have to be strong and determined.”

This 49 year old, not so much: “The opportunities, dreams and the fulfillment of a truly valued life.” (The one who does get it is black, incidentally. The one who doesn’t is whiter than a shade of pale.)

A 60 year old and a 48 year old attribute Americanness to “freedom of speech,” which may be true in the abstract, but is among those freedoms least valued, least protected, and most badgered in our day: we have the freedom to say what we please on our blogs and in our living rooms.

But so do the Chinese (and they live in a totalitarian regime). And even then, those freedoms are being restricted: let your employer find out what you think or do that may clash with your company’s “culture” and you’ll be out the door before you have a chance to scroll down to your explanation.

“Freedom of speech” in the media is even more of an fallacy. The spectrum of accepted ideas is embarrassingly narrower than it is in most European countries.

The voices in those media form a small, hermetic, repetitive and self-preserving elite that has less to do with ideology than a form of religious belief in the status quo.

Once again blogs have dented the club and forced it to own up to realities it might not have otherwise, but even the blog world has developed its own class system, its own establishment, conventions and, quite rigorously, its own rules of intolerance.

Conformist America

Freedom of speech is pointless when it doesn’t provoke conversations, when dissent isn’t accepted not only as an inherent value of the liberal mindset, but as its necessity.

I’m tempted to say that we live in a conformist age. But in reality most of American history has been one age of conformism after another, shocked and jagged periodically by brief periods of radical rethinking, by that shaking of the tree of liberty Thomas Jefferson spoke about, often with drips of blood as a consequence.

This is not, by any means, one of those periods. Not even close. Dissent over Bush has formed its own establishment.

But a movement to be rid of something as specific as one presidential administration and its follies isn’t the same as a movement to change the culture, politically and socially.

There isn’t, among viable Republican or Democratic candidates running the slightest desire to question the status quo, to, for example, up-end assumptions about the market economy.

Or to challenge the eminently challengeable belief that American interests begin and end with its business interests. Fire up those engines of subversion and see how far your “freedom of speech” will take you.

False Flag: Virtuous America

The disconnect between the neocons’ Bush-Cheney version of the world and the reality we face is clear enough.

With simple-mindedness that makes George Babbitt seem like a foreign policy whiz, Bush thinks that American power and institutions are innate virtues that the world craves, that no people could want another system.

It’s what drove his assumptions that American tanks in Baghdad could metamorphose into the making of another San Antonio on the banks of the Tigris. He got an Alamo in reverse, writ large.

But he had the majority of Americans’ support as late as 2004. And if he did so, it’s because the disconnect he projected is alive and well in the heart of most Americans.

They have soured on Bush. Yet they haven’t lost their illusions about 'virtuous' America.

Bush will soon be gone. Not so the fatal assumption that to be an American is to be the world.

tags: america  illusion  false  freedom  conditioning  

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