http://madnessatthegates.wordpress.com/2013/07/29/barrys-blog-65-public-relations-for-the-myth-of-innocence/

Public Relations for the Myth of Innocence

On a recent trip to the Mono Lake region of the eastern Sierra, we had dinner at the Double Eagle Restaurant in Lee Vining, where we observed a curious sight on a wall near the entrance. It was an American flag, folded tightly into a triangle and mounted and framed, along with the following text, which is superimposed over a series of romantic images, including helicopters, battle scenes, citations and Marine unit insignia:

So that all shall know, this flag was flown in the face of the enemy, illuminated in the dark by the light of justice, over the compound of our nation’s leading task force in the Global War on Terrorism, on November twenty-sixth, 2008, and bears witness to the destruction of terrorist forces threatening the freedom of the United States of America and the world.

IN HONOR OF THE DOUBLE EAGLE SPA & RESORT

Signed, __________, Commander of ____ battalion, etc.

We ate at three restaurants in Lee Vining. I saw another folded flag on the wall of the second restaurant. The third had a series of flags flying around its outdoor seating area. But this sight was the most intriguing.

I felt angry at having my vacation disturbed by this reminder of almost twelve years of unnecessary carnage, and then sad at all the lives lost, both in those years and in the years to come. But then I felt drawn to the text itself, and marveled at the perspective it conveyed to its intended audience. Assuming that similar plaques are currently on display in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of public places across the country, I had to unpack it in terms of American myth.

“This flag was flown in the face of the enemy…” Perhaps the writer (very likely a PR man hired for the occasion) simply meant to imply that this is an actual battle flag, which in the world of militant nationalism – I call it the addiction of nationalism – has the emotional resonance of a holy relic. If American lives had been placed in danger, then this must have been a just cause.

Or perhaps flying a flag in the enemy’s face is more of a smug, naughty gesture – In yo face, suckah! Watch’a gonna do?  – the taunting gesture of an adolescent, or an adolescent culture. You want a piece of me?

At another level, such passive aggressive taunts (Strike me first. See if I care.) are really unconscious pleas for initiation. Translated into ritual terms, they come out like this: Kill the boy in me so that I might become a man.

Then there’s the question of where that flag was flown, on Afghan national territory, eight thousand miles from America. This is a central image in American myth. Just as the U.S. Army 45 years ago referred to the unsecured Vietnamese countryside as “Indian territory,” the holders of this flag were defiantly asserting the right of America (or John Wayne’s cavalry, if you prefer) to establish itself among the “hostiles.”

These images have retained their deep emotional resonance for older (white) Americans, and it seems that it is imperative that younger people (such as the young families in the restaurant) should also digest them. Despite the vast majority of incidents in which those cavalry troops and this Marine Force were guilty of massacring innocent people, our war narratives have consistently portrayed our soldiers as being idealistic, innocent and never fighting unless provoked. As Franklin D. Roosevelt told his Naval commanders in early December, 1941: “The United States desires that Japan should commit the first overt act.” Yes, that was a direct quote.

“This flag:” consider how an Afghan citizen might react to the idea of someone else’s flag being flown on his or her land. Or put the whole thing into an urban American context: what could be more provocative than a group of thugs displaying their gang colors on your block? Aren’t they saying try and knock this chip off my shoulder?

“Illuminated by the light of justice” is tacky but effective metaphor. That light comes from the Judeo-Christian God of war, the one who has sanctioned all the extremes of violence perpetrated by Western Man for three thousand years. This God would have us resort to violence, to kill violent perpetrators (and would shame us if we didn’t) because, we are always told, killing is wrong. Why do Americans insist on the death penalty when it has no deterrent value? To punish people, not to prevent others from acting violently; certainly not to rehabilitate them.

This God’s violence is in the name of justice. So yet another generation of Americans will feel justified in destroying Third World people who would determine their own destinies. Or as they said in Viet Nam: We had to destroy the village in order to save it. In other words, we have the right god and they don’t.

“Our nation’s leading task force” – Not simply any U.S. Marine force, but the very best of them. One might well wonder who sets the standards and who judges such things, but no matter. The assumption of “We’re number one” is the critical thing here, even if it implies that another Marine force is number two.

“The Global War on Terrorism:” In case anyone needed to be reminded, you are either with us or you are against us, wherever you are on the planet. Politically, psychologically and mythologically, these words portray a black-and-white world (or a white-on-black world) that cannot allow for any nuance. Since nuance invites inward speculation, it is threatening. What does it threaten? Our identity.

The specific date – November twenty-sixth, 2008 – locks the event (destruction of terrorist forces) into all readers’ memories and invites them to ponder just what they were doing on the same date while these Marines – these American boys – were defending our freedom and that of the whole world.

Perhaps the owner of the Double Eagle has lost a son to the war. With all due respect, is this the way to memorialize his life – or his sacrifice? Let me say this as simply as I can. To be confronted with the potential truth that your boy died or was maimed for nothing – for Wall Street and Big Oil – that you sent them with your patriotic blessing, that you proudly offered one of your children to be sacrificed – would be more than most people could bear. Therefore, when our government and media gatekeepers offer us the opportunity to collude with their crimes by re-inventing memory – He died defending freedom – who wouldn’t take the bait?

In a demythologized world we construct meaning and identity by placing ourselves and the memories of our lost loved ones within the protective coating of national myth, or nationalism. In this sense, nationalism is precisely the same in its addictive qualities as alcoholism or any other substance addiction. It serves to insulate us from the pain of acknowledging our suffering and the suffering we inflict on others. The God of justice required this sacrifice, and rather than regretting it, we offered it willingly.

But wait, as the late-night commercials shout, there’s more! The myth of a reluctantly violent America that comes to the aid of the oppressed and defends freedom with the blood of its young men has always been inextricably entangled with a whole series of commercial myths, from rugged individualism to the Protestant ethic to sacrosanct corporate capitalism. Something is always for sale in America, and our PR flack couldn’t resist a final plug. Apparently, this flag itself – perhaps the memory of the very battle it flew over – is here on this wall “IN HONOR OF THE DOUBLE EAGLE SPA & RESORT.” Was the whole battle fought for that reason? Who was selling and who was buying?

But the likelihood (based on this small sample of one resort area among hundreds) that such “authentic” plaques appear in huge numbers all across the country actually is a positive sign. If our media gatekeepers must repeatedly use such emotionally manipulative texts to remind us of these mythic narratives, then perhaps the Myth of American Innocence, like the walls of ancient Thebes, really is collapsing. And when it does come down, will we be there to offer a new story?

Nineteen-nineteen was one of the most contentious years in American history. The presence of millions of unemployed World War One veterans added to an already difficult economic situation. In every industry, working people were confronting the excesses of capitalism. The year saw: more labor strikes than in any previous year; a resurgent Ku Klux Klan; several major race riots; pressure for both prohibition of alcohol and women’s right to vote; and a massive reactionary mobilization by the government and the major media in what became known as the (first) Red Scare, which led to the murders of many activists by police and right-wing thugs.

The ruling elites – and, because of the unrelenting media blitz, the middle class as well – were obsessed with the new version of what I have called the “outer other” of communism, or as it was more commonly called at the time, “Bolshevism.” J. Edgar Hoover blamed this evil ideology specifically on “alien” immigrants from eastern and southern Europe.

Serious cracks in the myth of American innocence had appeared, and people were faced with the terrifying possibility of having to question the most basic assumptions of the stories we (whites) have told ourselves about ourselves. These stories include sacrifice of the children and redemption through violence; heroic masculinity; upward mobility; white privilege; racial exclusion – and scapegoating.

When our government and media gatekeepers perceive the need to shore up the cracks in the myth, they have always done so by demonizing the “other,” both to provide distractions from the pressing economic issues, and to offer a way out of the anxiety that arises when we begin to doubt the roots of our identity. We know who we are because we are not “them.” White American identity is very shallow and fragile, because it is built upon a sense of who we are not, rather than upon who we are.

But whenever America attacks the outer other (originally Indians, then Bolsheviks, eventually Muslims), there seems to be a need to demonize the inner other as well (then, as always in America, the Black man). If identity is attacked from the outside, then fears of losing that identity from the inside may also arise. So, as Anthony Read writes in The World On Fire: 1919 and the Battle with Bolshevism:

When racial unrest erupted…it was inevitable that Bolshevism was seen as a prime cause: ‘REDS TRY TO STIR NEGROES TO REVOLT’ was one typical headline, while the New York Times…was quick to blame ‘agitators among the Negroes, supported by the Bolsheviki, the IWW (the “Wobblies”) and other radical elements…’

On one level, to connect the black struggle for justice with other progressive and revolutionary movements is to imply that Blacks couldn’t or wouldn’t rise up on their own, that only “Reds” would agitate Blacks into protesting their conditions. On another level, these hysterical headlines were not concerned with rational argument but only to evoke fear of the other in every possible form.

The same dynamics could be seen earlier, during the Populist period of the 1890s, as well as later, in the 1950s, during the second Red Scare, when the same Hoover accused Martin Luther King Jr. of being a “card-carrying” member of the Communist Party. The presence – or contrived fear – of the other on one side of our identity inevitably evokes the other side.

The first Red Scare lasted a few years, until the myth of innocence was temporarily restored in the late 1950s. The second one lasted much longer, primarily because of the political and cultural explosions of the 1960s. It ended only because the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

But the economy continued to unwind and America remained in a constant state of turmoil. Elites needed a new “outer other.” They found it very quickly with the threat of Muslim terrorism. Soon after the tragedies and invasions of 2001, they refocused upon the threat of illegal immigration, which has the curious potential to evoke both inner and outer.

By the election of 2012, however, it became clear to reactionaries that Latino-Americans had become a voting block too powerful to ignore. However, the traditional, reliable “inner other’ remains the Black man in America.

This is true even though our gatekeepers have portrayed the nation as being “post-racial” because it has a Black president. The presence and symbolism of Barak Obama have enabled the media to ignore or at least minimize racial profiling, the growing poverty and despair in the Black community, voter registration scandals, the epidemic of police and vigilante violence against Black people (“When Police Shoot And Kill Unarmed Men” —http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2010/07/when-police-shoot-unarmed-man-oscar-grant-verdict-Mehserle), the lack of accountability (“F.B.I. Deemed Agents Faultless in 150 Shootings” — http://www.utopiaforums.com/boardthread?id=politics&thread=62559&time=1371651222771), the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act and Obama’s own war upon our privacy.

The War on Terror is our third Red Scare, with the simple exchange of brown (Muslims) for red (Communists). It is just as contrived, just as fictitious, as the first two scares. However, the other fiction of post-racialism supports the sense that we are too sophisticated now to believe that terrorists might be behind progressive and anti-racist organizations. So even the most extreme right-wingers don’t bother to make such suggestions. The tragedy is that they don’t have to anymore.

All this leads me to suggest that it is no coincidence that both the Edward Snowden controversy and the miscarriage of justice in the Trayvon Martin trial should be so prominent in the news today. Snowden’s revelations are so important because they call into question the hideously wasteful national security state and the edifice of faith in government that the gatekeepers have struggled so hard to rebuild ever since 9-11, indeed, ever since the end of the Viet Nam War, ever since the sixties. Hence the nearly universal vehemence that the corporate media and almost all elected politicians, including the liberals who have tied their fortunes to Obama, have heaped upon Snowden.

Violence against young men of color never ended during these years. But now we have a new escalation in the hate because the economy has not and will not recover for working people. The good, blue-collar jobs are gone forever. To add to the insult to traditional masculinity, most jobs are in the female-dominated service industry. But the gatekeepers have offered a sop to the millions of disillusioned white men and terrified white women (George Zimmerman’s jury was composed entirely of women, none of whom were Black). The sop, coded in “post-racial” language, goes like this: We welcome you to re-affirm both your identity and your trust in our institutions through risk-free hatred and punishment of the scapegoat.

If there is anything encouraging to be found in the current situation it is this: When the gatekeepers go to such lengths both to convince liberals to demonize whistleblowers (this administration has attacked eight of them, more then the combined total of all previous administrations) and to enable and encourage violent rednecks, it is an indication that the new cracks in the myth of American innocence are getting so wide and so numerous that they must be fearing that the whole thing might be in danger of falling down.

Dionysus caused the walls of mythical Thebes to collapse. His story is archetypal; that is, it happens ultimately in every psyche and in every culture. And the more inflexible those in charge (in psychological terms, the ego), the harder they will fall.

http://madnessatthegates.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/barrys-blog-62-what-we-have-lost/

A reader recently asked me for a short answer to the question: What have we lost by literalizing our mythological stories?

The evidence is all around us, so ubiquitous that we don't see it. The creative imagination (which I discuss in Chapter One of my book) that is our universal inheritance from our indigenous ancestors has collapsed over a very long period of time, as the myth of patriarchy overcame it. Our sense of the possible has diminished accordingly.

What we have as a result are what I call the predatory imagination and the paranoid imagination. As indigenous myths and the rituals associated with them are forgotten, we search desperately for substitutes that will offer our lives even a small bit of meaning. Caroline Casey calls this the "toxic mimic" of the real thing. Some old myths describe this historical shift, most notably the story of Abraham and Isaac.

The collapse of the creative imagination means that, compared to tribal people, modern people in general have a vastly reduced capacity for nuance, metaphor and symbolic thinking.

And, as Francis Weller writes in Entering the Healing Ground: Grief, Ritual and the Soul of the World (http://www.amazon.com/Entering-Healing-Ground-Grief-Ritual/dp/0983599920/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1372786800&sr=8-1&keywords=Entering+the+Healing+Ground%3A+Grief%2C+Ritual+and+the+Soul+of+the+World):

"…we are programmed to anticipate a certain quality of welcome…what our deep-time ancestors experienced as their birthright, namely the container of the village. We are born expecting a rich and sensuous relationship with the Earth, and communal rituals of celebration, grief and healing that keep us in connection with the sacred…The absence of these requirements haunts us, even if we can’t give them a name."

The base emotional experience of all modern people is repressed grief for what we never received and what we know at some level should have been ours. The result is that nearly everyone feels alienated from the core of their being. So much of the modern world – our institutions, our entertainments, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves – are attempts to cover up that grief.

What we have instead of a mythic world are:

1 – Ideologies and belief systems, most easily seen in fundamentalist religions, which literalize their own myths. This includes the literalization of apocalypse, the projection of the desire for personal initiatory death onto the world itself. All ideologies are forms of fundamentalism.

2 – Capitalism and consumerism, corrupted approaches to Mother Earth. “Materialism” comes from the root word for “mother.” We produce and consume to cover up the grief of being, as the old song said, “motherless children.”

3 – The culture of celebrity, which literalizes the old polytheistic universe of deities and royal figures and projects them onto public figures. Not possessing the tools with which to see our own innate nobility, we can only see it others.

4 – Addictions (including workaholism and addictions to ideology), which arise when "the spirits" devolve into "spirits" (alcohol).

5 – Pornography, which James Hillman claimed is the result of the Western world’s long-term cultural repression of Aphrodite and Eros (See my Chapter 10).

6 – And the most destructive, war, which over the centuries devolved from contained, ritual conflict to literal, total warfare. This category would include youth gangs and all of the potentially lethal ways in which young men search unconsciously for initiation (See my Chapter 5).

This is the challenge and the opportunity that our present historical situation offers us: recovering our indigenous sense of the possibilities inherent in ourselves and in the soul of the world. But before we can imagine what we want, we first have to acknowledge – and feel – what we have lost.

A few days after Edward Snowden revealed the NSA’s secret – and criminal – surveillance programs, an old friend of mine posted on Facebook that Snowden was a “traitor” who’d done irreparable damage to American security and should be punished most severely.

I was stunned that Leda, who’d participated fully in the political, cultural, racial, sexual, spiritual and pharmacological upheavals of the 1960s and 70s, should feel that way. I posted a quote:

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. – Benjamin Franklin

Leda responded by writing, “Most Americans just don’t know what they don’t know. That’s why there is such secrecy involved in these security activities. It is not hyperbole to say that there are lives on the line here. As my Sihing likes to say, for those who have fought for it, freedom has a flavor the protected will never know. This kind of security activity has been going on in one form or another for a very long time, and most Americans will never know what horrors have been prevented in the process and at what cost to those serving this country.”

I offered another quote: If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking… is freedom. – Dwight D. Eisenhower

She insisted: “My friends, I thought as you did until someone really in the know explained things to me that could turn your hair white overnight. You don’t know what you don’t know. Have faith that there are people out there protecting you from things you know nothing about, at the risk of their own lives, and be grateful that they are doing so…I know I will change no minds by what I am saying. I just know things that you do not know. If you knew what I know, you would probably think about this differently.”

Many years ago Leda had had a lover who’d served in intelligence work. Clearly, Minos, a good man and a patriot, like many thousands of other snoops, had spent his career believing that he was protecting America from the evil Soviets. And he had known that he would receive no public praise for his sacrifices, because he had worked in secret. Clearly, he’d left a strong impression on Leda.

I followed with a couple of quotes from George Kennan, the primary architect of the American policy of “containment” of the Soviets:

Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. (1987)

I did not believe, nor did others who knew the Soviet Union well, that there was the slightest danger of a Soviet military attack…(1995)

I thought that Leda, a Radcliffe graduate, a holder of an MFA in creative writing, a mother of a bi-racial son and a deeply spiritual person, might rationally reassess her position and at least consider the possibility that men like Minos might well have been pawns in a much larger political and economic game.

Leda was certainly a rational person. Her response made me wonder:

“Quotes are nice, but they may have been put out there for a reason. What do you know about the Cold War really? Have you spoken to people who were on the front lines of the Cold War? I have. Maybe what you think is what happened isn’t what happened.”

Well, I took the bait. I responded not with another quote but with some passionate opinions. If I couldn’t move her with logic, maybe she’d feel my concerns:

“No, but I have met people who were victims of the Cold War, people who believed in the absolute American value of free speech, who spoke out for no gain of their own and at great risk, and were persecuted for doing so. Besides, if you know secrets that Minos had revealed, wasn’t he guilty of exactly what you are accusing Snowden of?

 And “Traitor?” After Viet Nam, Indonesia, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Chile, the Congo, South Africa, Iran, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc, do you still believe in American innocence?

But what bothers me is not our difference of opinions nor not even your patronizing tone; it’s your loony assertion that self-incriminating admissions by high-ranking members of the National Security establishment “may have been put out there for a reason.” That kind of twisted logic wouldn’t get you a C- on a high school freshman civics exam!”

Leda apparently chose not to respond to most of my points (a D+ strategy in high school civics, but an A in presidential debates). She wrote:

“He never revealed anything classified to me, and rather than write the book he knew he could write, like the good soldier he was he took his secrets to the grave. Disinformation is put out to the public sometimes for reasons. Sorry if you think I sound patronizing. I am just trying to tell you that there is much you do not understand in a bigger picture than you are currently understanding. I do not know secrets, but I know something of how the business works. So in the end it does not matter to the protectors how citizens choose to view the situation. It matters that those who are working hard to protect us all are doing their jobs so that we are able to be free and alive to have these discussions.”

I was about to respond with, “No – I’ve been writing not because of “the protectors” butin spite of them. Besides, Minos spent his entire career monitoring communists, not Muslims, and he retired and died long before the attacks on the World Trade Center. Butyou have transferred your paranoia from the old ‘Other’ to the new one,” just as the ‘protectors’ wanted you to do. How can I have a conversation (literally, “to turn about with”) with a fundamentalist, a person who “knows” the truth and is impervious to persuasion?”

One final quote:

First they came for the communists and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

Then they came for the socialists and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Catholic.

Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.

                           — Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984)

But when I clicked on the FB link to respond, I saw this notice:

Sorry, this page isn’t available — The link you followed may be broken, or the page may have been removed.

Leda, apparently tired of dealing with a naïve fool like me, and wanting the last word, had erased the entire “conversation” from her FB home page.

But I got this blog. And I have to imagine that truth (which Keats equated with beauty) will have the last word.

http://madnessatthegates.wordpress.com/2013/05/29/barrys-blog-60-the-curse-of-the-fathers/

The Curse of the Fathers

What are the mythological roots of violence in the modern world? Can we speak about school shootings and the Boston bombing without also speaking about drones and targeted killings? Don’t lone gunmen and the agents of state violence enact our myths for all of us? Don’t we all have the same capacity for violence?

In 1964, Bob Dylan sang of these roots:

Oh God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son"

Abe says, "Man, you must be puttin' me on"

God say, "No." Abe say, "What?"

God say, "You can do what you want Abe, but

The next time you see me comin' you better run"

Well Abe says, "Where do you want this killin' done?"

God says, "Out on Highway 61".

Now the rowin' gambler he was very bored

He was tryin' to create a next world war

He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor

He said I never engaged in this kind of thing before

But yes I think it can be very easily done

We'll just put some bleachers out in the sun

And have it on Highway 61.

A few images of masculinity have formed the base of our modern patriarchal consciousness in two main cultural streams, each of them 3-4,000 years old.

The Greeks:

Everything began with the Great Earth Goddess Gaia, who begat Ouranos (Heaven). They mated and produced the first generation of deities, the Titans.

The oldest storytellers inform us that Ouranos, first ruler of the universe, hated his children. He heard a prophecy that a son would overthrow him. So, as each of them was born, he pushed his children back into the body of Mother Earth. But one son, Kronos, escaped and hid. When he matured, he ambushed Ouranos while his parents were making love and castrated him. Some say that Gaia had actually given Kronos the sickle that he used. Others say that he threw his father’s severed testicles into the ocean, and that they became Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love.

Kronos, now the king of Heaven, freed his siblings, married his sister Rhea and produced the next generation of divine children who would eventually become the Olympian gods and goddesses we all know. However, fearing a similar prophecy, Kronos ate his children as each of them was born. Rhea hid the youngest, Zeus, and instead gave Kronos a stone wrapped in blankets, which he ate thinking he had disposed of the threat.

Eventually, Zeus found a way to release his siblings, and they waged a ten-year war against Kronos and the Titans, eventually defeating them and casting them down to the underworld, where they still live. Consider that “underworld” understood psychologically is the unconscious, both personal and cultural. Modern culture has cast the devouring father into our unconscious, because we cannot admit our capacity to destroy our own children.

Eventually, Zeus heard the same prophecy. After mating with Metis (Intelligence), he consumed her to prevent conception of yet another son who might overthrow him. This resulted in Athena’s birth from his forehead.

And so it went. Many other stories in the Greek tradition follow this pattern of the killing – and often the eating – of innocent children.

Over many centuries, Kronos’ Roman equivalent Saturn eventually came to personify Father Time, which devours all things.

For 3,000 years, or 150 generations, Ouranos and Kronos, the original patriarchs, have been our models for two extreme patterns of fathering. Ouranos is the classic absent father: completely gone, or if in the household, he is uninvolved, unavailable, hidden behind the newspaper, brushing off needy children with the phrase, “Ask your mother.”

By contrast, Kronos is overly involved: tyrannical, judgmental, colonial, abusive, predatory, rapacious, murderous. Ouranos neglects the children, but Kronos kills their creativity with his unreasonable expectations. Many works of art have depicted Kronos, but the most famous is Goya’s Saturn Devouring One of His Sons.

Jay Scott Morgan describes this masterpiece:

Cover the right side of the face, and we see a Titan caught in the act, defying anyone to stop him, the bulging left eye staring wildly at some unseen witness to his savagery, his piratical coarseness heightened by the sharp vertical lines of the eyebrow, crossed like the stitches of a scar. Cover his left eye, and we are confronted by a being in pain, the dark pupil gazing down in horror at his own uncontrolled murderousness, the eyebrow curved upwards like an inverted question mark, as if he were asking, “Why am I compelled to do this?”

Kronos is the fabric of our daily lives. Benjamin Franklin equated Time, the ancient god, with money, the new one. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver told the Lilliputians that his watch determined every action of his life. They concluded that it must be his god. Now we carry Time’s temple with us continually, on our wrists.

Ouranos and Kronos are ancient images of archetypal patterns. As such, they are extreme models of fathering. Few fathers express only one of them purely; rather, most of us seem to share aspects of both patterns.

Among men of our generation, Ouranos – the absent father – is more prevalent. But for most men throughout Western history, Kronos – the devouring father – has been a more powerful determinant of social patterns.

As different as these images are from each other, most images of fathering within patriarchy have two things in common. First, they are narcissists who won’t acknowledge the needs or even the subjectivity of their children. Second, by refusing to share life’s abundance, they encourage sibling rivalry and establish the belief that all good things, from food to love to petroleum, are scarce and must be earned.

These mythic figures profoundly influence masculine psychology as well as the course of modern history. The connection is simple: if masculinity in a society is formed in such a narrow range, then power elites will always manipulate men toward the expression of power in war and mass conformism. In such a world, most men will choose power over love.

The Hebrews:

The second major mythic tradition comes from Hebrew myth, where Jehovah shares elements of both Ouranos and Kronos. He is distant and unknowable, yet jealous and vindictive. He regularly tests the loyalty of the Israelites, and his relationship with them is marked by the constant threat of sacrifice.

When Ham accidentally discovered his father Noah naked, Noah cursed Canaan, one of Ham’s sons, and all of his descendants. Noah’s other sons escaped the curse by covering their eyes so as not to see him naked. Assenting to Ham’s curse, they gained Noah’s approval. Indeed, biblical brothers often fight each other (Cain/Abel, Jacob/Esau, Joseph and his brothers, Amnon/Absolom) instead of their fathers. Unlike the Greeks, the Hebrew patriarchs seemed to deliberately promote sibling rivalry, knowing that if brothers were to love each other, they might unite and overthrow the fathers.

Child sacrifice is a common Old Testament theme. Jehovah accused the Israelites: “… you slaughtered my children and presented them as offerings!” Like the pagans, they “shed innocent blood, even the blood of their sons and daughters,” wrote the Psalmist, “whom they sacrificed unto the altars of Canaan…” When Phineas murdered a Hebrew for sleeping with a pagan woman (he murdered her as well), God was pleased: “Phineas turned my wrath away…he was zealous for my sake, so that I consumed not the children of Israel in my jealousy.” Lot offered Sodom his two virgin daughters to “do ye to them as is good in your eyes.”

Most significantly, Abraham – father of Judeo-Christian-Moslem monotheism – was willing to sacrifice Isaac to prove his loyalty to God. The “Binding of Isaac” is called the Aqedah in Hebrew and the Dhabih or "Slaughter" in Arabic, and Jews, Christians and Muslims have debated its significance for hundreds of years. (see Abraham's Curse: The Roots of Violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam by Bruce Chilton).

Chilton writes, “Different versions of Genesis 22 circulated in an immensely varied tradition…in Rabbinic sources and – with key changes – in both Christian and Islamic texts.” In many of these later versions, Isaac was indeed sacrificed.

I invite you to consider symbolic interpretations of this story. But for our purposes, its meaning is clear: whatever Abraham did or didn’t do, he was willing to murder his son to appease the father god, and men have taken this model quite literally for many hundreds of years. “Uniquely among the religions of the world,” writes Chilton, “the three that center on Abraham have made the willingness to offer the lives of children – an action they all symbolize with versions of the Aqedah – a central virtue for the faithful as a whole.”

Generally, however, the patriarchs couldn’t openly admit that men – at least Hebrew men – had such barbaric potential, so they projected child sacrifice onto the gods – such as Moloch – of other people. Only other people – the Other – would do this.

Later, Christians learned that “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son.” There may very well be convincing symbolic explanations for this quote, but we are talking about how a culture became so “demythologized” (in Joseph Campbell’s terms) that most people have no alternative but to take their myths quite literally.  

As Jesus hung in terrible agony on the cross, God confirmed the most fundamental theme of Western culture when he abandoned his son. When Jesus asked, “Father, why have you forsaken me?” he was actually quoting from Psalm 22. Written1,000 years before, it acknowledged the centuries of abuse, betrayal and the profound depression – or unquenchable rage – they produce. Whether Hebrew or Greek, patriarchs have repeatedly slaughtered the innocent.

So where does Jesus, the god of loving compassion, fit into this mythic tradition? Three days after his death, the tomb is empty. Jesus has gone to the invisible world to be with his father. But what of those he leaves behind? From humanity’s perspective, going to Heaven to join the father god is, simply, like Ouranos, to leave. By doing so, Jesus contributes to the narrow modeling of fatherhood that I’ve been describing. This is the model – one followed by millions of modern fathers: when things get difficult – in relationship, in community, in dealing with women or children, or with any strong emotions, it is better to leave. Psychologically speaking, to stay is to remain vulnerable to the fear that we associate with emotional commitment. So we leave physically, or even if we stay, we leave emotionally, through substance abuse or workaholism.

This default mode of leaving when things get difficult is entirely consistent with the pattern of the American hero that I have described in other writings. This hero, in hundreds of incarnations through the centuries, generally leaves the community once his work of violent redemption has been completed.

Two thousand years later, at most American funerals, mourners are reassured that the deceased has gone to “a better place,” he or she has gone to “be with God.”

A quick digression: Years after the National Guard shot four students dead at Kent State University (in 1970), a memorial to the students was commissioned. The job went to the well-known sculptor George Segal. But the university rejected his offer, a representation of Abraham about to murder Isaac.

It wasn’t always like this. For thousands of years, tribal initiation rituals had symbolically killed the boys in order to turn them into men. However, when young men go to war and enact the myths of self-sacrifice for the approval of their fathers, symbolic death becomes literal death. In their unconscious longing for initiation, they attempt to defeat Father Time through heroism and self-sacrifice. Psychologist Robert Moore writes, “There is no way to understand the attractiveness of war without understanding the unconscious seduction of the archetype of initiation.”

The myths I’ve described are absolutely central to Western consciousness. They describe basic father-son relationships and indicate how long it has been since initiation rituals broke down. For at least three millennia, patriarchs have conducted pseudo-initiations, feeding their sons into the infinite maw of violence. Such rituals always include both a threat and a deal: Submit to our authority or else. Sacrifice your individuality and your emotions. In exchange you may dominate your women and children.

Indeed, it was their great genius – and primordial crime – to extend child-sacrifice from the family to the state. Boys eventually were forced to participate in the sacrifice. No longer surrendering to symbolic death, they learned to, in a sense, overcome death by inflicting it on others.

Ultimately, sacrifice – dying for the cause – became as important as killing for the cause. Martyrdom became an ethical virtue that every believer must be prepared to emulate. Wilfred Owen’s poem Dulce et Decorum Est that many of you know speaks to a military motto that goes back to the Romans (“It is a sweet and noble thing to die for your country”). Owens wrote – and died – during World War One, which caused 37 million casualties, or 25,000 casualties per day, every day, for four years.

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,


Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,


Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs


And towards our distant rest began to trudge.


Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots


But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;


Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots


Of gas shells dropping softly behind.



GAS! Gas! Quick, boys! -- An ecstasy of fumbling,


Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;


But someone still was yelling out and stumbling


And floundering like a man in fire or lime.

Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light


As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.



In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,


He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.



If in some smothering dreams you too could pace


Behind the wagon that we flung him in,


And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,


His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;


If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood


Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,


Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud


Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,


My friend, you would not tell with such high zest


To children ardent for some desperate glory,


The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est


Pro patria mori.

War allows old men to project their ambivalence toward their own unhealed and uninitiated inner selves onto actual youths. It is deferred infanticide, the revenge of the old upon the young.

In another great poem by Owen speaks more directly to the mythic roots of the issue:

Parable of the Old Man and the Young

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,

And took the fire with him, and a knife.

And as they sojourned both of them together,

Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,

Behold the preparations, fire and iron,

But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?

Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,

and builded parapets and trenches there,

And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.

When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,

Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,

Neither do anything to him. Behold,

A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;

Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,

And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

These are very practical issues. Men’s groups often wrestle with such questions:

-- Was your father more a Kronos type or an Ouranos?

-- What type of father are you?

-- How was the curse cast? What is the image? Where do you hold it in your body?

-- How does it affect your sense of masculinity and your relationships?

-- Was your father under the same curse?

-- Do you cast it on others? On yourself?

-- How is it activated in you?

-- How do you break the curse? How do you fail?

Killing the Children Throughout History

Yet don’t we idealize our children? Parents commonly deny their own needs so that “the children” might have a better future, and government demonizes and punishes those suspected of harming them. We go to war so the children may be free, and so on.

We love children because the archetypal child symbolizes rebirth, transformation and innocence. Christ said that to enter “the kingdom” one must be as innocent as those whose minds and bodies are still undivided by civilization. So the child personifies the lost unity adults long for – which most adults, however, cannot recover without being psychologically “dismembered.” Thus children also evoke the suffering to be endured on the road back to wholeness, and the grief over what we have lost. Consequently, many adults are compelled to destroy that image, to remove it from consciousness and replace it with idealization.

Why else would we bloviate about family values and threats to “the children” while gleefully destroying social programs proven to keep families together? Why else would Americans even debate the notion of punishing children simply because their parents are poor?

The mythological perspective tells us that these things can only happen in a society that is deeply ambivalent about its own children. “Some things,” writes psychologist David Bakan, “are simply too terrible to think about if one believes them. Thus one does not believe them in order to make it possible to think about them.” Idealization is the way we keep the secret that our culture is built upon sacrifice of our actual children.

Lloyd de Mause begins his survey of the vast literature on European child-raising: “The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awake.” Christians long believed that children were inherently perverse: “The new-born babe is full of the stains and pollution of sin, which it inherits from our first parents through our loins.” They required extreme discipline and early baptism, which used to include actual exorcism of the Devil. Initiation rites became further literalized in child abuse, with customs ranging from tight swaddling and steel collars to foot binding, genital circumcision and rape.

There is considerable evidence of the literal killing of both illegitimate children (at least as late as the 19th century) and legitimate ones, especially girls, in Europe. As a result, there was a large imbalance of males over females well into the Middle Ages. Physical and sexual abuse was so common that most children born prior to the 18th century were what would today be termed “battered children.” However, the medical syndrome itself didn’t arise among doctors until 1962, when regular use of x-rays revealed widespread multiple fractures in the limbs of small children who were too young to complain verbally.

What kind of people do these patterns produce? De Mause argues that war and genocide do “…not occur in the absence of widespread early abuse and neglect,” that nations with particularly abusive and punitive childrearing practices emphasize military solutions and state violence in resolving social conflicts. Furthermore,  “Children brought up with love and respect simply do not scapegoat…”

“Americans,” writes James Hillman, “love the idea of childhood no matter how brutal or vacuous their actual childhoods may have been.” We idealize childhood because our actual childhood did not serve its purpose, which was to provide a container of welcome into the world that would be the necessary precursor for initiation into mature adulthood. Without such preparation, we assume that alienation is the true nature of maturity. And if humans have no true animating spark, neither does the natural world.  So generation after generation of young men will be motivated to project their own need for rebirth onto the world and set out to literally destroy it. This is how Patriarchy perpetuates itself. In each generation, millions of abused children identify with their adult oppressors and become violent perpetrators themselves. In a demythologized world, they have no choice but to act out the myths of the killing of the children on a massive scale.

http://madnessatthegates.wordpress.com/2013/05/16/barrys-blog-59-war-on-terror-or-war-on-your-imagination-the-boston-bombing/

A month after the Boston tragedy, now that the media have moved on to other distractions, it’s time to reconsider this difficult and painful theme. The national security state has, for a very long time, taken advantage of – or actively created – violent conditions in order to re-activate our American paranoia about the evil “Other.” Enough circumstantial evidence has accumulated, even in the corporate media, to indicate that the bombing was no exception.

This blog is less of an essay and more a collection of articles grouped by theme. I invite you to consider the mythic implications of these issues.

1—The FBI: We now know that the FBI has enabled, aided, funded and then entrapped wannabe “terrorists” in the great majority of so-called domestic terror events over the past ten years. Notice that the fourth article in this group appeared in the New York Times.

The Boston Bombings in Context: How the FBI Fosters, Funds and Equips American Terrorists:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-boston-bombings-in-context-how-the-fbi-fosters-funds-and-equips-american-terrorists/5331872

FBI's History of Handing "Terror Suspects" Live Explosives:

http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2013/04/fbis-history-of-handing-terror-suspects.html?utm_source=BP_recent

FBI's apparent entrapment of San Jose man continues its track record: http://wanttoknow.info/a-fbis-apparent-entrapment-san-jose-man-continues-its-track-record

Terrorist Plots, Hatched by the F.B.I.:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/terrorist-plots-helped-along-by-the-fbi.html?_r=0

Newburgh Four: poor, black, and jailed under FBI 'entrapment' tactics:

http://www.wanttoknow.info/a-newburgh-four-poor-black-jailed-under-fbi-entrapment-tactics

2 – The Tsarnaev Brothers: These articles deal specifically with the Boston event. There is no doubt that the FBI was very well aware of the Tsarnaevs prior to the bombing. What’s not clear is how much it knew. But that’s why it is important to place this event in the broader context that the first group of articles laid out. Most of these articles have been written by alternative investigative reporters, but note again that one appeared in the Chicago Tribune.

Boston Bomber Controlled by FBI:

http://www.infowars.com/boston-bomber-was-controlled-by-fbi/

Russia caught bomb suspect on wiretap:

http://news.yahoo.com/apnewsbreak-russia-caught-bomb-suspect-wiretap-211814701.html

FBI interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev two years ago:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/parents-of-boston-marathon-bombing-suspects-defend-their-sons-and-father-reveals-fbi-interviewed-tamerlan-tsarnaev-two-years-ago-8581259.html

Boston suspect was under FBI surveillance, mother says: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-rt-us-usa-explosions-boston-motherbre93j0ae-20130420,0,7073219.story

The Russians Warned Us – Why Didn’t We Listen? http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/04/23/the-russians-warned-us-why-didnt-we-listen/

FBI Spiked Chechen Jihadi Investigation: http://us4.campaign-archive1.com/?u=33e4ec877eed6a43863a4a92e&id=e198c81345&e=fbce8339f6

Clear Evidence Points to Bomb Squad’s Prior Knowledge:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/official-story-unraveling-for-boston-marathon-bombing-clear-evidence-points-to-bomb-squads-prior-knowledge/5331559

3 – Political Opportunism: Even though the corporate media will occasionally acknowledge unpopular viewpoints, they rarely take the next step and put small truths into a broader perspective that might question our mythic assumptions about American innocence. So it’s up others to ask the traditional question: Qui bono? (Who would profit?)

Since the bombing, the same FBI that was (at best) so incompetent at monitoring terror suspects, despite its massive powers and budget, has asked for still more resources and relaxed legal guidelines to monitor social networks and other internet traffic in real time. And the President appears to be favoring such further impositions on privacy.

U.S. Weighs Wide Overhaul of Wiretap Laws:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/08/us/politics/obama-may-back-fbi-plan-to-wiretap-web-users.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Obama May Back FBI Push for Total Internet Surveillance Law:

http://news.antiwar.com/2013/05/07/obama-may-back-fbi-push-for-total-internet-surveillance-law/

And then there’s the broader context of global militarization:

The Boston Marathon Tragedy Used as a Pretext To Extend the “Global War on Terrorism”: http://www.globalresearch.ca/political-opportunism-the-boston-marathon-tragedy-used-as-a-pretext-to-extend-the-global-war-on-terrorism/5332709

Boston police chief wants drones for next year’s marathon: http://rt.com/usa/boston-marathon-surveillance-drones-452/

Boston Bombings: Detonator to Mobilize the Entire US Security Apparatus. http://www.globalresearch.ca/boston-bombings-detonator-to-mobilize-the-entire-us-security-apparatus-may-change-the-world-for-the-worse/5333529

Conclusions: What does all this lead to? We have three main avenues of speculation.

1 – Ignorance and incompetence. For those who are not interested in conspiracies (I have to use that term because everyone else does), this is the least threatening scenario. We are told – just as in the months before 9-11 – that the largest, most comprehensive, most expensive security system in world history had utterly failed to notice the massive evidence of a planned terrorist event. All that money had been wasted, and in the case of 9-11, every single top manager (none of whom accepted blame and all of whom were subsequently promoted) was utterly incompetent.

2 – Complicity and incompetence. There seems to be little doubt that most domestic “terrorist” events since 2001 have been concocted deliberately so as to raise, maintain and take advantage of a constant state of fear in the United States. The FBI knew something was going to happen, because they had enabled the bombers but were unable – too incompetent – to stop it.

3 – Complicity and cynicism. Here we venture into what the gatekeepers call “conspiracism,” because we simply can’t ignore the most critical fact to emerge around the Boston bombing: long-term FBI involvement and encouragement of potential terrorists. In this scenario, the national security establishment knew very well that something was about to happen – because they had cynically enabled the bombers – and did nothing to stop it, because of the compelling propaganda and economic benefits. In this scenario, certain persons smiled knowingly when, two days after the bombing, they watched video of the crowd at the Boston Bruins hockey game (a sport known for fighting) singing the national anthem with uncharacteristic fervor (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzMsagY7oRs). In this scenario, the veil of innocence had dropped down over the nation once again.

http://madnessatthegates.wordpress.com/2013/05/02/barrys-blog-58-tamerlan-tsarnaev-when-the-american-dream-becomes-the-american-nightmare/

Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.  – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Americans have always dreamed big dreams. Perhaps, having invented the phrase “American Dream,” we may well dream bigger dreams than other people. However, when our expectations are unfulfilled, we also fall much farther than others. Gaps between aspiration and reality – the lost dream – are also far higher here than anywhere else.

America was born in Puritanism, and that ideology remains profoundly influential. In its modern form it tells us (wrote Ben Franklin, not Jesus), “God helps those who help themselves.” However, there are darker implications to our American story – six out of seven of us still believe that people fail because of their own shortcomings, not because of social conditions.

Historian Greil Marcus writes, “To be an American is to feel the promise as a birthright, and to feel alone and haunted when the promise fails. No failure in America, whether of love or money, is ever simple; it is always a kind of betrayal.”

But the promise of success (and consequent acceptance among the chosen) always appears just up ahead, and it contributes to a characteristically American ignorance about many of our social values, especially social mobility, the opportunity to get ahead. The likelihood of advancing in social class has decreased significantly since the 1980s. But fifty-six percent of those blue-collar men who correctly perceived George W. Bush’s 2003 tax cuts as favoring the rich still supported them. The myth of the self-made man is as deeply engrained as our wild, naïve optimism; in 2000, nineteen percent believed they would “soon” be in the top one percent income bracket, and another nineteen percent thought they already were. Two-thirds expected to have to pay the estate tax one day (only two percent will). These attitudes have softened since those polls were taken, but only a bit.

Our mythology, born in monotheistic dualism, claims competitive individualism as its highest value. For this reason, unlike older, indigenous perspectives, it offers only one alternative to the Hero, and that is the victim or loser. And when our assumptions of social mobility are revealed as fiction, the hero encounters this shadow within himself. This lifting of the veils often proves to be unbearable.

“America,” says mythologist Glen Slater, “has little imagination for loss and failure. It only knows how to move forward.” We go ballistic when we can only imagine moving forward and that movement is blocked. Then violence becomes the purest expression of controlling one’s fate. As such, it is “the dark epitome of the self-made way of life.”

When we don’t meet our expectations of success, when the gap between the dream and the reality gap gets too wide, violence often becomes the only option, the expression of a fantasy of ultimate individualism and control. In this sense, the Mafia is more American then Sicilian, and the lone, mass killer (almost all of whom have been white, middle class men with no criminal background) is an expression of social mobility gone bad.

This pathology may well be even stronger among one particular type of American. Sociologists often describe recent immigrants as “more American than Americans,” who are willing to work longer and harder because of their undiluted faith in the dream. But just below the optimism we may also find deep anger.

Enter Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston bomber. Here I will be relying on Dave Zirin’s excellent article, “A Fighter by His Trade: Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Sports and the American Dream” (http://www.thenation.com/blog/174080/fighter-his-trade-tamerlan-tsarnaev-sports-and-american-dream).

The media have described Tsarnaev as a “one-time boxer.” Actually, he was a two-time New England Golden Gloves Heavyweight Champion, and a flamboyant showman at that. He was, writes Zirin, “America as learned through a television screen,” with ambitions as big as his success. He wanted to represent the U.S. in the Olympics and then turn pro.

He was about to compete in the National Golden Gloves Tournament of Champions. However, the esteemed boxing organization changed their rules for admittance. The Golden Gloves, at the height of Tsarnaev’s powers as a fighter, ceased its ninety-year-old practice of allowing legally documented immigrants to take part in their tournament. Thus, Tsarnaev (and three other New England champions—all immigrants) were not allowed to compete. Dejected and depressed, he quit the sport.

As dozens of interviews with friends, acquaintances and relatives showed, his devotion to radical Islam “was a path he followed most avidly only after his more secular dreams were dashed in 2010 and he was left adrift.”

“Adrift meant food stamps and unemployment, as he needed to stay home and watch their infant daughter. Adrift meant feeling a new sense of belonging in political and religious doctrine that spoke of war against United States.”

Adrift (I would add) meant loss of the dream, a descent into victimization and a desperate search for a way to transform his despair into a sense of active heroism – or a sense of meaningful sacrifice, which in this context is very similar.

Zirin concludes:

“For over a century, sports has been the entryway for many immigrants and people of color to feel a sense of belonging in the turbulent ethnic stew that is the United States. The first Public School Athletic Leagues and YMCAs in the nineteenth century were underwritten by industrialists as a means of ‘Americanizing’ the masses arriving in record numbers from Eastern Europe…sports would be the first step…toward leaving behind radical socialist European ideologies and buying in to the idea of the American Dream…the doctrine that anyone who works hard enough could climb the competitive ladder…

Similar hopes of finally having a seat at the American table have been projected onto athletes of color such as Jackie Robinson, Roberto Clemente and, most recently, Jeremy Lin. Their acceptance—or the myth of their acceptance—was treasured by immigrants and people of color as a sign that this country wasn’t just for Caucasians of pure European stock. How horribly ironic that this athletic avenue of acculturation closed in the face of someone who would have been at home in that late nineteenth century wave for whom the PSAL was created: an immigrant from Eastern Europe.

…the means by which people have historically felt a sense of having a stake in this country have been inexorably altered in the post-9/11 world. This is now a nation defined and scarred by the cruel anti-immigrant policies of both Presidents Bush and Obama. It’s now a nation defined and scarred by pushing people away from that historic safe haven for immigrants otherwise known as competitive sports. It’s a nation that spawned the brothers Tsarnaev.”

It’s a nation in which failure feels like betrayal, where the lone hero becomes the lone victim, who becomes the lone gunman.

Ending this essay with that phrase, I do not mean to imply that I share the conventional assumption – think Lee Harvey Oswald – that the brothers acted solely on their own without being entrapped by the FBI. This is a subject I will explore in my next blog.

http://madnessatthegates.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/barrys-blog-57-gatekeeping-in-the-desert-part-3/

I ended my previous blog by quoting George Kennan, the architect of the containment doctrine, who wrote in 1995 that there had never been “…the slightest danger of a Soviet military attack.” Significantly, he waited to admit that the Cold War had been a lie until after Saddam Hussein had become America’s favorite symbol of the Other.

In 1987, however, Kennan, unable to restrain himself, had predicted, “Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented” (my italics).

Again, we look at our primary mythmakers – Hollywood – to see how the nation was so willing to overlook the lies. In the 1980s, the memory of Viet Nam remained a blemish on the skin of American myth, and public opinion was still solidly against intervention in Central America. So Hollywood was assigned the task of re-writing the war. Revenge fantasies starring lone, persecuted heroes such as Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Morris made men feel better about themselves and about war. These films deliberately inverted reality, using the old theme of the captivity narrative. Now and in our future movie memory, the Vietnamese (in over a dozen films) became the torturers, although Russians commonly directed them. “Myth,” writes James Gibson, “readily substitutes one enemy for another…If Russian white men really controlled and directed the yellow Vietnamese, then the U.S. defeat becomes more understandable and belief in white supremacy is confirmed.”

Other post-Viet Nam films included Red Dawn, Invasion U.S.A., Red Scorpion, Firefox, Top Gun, The Hunt for Red October, The Falcon and the Snowman, etc. For more on direct collusion between Hollywood and the military, see David Sirota’s article, “How Your Taxpayer Dollars Subsidize Pro-War Movies and Block Anti-War Movies (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/how-your-taxpayer-dollars_b_836574.html?ref=email_share).

Ronald Reagan mastered the intermittent reinforcement of denial and fear, reassuring white Americans that Eden was secure, and terrifying them with prospects of immanent nuclear war. As President, he described the external, communist Other with demonizing rhetoric: evil empire, shadowy, fanatics, satanic and profane. The corporate media complied. Long before Fox News, Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report commonly depicted Russians as savages, dupes, adventurers, despots and barbarians. Their methods were brutal, treacherous, conniving, unmanly, aggressive and animalistic. “Unmanly” yet “aggressive” – only the Prince of Darkness himself (or Dionysus) could hold such contradictory projections.

Despite their 12,000 nuclear warheads, Americans were informed that they needed the “Star Wars” missile defense. The greatest power in history couldn’t protect itself from the barbarians outside without appealing to the high-tech gods. Nor could it solve the internal threat without building more prisons and establishing SWAT teams in every city.

After seventy years and trillions of dollars wasted, the U.S.S.R. collapsed. The result was worldwide euphoria. Sixty percent of Americans favored huge cuts in defense and a “peace dividend” that would eliminate poverty. But visions of infinite wealth drove the new opportunists, who demanded further deregulation and increased military spending. Other visions drove the Puritans. Psychologist Lionel Corbett suggests that such people cannot tolerate peace, because happiness produces guilt and the desire to be punished, especially if we feel too greedy. But neither greed nor guilt could generate support for new aggressive policies. Fear could do that, and this required a new external Other.

Over the years, the image of the external Other had shifted from the Indians, resting briefly on Mexicans, Spanish, Germans and Japanese before finding its home among the Communists. However, there was always a problem with “othering” the grey-suited and anonymous Russians: despite their slightly exotic, Slavic features, they were white.

Around 1985, the Other became more personal – and darker – when television identified many charismatic Third World villains. After the first generation (Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro) came Moammar Khadaffy, Idi Amin, Yasser Arafat, Ayatollah Khomeini, Manuel Noriega, Kim Il Sung, Slobodan Milosevic, Hugo Chavez, Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden and perhaps the greatest of all, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was too good to be true: a Holocaust denier who sought to possess nuclear weapons.

Note three themes here. First, U.S. propaganda attacks were often timed to impact (or obscure) domestic issues. Second, only Milosevic was white (but Slavic). Third, several of these men had previously worked for the Americans. Back in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt had said of Nicaragua’s Anastacio Somoza, “He’s an S.O.B., but he’s our S.O.B.” It is as if the U.S.’s long-term policy has been to keep the worst murderers on ice, allowing them to quietly do their work and amass their fortunes until it needs to reveal them as the Devil’s latest incarnation. Then they become expendable, or, as with Bin Laden, even more valuable as fugitives, hiding in caves and bazaars, plotting more evil out there.

When Communists became our friends, it was a dizzying experience for older Americans, who grew up fearing Russians, then Germans and Japanese, then Russians again, along with Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Nicaraguans, Iranians and Arabs, while Germans and Japanese became allies. Still, Hollywood took years to portray Russians (in 2001’s Enemy at the Gates) or Vietnamese (in 2002’s We Were Soldiers) as moral agents. By then, the image of the Other had shifted.

Renewing the myth of innocence requires something more than small-time dictators. As Communism disappeared, conservatives found the answer. Terrorists hated freedom and meant to destroy our way of life. Wily, shifty, turbaned, bearded, they almost invariably had dark skin. And they were already among us; once again, no one could be trusted.

Indeed, militant Islam had been growing for three reasons. First, the U.S. had eliminated almost all secular forms of resistance to Western domination, while staunchly supporting Israel. Second, it spent billions supporting fundamentalists in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. Third, it needed an Other.

An American general had lamented, “The drug war is the only war we’ve got.” The Gulf War made violence acceptable again with its video game images, and pacifist euphoria dissipated. George Bush boasted, “Viet Nam has been buried forever in the desert sands.” Saddam, more valuable to the myth as the face of evil than as ex-dictator, remained in power for another twelve years. An official candidly admitted, “Saddam…saved us from the peace dividend.”

Sensing the opportunity, Hollywood contributed Rules of Engagement, Iron Eagle, True Lies, The Siege, Delta Force, Harem, Executive Decision, Forbidden Love, The Kingdom, Four Feathers, 24 and many other films, video games and TV shows that demonized Muslims. By 2012, critical praise for Zero Dark Thirty and Argo showed that the demonization genre had become accepted, middle-of-the-road fair.

In the year 2000, the U.S. had over a thousand military bases in other countries. Pundits bragged, “Others welcome our power.” Exactly the same pompous yet mythically effective rhetoric had rallied the innocents in 1900 as Americans massacred Filipinos, in 1800 as they subsidized repression in Haiti, and in 1700 as they slaughtered Indians and took over their lands.

I have written extensively elsewhere about the extremes to which our government has gone to increase fear and anxiety over the past thirteen years. I hope that these last three essays have provided the background that explains our national willingness to accept its propaganda. At every point during the Cold War, and at every point since its end, the U. S. government, no matter who is President, has relied on the fear of unprovoked attack by the evil Other to justify its massively wasteful and destructive military empire.

I write these essays in the week after the Boston Marathon bombing. Already, one old friend from Boston has informed me of her new support for “law enforcement.” Already, Secretary of Defense Hagel has offered Israel yet another new weapon deal and mused publicly about Israel’s right to unilaterally attack Iran. And let’s be clear about this one: The U.S.’s own intelligence agencies have concluded that Iran has no intentions to build a nuclear bomb (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/world/middleeast/us-agencies-see-no-move-by-iran-to-build-a-bomb.html).

I ask you not to fall for the inevitable calls for increased preparedness, further restrictions on civil liberties and a halt to immigration reform.

And I ask you not to fall for Barack Obama’s self-righteous condemnation of Republicans for not passing gun control. Not until he stops saying (in regard to Iran) that “all options are on the table.”

http://madnessatthegates.wordpress.com/2013/04/20/barrys-blog-56-gatekeeping-in-the-desert-part-two/

To really understand the Cold War and its relevance to our contemporary world, we must take another detour through myth. The birth of the national security state coincided precisely with the peak popularity of western movies. Westerns had been central to the movies from the beginning. In 1910, more than twenty percent of American films were westerns, and the trend continued. In 1959, westerns comprised one quarter of all prime-time network hours. Eleven of the top twenty-five shows were westerns.

The genre attracted audiences worldwide, but it also evoked ambivalence. People throughout the Third World understood perfectly well that they were the Indians in these stories. Many connected American affluence to the theft of their resources by post-colonial oligarchs. While they lived in darkness, Americans appeared to be enjoying the brilliant light of their all-electric kitchens.

The range of acceptable discourse in our corporate media still frames the Cold War in terms of America’s heroic containment of Soviet expansionism. The media does this for an important reason. Since our paranoid American imagination (with the media’s help) has simply replaced the Soviet threat with the War on Terror, the motives of our leaders must be consistent: protecting America from the irrational, evil Other, who “hates us for our freedoms,” as George Bush said.

According to Noam Chomsky, however, classified U.S. government documents in the late 1940s acknowledged that the primary threat after World War Two was not Soviet expansionism but Europe’s “…refusal to subordinate their economies to…the West.”

It is certainly true that the Soviets brutally dominated Eastern Europe. However, no political scientist will ever be able to explain to what degree Soviet policies expressed the fanatic excesses of totalitarianism, or to what degree they were a paranoid reaction to forty years of German – and American – aggression. What we do know is that in May 1945, Brittan once again prepared plans for invading the U.S.S.R. (as it and America had done after World War One), “to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire."

 “The purpose of propaganda,” writes psychologist Sam Keen, “is to paralyze thought, to prevent discrimination, and to condition individuals to act as a mass.” It is critical to understand how quickly all of our major institutions (government, media, universities and churches) converted post-war optimism into hysteria, since this was neither the first nor the last time this has happened. In demonizing communists, they utilized the mythic narratives that Americans had already been consuming for fifteen generations.

Mere months after Hiroshima, Life Magazine depicted rockets raining down on America from the east, predicting millions of dead. Advisors told President Truman in 1947 that in order to win approval for his foreign policy of perpetual militarism he would have to “scare hell out of the country.” His Attorney General publicly warned that communists “…are everywhere – in factories, offices – and each carries with him the germs of death for society.” J. Edgar Hoover declared that “Communists are today at work within the very gates of America.” The madness was already inside the gates…

Propaganda films (do you remember “newsreels”?) portrayed Russia threatening Europe with its tentacles, or as a grapevine (the perfect image of Dionysus) spreading over the map. Week after week, they depicted a state of crisis, and with no alternative voices in the major media, reality was what appeared onscreen. Politicians brayed, “Like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one, the corruption of Greece would infect Iran…this red tide… like some vile creeping thing…spreading its web westward…”

Americanism now had a “higher power” (the state), dogma (anticommunism), zealots (the F.B.I.), modes of excommunication (the Hollywood blacklist) and clergy. Billy Graham, America’s most famous preacher, declared that communism was “a religion inspired…by the Devil himself.” Religion: what other word can describe the all-encompassing force that anticommunism injected into American life, how the fear, as well as the sense of identity, spread?

In this sense, 1950s Americanism can be called a negative ideology, of mere opposition to or fear of another way of thinking. Or we could call it a religion of denial, because it allowed nuclear bellicosity, neo-colonialism and de facto segregation to coincide with the ideals of freedom and opportunity. Millions resolved this dilemma in the only way they could, by accepting the unrelenting propaganda and agreeing that to be American was to be anticommunist. “If Americans could only band together against the common red foe,” writes Joel Kovel, “they would know who they were.”

A half-century before the “Neo-Cons,” reactionaries were willing to say absolutely anything to amplify fear. From this point on, we can follow the predatory imagination to its logical extreme – doing whatever is necessary. But the myth of noble American intentions is so pervasive that generations would pass before liberals, themselves innocent believers in “fair play,” would even begin to understand that conservatives had never played by the rules.

It was the time of HUAC, McCarthyism and bomb shelters. Children crawled under desks as practice for protection from atomic blasts, while the U.S. Air Force decimated Korea. The FBI intimidated unions, school boards and universities, where 600 instructors were fired. Some 2,700 federal workers lost jobs, and 12,000 resigned. As in the Salem witch trials of 1692, one could save oneself by naming names. The hysteria was a sobering reminder of how thin a veil our modern temperament is, how mythic furies still drive our imagination.

What makes this period so maddening, and so similar to our present time, however, is that millions managed to deny the hysteria by immersing themselves in consumer delights, vacuous sitcoms or paranoid narratives (Foreign Intrigue, I Spy, Passport to Danger, I Led Three Lives, The Day North America Is Attacked and Nightmare In Red.) Subtler film allegories (Invaders from Mars, The Manchurian Candidate and Invasion of the Body Snatchers) expressed the fear – or fantasy – of pollution. The 1953 version of The War of the Worlds ends by warning: “Keep watching the Sky. Stay vigilant against another attack.” The Blob featured a shapeless, red jelly that, like Dionysus, seeped effortlessly through all man-made boundaries. People reported alien abductions.

Later, Hollywood mythologized the C.I.A. James Bond, with his “license to kill,” reincarnated the Redemption Hero, exempt from all laws (a privilege that both of our recent Presidents have claimed for themselves).

Despite, or perhaps because of the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine, neither side could instigate nuclear strikes without being destroyed itself. The Cold War, however, rarely involved direct confrontation. Instead, as Chomsky has argued, a tacit compact developed that allowed a sharing of world management. The Soviets dominated their satellites in Eastern Europe, while the U.S. was free to overthrow Third World democracies. From this perspective, consider this 1960 statement by General Thomas Power, commander of the Strategic Air Command: “At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win.” Was this the joke of a psychopath or cynical hyperbole deliberately intended to maximize anxiety? Or would only the former do the latter?

Before the hysteria dissipated, complete trust in anyone was impossible – just as in the Titan missile bunker I described in my previous blog – because “they” could be anyone or anywhere. The propaganda was effective because it relied upon three centuries of American paranoid mythology.

In its fear, the public supported undemocratic security measures that the government (as it would in 2001) claimed were necessary to protect democracy. In a 1954 poll, seventy-eight percent of Americans agreed that it was a good idea to report any neighbors they suspected of being Communists. Indeed, for a decade the red communist supplanted the black man as both “inner” and “outer” Other.

Later, however – much later, in 1995 – George Kennan, the architect of “containment,” admitted, “…there was not the slightest danger of a Soviet military attack.” The Cold War and all of the vicious genocides it engendered throughout the Third World, had been the most expensive lie in history. Part three of this essay will take the story in the direction of the present.

http://madnessatthegates.wordpress.com/2013/04/18/barrys-blog-55-gatekeeping-in-the-desert-part-one/

Nestled on a quiet hillside among the saguaro cacti and ocotillo plants twenty miles south of Tucson, the Titan Missile Museum preserves one of the many bases that targeted the Soviet Union for over twenty years with bombs that could have destroyed all life on Earth. It is a shrine to peace through strength, or, depending on your point of view, to the madness of technology divorced from ethics.

After browsing the gift shop (nuclear war card games, “Got Nukes?” T-shirts, “Fallout” red wine, iron-on hammer-and-sickle shoulder patches, old Geiger counters, cans of emergency drinking water and “Watch for Aliens” street signs), we enter the museum.

The tour begins with a film narrated by a white-coated scientist who wears a beard and a long ponytail. He looks quite geeky, but to Sunbelt tourists he could also be the stereotyped image of a former peace protester who has seen the light. Technology has saved the world.

He tells the conventional history of the Cold War: how American ingenuity and know-how provided the means for successful deterrence of the Soviet threat. In the doctrine that came to be known as Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), both sides understood that neither could start a nuclear war without being annihilated by the other; thus, strength and preparedness kept the peace. The “scientist” (almost certainly an actor) is functioning as a gatekeeper. To pass through this checkpoint and go on the tour, we must listen to a sanitized version of history that ignores Hiroshima, the fire-bombings of Dresden and Tokyo, CIA-sponsored coups in countless countries, three million dead in Southeast Asia, a half-million dead in Latin America and many trillions of dollars wasted.

We note the relevance of this thinking to the current gun control debate – the NRA’s insane argument of peace in the schools through arming absolutely everyone. We also note the mythic nature of his narrative: American motives were pure and innocent; the Soviets were the aggressors. Like the terrorists of George W. Bush’s era, they hated our freedoms.

But the truth is that at almost point from 1945 to 1990, the U.S. attempted to achieve technological superiority for first-strike capability (including "Star Wars"), that the USSR was constantly playing catch-up, and that such attempts were used as evidence of the need for further billions in American expenditures. 

After the film, a tour guide leads us through the gates (literally, two-foot-thick steel doors) and into the underground complex of bunkers. We view the ten-story missile with its twelve-foot diameter payload. She tells us how the crewmembers entrusted with the launch codes could never be left alone. Curiously replicating the paranoia that had seized the nation above ground, each was ordered to spy on his partners.

She explains the multiple, complex systems designed to prevent accidental launch. I ask her if the Soviets had similar measures, and she brushes off my question. This tour is, after all, about our own national willingness to – what? – die for love of country? Destroy all of humanity for love of country?

We do know, however, that the only thing that did prevent a Soviet nuclear attack during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis was that one individual, a Soviet submarine officer, cared enough for the future of the world to refuse to push the button when he was ordered to (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov).

In the end, the Cold War did achieve one of its stated ends: it bankrupted the USSR and led to its downfall. What the narrative fails to address is that it also bankrupted us. In a mere eight years, Ronald Reagan’s military budget and tax cuts turned the United States – the world's largest creditor nation – into its largest debtor. 

But the museum’s narrative is a lie at a deeper level: it assumes American innocence. It assumes that the U.S. developed the MAD policy as the only way to prevent full-scale war. In fact, elements at the very top of our national security apparatus have always lobbied for unnecessary, unilateral, unprovoked attacks on the various Others of the world, from Hiroshima to Iran.

Deterrence had one primary function – to prevent counter-attacks, to limit any response. And the Cold War was a massive lie from beginning to end. Part Two will elaborate.

http://madnessatthegates.wordpress.com/2013/04/01/barrys-blog-54-the-myth-of-equivalency-part-two/

The Myth of Equivalency, Part Two

Gatekeepers know what is expected of them, and they know each other very well. Here’s one gatekeeper (New York Times book reviewer Jacob Heilbrunn) praising another gatekeeper, Jonathan Kay:

Inside the World of Conspiracy Theorists (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/books/review/book-review-among-the-truthers-by-jonathan-kay.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print)

“Among the Truthers” is a remarkable book, not least because its author, Jonathan Kay, appears to have emerged with his sanity intact after immersing himself for several years in the wilder precincts of conspiracy theories…Some of Kay’s most illuminating passages center not on what conspiracy theorists believe — even to dignify it with the word “theory” is probably to grant them more legitimacy than they deserve — but on why they are attracted to such tedious rubbish in the first place. He divides them into different camps, including the “cranks” and the “firebrands.” Cranks are often reacting to male midlife crises — combating conspiracies, Kay says, offers a new sense of mission. Cranks, he adds, are frequently math teachers, computer scientists or investigative journalists…As Kay sees it, the Enlightenment is itself at stake. His verdict could hardly be more categorical: “It is the mark of an intellectually pathologized society that intellectuals and politicians will reject their opponents’ realities.”

That last statement, of course, could not be a more precise description of the gatekeeping process itself. To accuse others of doing what one himself is in fact doing is a perfect example of the psychological process of projection. One might well wonder about the hidden motives of someone (and his editor) who would so blatantly indict himself. But the best of the gatekeepers – imagine the vetting process one must go through to reach the level of NYT book reviewer – are not that dumb. They do this, I’m sure, quite deliberately. “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth,” said Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, and U.S. State Department spokespersons listened closely.

James Tracy, a professor and journalist who himself has been tarred with the “conspiracy theorist” label, writes:

The now-prevalent phenomenon where only the narratives authorized by law enforcement and government authorities are worthy of serious consideration suggests the unmistakable extent to which public discourse has declined…journalists and academics are expected to either fall silent or perform the rearguard action of deflecting criticism from the state…Today’s project of policing the public sphere for unorthodox thoughts is a form of stealth authoritarianism that combines the weight of academic or journalistic expertise with a phony liberalism (or conservatism) to confirm the often unexamined perspectives of a specific political constituency. Such a technique is most readily employed against the apparently irrational ideas, beliefs and practices of a foreign other. In this regard “conspiracy theorists” and “truthers” typically play the “straw man” role. (http://www.globalresearch.ca/conspiracy-theories-and-media-coverage-of-the-sandy-hook-school-massacre-in-search-of-the-last-liberal-intellectual/5328743)

The state, in its ongoing effort to shore up broken timbers in the pale of American innocence, has long worked directly with the media. By now, we all know about media collusion around the invasion of Iraq. Long before that, in “Operation Mockingbird,” the CIA infiltrated major news organizations, planted stories, thwarted criticism of the Warren Commission Report and labeled its critics as the original “conspiracy theorists.” Of the hundreds of journalists who have colluded with the CIA, wrote Carl Bernstein in 1977, “By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.” We can certainly assume that this process continues today.

Ultimately, we follow the money, and here is where the idea and myth of equivalency breaks down. Even primary gatekeepers such as the NYT ( http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29rich.html?_r=0) and The New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer) have admitted that the Tea Party was created and subsidized (in the tens of millions of dollars) by the Koch brothers and the tobacco industry. The populist uprising so praised by Fox News is nothing without their massive subsidies. It is not a purely grassroots movement that spontaneously developed in 2009. Indeed, it required many years of preparation and well financed educational efforts. Long before the Citizen’s United Supreme Court decision, some $200 million had been channeled to conservative causes and institutions.

At the Koch brothers’ level of influence, they can simply buy or create entire gatekeeping institutions, such as the bogus libertarian “think tank” that recently labeled North Dakota as the “most free” state in the union even as it was making abortion illegal. Similarly, Rupert Murdoch has bought The Wall Street Journal and dozens of other gatekeeper media outlets. There is not and never was any equivalency.

Still, there is little point in blaming the rich for wanting to maintain control. The big mythological question is why so many Americans remain willing to support people and parties that have never served their interests, even when those interests are defined broadly as “values.”

The good news is that, even with so many of us still willing to consume the dominant mythology of innocence, so many others have always opted out. This fact actually forces people like Murdoch and the Kochs to expend fortunes trying to keep enough of us thinking within the pale.

Ironically and unknowingly, these billionaire “libertarians” offer tribute to the opponents that they would destroy. To have their press puppets imply that movements that must have bake sales to raise the money to educate the public about global warming or imperial wars are “equivalent” to their own slick media barrages and fabricated “mass demonstrations” is, in truth, to admit the power of authentic ideas. It is to admit the power of the people whose respect they can only buy but never earn. It is to admit that the myth of American Innocence, though very old, is also very unstable.

http://madnessatthegates.wordpress.com/2013/04/01/barrys-blog-53-the-myth-of-equivalency-part-one/

The Myth of Equivalency, Part One

January 26^th, 2013 – NBC Political Director and chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd ridiculed election machine critics at a conference of vote-counters, saying that critics must be paranoid to fear that anyone would deliberately alter election results. Earlier he had tweeted: "The voting machine conspiracies belong in same category as the Trump birther garbage." Todd received applause from his audience of  state secretaries of state and sales reps for voting machine and software companies. (http://www.opednews.com/articles/NBC-s-Todd-Mocks-Election-by-Andrew-Kreig-130129-725.html)

Late February: Readers of daily newspapers saw a series of “Doonesbury” comic strips:

 For several days, Doonesbury made fun of right-wing conspiracies. Then he completed the theme with this strip:

What’s going on here? By including a very widely held left-wing political theory in the same category as these right-wing ideas, Doonesbury was defining them all as conspiracy theories. He was doing exactly the same thing (granted, with more humor) from a liberal perspective that Todd was doing from the conservative side.

This is the narrative of equivalency. It conveys the essence of what I’m calling the myth of equivalency, which instructs Americans that any notions differing from mainstream understandings of reality – no matter how popular – are equally worthless. Here’s the logic: A is silly. We mention B next to A. Therefore, B is silly.

Indeed, there are countless websites and books devoted to this narrative, typically making lists of “loony” theories, often lumping them together at random and offering psychological explanations of the unconscious motivations of conspiracy theorists, be they fascists or progressives.

Such sources are well within one of two very old American traditions of gatekeeping. One is to lie outright about American history. Here’s the logic: A is a story. There is no B. Therefore, A is the only story.

As I wrote in a previous blog (Barry’s Blog # 34: Academic Gatekeepers):

The “Dunning School” of racist historians dominated the writing of post-Civil War history well into the 1950s. William Dunning, founder of the American Historical Association, taught Columbia students that blacks were incapable of self-government. Yale’s Ulrich Phillips defended slaveholders and claimed they did much to civilize the slaves. Henry Commager and (Harvard’s) Samuel Morison’s The Growth of the American Republic, read by generations of college freshmen, perpetuated the myth of the plantation and claimed that slaves “suffered less than any other class in the South…The majority…were apparently happy.” Daniel Boorstin’s The Americans: The Colonial Experience doesn’t mention slavery at all. Similarly, Arthur Schlesinger’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Jackson never mentions the Trail of Tears.

The process of initiation into higher education (and the careers it opens one to) nearly guarantees that those admitted within the pale are already thinking within very narrow boundaries. Noam Chomsky writes that it is a system of imposed ignorance in which the most highly educated people are the most highly indoctrinated. “A good education instills in you the intuitive comprehension – it becomes unconscious and reflexive – that you just don’t think certain things…that are threatening to power interests.” Over the years, polls clearly indicate the results: the higher one’s education, the more one is likely to unquestioningly support America’s wars of aggression – and the reverse is also true.

The other tradition is to ridicule any political positions further out on the spectrum (left or right) often enough so as to deprive it of legitimacy and, by contrast, manufacture the legitimacy of the “center.” Here’s the logic: A is too far out in one direction. B is too far in the other direction. C lies in between them. Therefore, C is legitimate.

The use of the term “conspiracy theory” is one of the main ways that our corporate-owned media banish any legitimate criticism to the realm of the truly illegitimate. The intent is insidious, even if sometimes sincere. The only position that “reasonable people” could hold is the only one left, the consensual center. Done often enough (and it is; even progressives use the phrase “conspiracy theory” to de-legitimize ideas further out on the spectrum than they are comfortable with), enough people hold to that center so as to reaffirm their sense of American Innocence.

Note the mythic implication here: Apollo is the god of fine arts, truth and reasonable discourse. By contrast, Dionysus, the archetypal “Other,” is ecstatic, raving, physical, irrational, emotional and unreasonable. He is the mythological foundation of American innocence. For 400 years, the white American psyche has repressed its Dionysian nature and projected it onto the scapegoated Others of our history. Gatekeepers know this. To deliberately equate, for example, 9-11 skeptics (by calling them “truthers”) with paranoids who label Barack Obama as a Muslim, non-citizen socialist is not simply to delegitimize both; it is to imply that both are equally irrational and Dionysian. “We,” by contrast, are safely, acceptably Apollonian.

This is the process of identity-formation in our demythologized world. We know who we are as Americans because we “know” that we are not the Other. I prefer to imagine that in other times and places people knew who they were because they had endured the process of initiation. They were nobles. The word “noble” comes from the same root as gnosis, or knowledge. A noble is someone who knows who he is, not who he isn’t.

Gatekeepers, whether academics or media puppets, delight in the power to subtly determine boundaries, to let everyone know exactly who is “beyond the pale.” The word “pale” refers to the pointed wooden poles that once were used in fortifications. Think “Fort Apache.” Anyone who threatened the innocent community within risked being impaled on the sharp stakes of irrefutable “argument,” or worse.

http://madnessatthegates.wordpress.com/2013/03/20/barrys-blog-52-on-the-tenth-anniversary-of-the-invasion-of-iraq/

On the Tenth Anniversary of the Invasion of Iraq

Ten Years ago:

f

Today: 

In recent years, many politically active people have been attracted to Ron and Rand Paul. In addition, there has been a huge resurgence in the free-market writings of Ayn Rand. Out of that tradition came the film Thrive, which has been very popular among well meaning but naïve members of the New Age community.

In response, the Praxis Peace Institute (www.praxispeace.org) published a pamphlet that exposed Thrive’s unstated, right-wing agenda.

Now we’ve taken the next step. After searching for a systematic, book-length answer to the seductive attraction of libertarianism, the members of Praxis decided to write that book. Six of us approached the subject from various angles, and the result is Uncivil Liberties: Deconstructing Libertarianism (http://www.amazon.com/Uncivil-Liberties-Deconstructing-Georgia-Kelly/dp/098861300X).

To see a description and blurbs, link to: http://www.madnessatthegates.com/Madnessatthegates/Uncivil_Liberties.html

My contribution is the introductory chapter, “The Mythological Roots of American Individualism.” After a while, I will post the entire chapter on my website. But for now, in hopes that you’ll consider buying the book (proceeds going to Praxis and its educational efforts), I simply suggest that you consider these three quotes that, I believe, encapsulate much of our American psyche:

Free money makes the rich strong and wise, while it corrupts poor people, making them stupid and weak. – Lewis Lapham

You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself. – Ivan Boesky

This is America. If you’re not a winner, it’s your own fault. – Jerry Falwell

http://madnessatthegates.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/barrys-blog-50-the-end-of-the-world/

In December of 2012 the media was awash with speculations about the approaching solstice and the meaning of the Mayan prophecies. Countless people planned to celebrate the arrival of a new age. Meanwhile, millions of fundamentalists were actively hoping for the apocalypse and expecting to be “raptured” into Heaven.

Now that two months have passed and we have experienced neither heaven nor hell, perhaps it’s time to reconsider these expectations and why so many continue to obsessed with them.

What does it mean to be at the end of an age? What does it mean to end? To honestly approach the question, we must step away from literal thinking (New Age or fundamentalist) and accept that in biological, ecological, mythological or indigenous initiatory terms, to end is nothing other than to die. Only when death and decay are complete can they be understood as the necessary precursors to fermentation and new growth.

Indeed we are living in the last phases of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic mythic universe. For over a thousand years, these stories nourished the individual and connected him/her in meaningful ways to their community. Over a second thousand years, they gradually lost their hold on the psyche. Our demythologized modern world continually searches for that sense of meaning but only finds literal substitutes in isms: nationalism, patriotism, fundamentalism, alcoholism – and apocalypticism.  

And the factory jobs that sustained the strongest ism, consumerism, are gone, never to return. Even if they still existed, the age of unbounded industrial growth, fueled by the myth of infinite resources, is also concluding.  So is the “American Century.” Where has any empire in history gone but down once it reached its peak?

Great fear lies just below our superficial cheerfulness. I don’t simply mean the fear of the “Other” that elites have manipulated for centuries. Many live as if there will be no future. Many others are obsessed with end times or with horrifying secular endings such as global warming. We can hardly minimize the actual dangers we confront.

Yet to examine the fear, or, if we were honest, the anticipation that many obviously display is to approach the psychic energies that actually drive us. The word “apocalypse” comes from a Greek root that can mean “to uncover, disclose, to lift the veil from what had been concealed.” Carl Jung regarded apocalypse as an archetype because visions of the end are not limited to Christians; indeed, they occur in many cultures where revelation and destruction lead – possibly – to renewal.

In myths and rituals that predate the Christian end-times by millennia, tribal people celebrated the winter solstice by extinguishing and rekindling fires, welcoming the temporary return of the dead, acknowledging the community’s sins, feasting to excess and retelling creation stories. They re-enacted primordial chaos in order to revive a world in decline. Storytellers told of deteriorating values, darkness, floods and conflagrations. Most indigenous cultures, however, saw these events within a cyclic historical imagination.

Later, our European ancestors regarded the end of the year as a dangerous period when the calendar literally ran out of days, the landscape was blanketed by night and cold, and nobody could be truly certain that the heavens would usher in a new year. One attempt to make sense of this period was the Christian calendar, which bracketed the strange, final days of the year with two holidays – the birth of Christ (December 25^th) and Epiphany (January 6).

Our indigenous souls know something else: “End times” is also a metaphor for the archetypal cry for initiation. It is our own transformation – the death of who we have been – that we both fear and long for. The soul understands that there is no initiation into a new state of being unless we fully accept the necessary death of what came before.

However, this is a difficult concept to understand when we lack authentic ritual and real community. We live in one of those rare historical moments when dominant values are in a wild state of transition that actually mirrors the initiatory liminality experienced – or desired – by adolescents everywhere. And yet, our demythologized world has severely compromised our ability to think metaphorically. When we can no longer imagine inner renewal, we see literal images elsewhere. We project our internal state onto the world and look for the signs of world changes “out there.”

Michael Meade’s recent book Why the World Doesn’t End suggests that “…the archetype of apocalypse describes a psychological condition or state of mind that becomes more activated during times of tragedy and loss and when radical change is predominant…Often apocalyptic prophecies reveal most about those having the revelatory experience…A psychological rather than a religious interpretation would suggest that the (prophetic) voice comes from the unconscious….”

This is not to deny this huge and painful transition. What do we do when we face the facts of great endings, which we experience emotionally as fear of death and ideologically as apocalypse?

The proper response is to fully engage in the universal experience of extended mourning; indeed this is the central focus of the last chapter of my book.

But once again recall the meaning of apocalypse: to lift the veil. At the end of an age we have the opportunity to see truths that have been veiled behind outdated myths. In mourning and letting go of what is dying, we can discover new (or much older) truths. Remembering the Celtic proverb – “Death is the middle of a long life” – we can see more clearly for a while and gain the strength and courage to support what is struggling to be born.

We need to acknowledge the mythic sources of our dilemma. After all, isn’t the literal loss of species an expression of the more fundamental, symbolic collapse of the creative imagination? And hasn’t that breakdown invited the paranoid and predatory imaginations to fill the gap?

Long-term sustainability requires changes in consciousness as fundamental as those that occurred in the long transition from the indigenous world to the modern. This is both bad news and good. Such changes took millennia in the First World to be completed, but only a few generations in the Third World. Perhaps these more recent transitions can be altered or channeled toward a sustainable future. Perhaps there is much positive potential, as the ecstatic solstice dancers at the Great Pyramid of Chitzen-Itsa proclaimed.

But simply focusing on the light is another form of literalization equal to religious fundamentalism. An awareness of death is precisely what I see missing in New Age thinking. To speak of rebirth without considering the breakdown and destruction of what must precede it is to wallow in innocence. As Jung said, “…the experience of the Self is always a defeat for the ego.”

The rule of uninitiated men underlies all of modernity’s ills. But this story is slowly changing, and in offering our gifts to the world, we can facilitate its renewal. The elders say that there is still time to make all decisions with the wellbeing of the next seven generations in mind. This kind of thinking must be our guide, instead of either falling into depression or blissing out.

We are called to attend the funeral of patriarchy, to mourn the dying King who is nothing other than who we thought we were. Only then can we celebrate his rebirth in equal consort with his Queen.

There is yet another meaning to “endings.”  Seen from the detached perspective of the mystic, from the inspired eye of the poet and even from the cyclic movements of our lungs, each moment expresses both birth and death, each of which is an essential aspect of life… breathe out the end of time, breathe in rebirth. Start again, continue.

Part One

…doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on ‘normalization.’ This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as “the way things are done.” – Edward S. Herman

Do theaters tailor their previews of upcoming films to certain audiences? Prior to viewing Zero Dark Thirty in liberal Berkeley, I had to endure six such previews, every one of them an action thriller; a full twenty minutes of explosions, gun fire, car crashes and sexy women.

By now, you’ve already made your decision: not on the quality of ZDT as film, but on whether to see it or not, because you already know the plot. The issue is the question of torture and extra-judicial violence in general.

Many reviewers of ZDT have criticized the film for implying that torture led to Osama Bin Laden’s death. Few, however, have questioned whether we should applaud the action itself. How ironic that as I write these words, I hear that Chris Kyle, the celebrity author of American Sniper, subject of the film of the same title and ex-Navy Seal credited with 150 kills in Iraq (and who had criticized Barack Obama for being soft on the Second Amendment) was himself killed by another veteran – at a shooting range.

These are all mythic issues.

Some critics side with director Kathryn Bigelow, a self-proclaimed lifelong pacifist, who has stated that “…depiction is not endorsement.” We’ll see about that. She claims that she included the torture scenes because not to do so would have been to “whitewash history.” Glenn Kenny concurs: “…rather than endorsing the barbarity, the picture makes the viewer in a sense complicit with it…” Andrew Sullivan adds, “…the movie is not an apology for torture…It is an exposure of torture. It removes any doubt that war criminals ran this country for seven years.”

Even Michael Moore writes, “It will make you hate torture. And it will make you happy you voted for a man who stopped all that barbarity…” It’s a bit surprising, though, that Moore makes no comment about Barack Obama’s drones strikes that killed 176 Pakistani children in 2012. Nor does he acknowledge that this President claimed legal authority to murder American citizens abroad. And you lament the cruelty of his successor.

But here is the real problem I have with the film, aside from the fact that it ignores all of the political and most of the moral implications of the death – the murder – of Bin Laden and several other people. It has less to do with themes and more to do with images. As I wrote in Chapter Six of my book, Madness At the Gates of the City, The Myth of American Innocence,

This is war’s attraction – it allows men to enact their longing for initiation while serving a transpersonal cause. Thus, as long as we have uninitiated men we will have war. Jungian therapist Robert Moore (no relation to Michael) writes, ‘There is no way to understand the attractiveness of war without understanding the unconscious seduction of the archetype of initiation.’

The rational parts of our minds recoil at the thought of war, but young men react mainly to images. This is why the film director Francois Truffaut is reported to have said that it is impossible to make a truly anti-war movie, because “to show something is to ennoble it.” Even if films show war’s horrors and absurdities, their images go to the oldest parts of the brain and beyond: to the drive for initiation.

This at least is clear: it is impossible to make an American anti-war film, because our heroic mythology simply doesn’t allow for the possibility of defeat. Bigelow certainly couldn’t have made this film much earlier, when the search for Bin Laden was still going on.

And this is clear: the U.S. military has had near-veto power over Hollywood war films since the 1940s. Mathew Alford summaries a study:

…between 1911 and 2017, more than 800 feature films received support from the …Department of Defense…On television, we found over 1,100 titles received Pentagon backing – 900 of them since 2005, from Flight 93 to Ice Road Truckers to Army Wives. …When we include individual episodes for long running shows like 24, Homeland, and NCIS, as well as the influence of other major organizations like the FBI and White House, we can establish unequivocally for the first time that the national security state has supported thousands of hours of entertainment…the CIA has assisted in 60 film and television shows since its formation in 1947.

That last number is so low simply because:

The CIA put considerable effort into dissuading representations of its very existence throughout the 1940s and 1950s. This meant it was entirely absent from cinematic and televisual culture until…1959

Tom Secker and Matthew Alford, co-authors of  National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood, write:

…U.S. government involvement also includes script rewrites on some of the biggest and most popular films, including James Bond, the Transformers franchise, and movies from the Marvel and DC cinematic universes….A similar influence is exerted over military-supported TV, which ranges from Hawaii Five-O to America’s Got Talent, Oprah and Jay Leno to Cupcake Wars, along with numerous documentaries by PBS, the History Channel and the BBC…dozens of films and TV shows have been supported and influenced by the CIA, including the James Bond adventure Thunderball, the Tom Clancy thriller Patriot Games and more recent films, including Meet the Parents and Salt.

This much is also clear: ZDT is a classic example of how Hollywood has always needed the aid, if not the outright permission, of the military (in this case, the “intelligence community”) to make its war movies, and of how that aid and permission inevitably flow seamlessly with the myth-making intentions, conscious or otherwise, of the filmmakers. In 2011, writer Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker), an acquaintance of CIA Director Leon Panetta, was working on the script for a movie called Tora Bora, about the CIA’s failure to capture bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks, when the killing occurred. Jason Leopold and Ky Henderson write:

Instead, he stopped writing the script for Tora Bora and began writing a different screenplay …That movie, which Boal would work on with director Kathryn Bigelow, would become the 2012 Oscar-winning film Zero Dark Thirty. And the CIA would play a huge role in the creation of the script…how they got agency officers and officials to review and critique the ZDT script…the CIA’s working relationship with the filmmakers began in 2010, a year before bin Laden was killed.

“Ever since its inception in 1947, the CIA has been covertly working with Hollywood,” writes Nicholas Schou:

But it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the agency formally hired an entertainment industry liaison and began openly courting favorable treatment in films and television. During the Clinton presidency, the CIA took its Hollywood strategy to a new level—trying to take more control of its own mythmaking. In 1996, the CIA hired one of its veteran clandestine officers, Chase Brandon, to work directly with Hollywood studios and production companies to upgrade its image. “We’ve always been portrayed erroneously as evil and Machiavellian,” Brandon later told The Guardian. “It took us a long time to support projects that portray us in the light we want to be seen in.”

The flag-waving Tom Clancy franchise became a centerpiece of CIA propaganda in the 1990s, with a succession of actors (Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, and finally Ben Affleck) starring in films like Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, and The Sum of All Fears, which pit the daring agent Jack Ryan against an array of enemies…The long relationship between Affleck, a prominent Hollywood liberal, and Langley seems particularly perplexing. But the mutual admiration has paid off handsomely for all concerned. According to The Guardian, during the production of The Sum of all Fears, the 2002 Clancy thriller starring Affleck, “the agency was happy to bring its makers to Langley for a personal tour of headquarters, and to offer [the star] access to agency analysts. When filming began, [CIA liaison] Brandon was on set to advise.”…also a frequent presence on the set of Alias, the TV espionage series starring Affleck’s then-wife, Jennifer Garner.

As Hollywood became increasingly embedded with Langley following 9/11, CIA employees often saw their public-affairs colleagues giving various celebrities personalized tours of the headquarters. “I can’t tell you how many times this happened,” recalled the former CIA officer John Kiriakou. He would regularly bump into a parade of Hollywood types, including Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck. He often wondered why these actors were allowed to walk around a top-secret facility. “Because he’s going to be playing a CIA guy in a movie? That’s the criteria now?

Part Two 

Hollywood is the only way that the public learns about the Agency. – Paul Barry, CIA Entertainment Industry Liaison Officer

All of these films and TV series superficially mask the old theme of the American Hero. But, as I write in Chapter Seven of my book, they are completely consistent with stories of him and his evil opponent – the Other – who have been stock characters in the stories we’ve been telling each other about ourselves since the early 1700s. For nearly four centuries “they” have attacked “us” for no reason other than their hatred of our democratic way of life, and “our” sacred responsibility has always been to “terminate them with extreme prejudice,” even if it means breaking the law to do so, in the quest to save the innocent community from the clutches of pure evil. Nicholas Schou continues:

…while Homeland’s CIA protagonists are portrayed as flawed, and often tormented, heroes, the bottom line is they are heroes. Their Islamic militant antagonists, on the other hand, are generally filmed in conspiratorial shadows, and are portrayed as fanatics whose souls have become twisted by years of struggle against the West.

The American Hero, of course, has always been extremely masculine. Women first broke this particular glass ceiling as comic book superheroines such as Wonder Woman and later in films, but usually in the same, familiar tongue-in-cheek, comedy/action/kickass mode that most male spy and superhero movies have offered.  The new twist is that some of these protagonists are women, even (see below) if still drop-dead gorgeous.

Regardless of gender, Schou concludes:

With few exceptions, Hollywood has long functioned as a propaganda factory, churning out jingoistic revenge-fantasy films in which American audiences are allowed to exorcise their post-9/11 demons by watching the satisfying slaughter of countless onscreen jihadis. This never-ending parade of square-jawed secret agents and bearded, pumped-up commandos pitted against swarthy Muslim madmen straight out of central casting has been aided and abetted by a newly emboldened CIA all too happy to offer its “services” to Hollywood.

Oh, come on, aren’t we more sophisticated than that? In 2014, Clint Eastwood, producer/director of the film version of American Sniper (destined to be listed on many “Top Ten” lists), obviously couldn’t give Chris Kyle’s primary Muslim adversary the traditional black cowboy hat. So he did the next best thing (in American mythic terms): he dressed the bad guy entirely in black.

In 2016, Tom Hayden reviewed Tricia Jenkins’ book The CIA in Hollywood: How the Agency Shapes Film and Television, which detailed the very long collaboration between these two purveyors of “deception,” or in the mythic terminology readers of this blog may be familiar with: stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to renew our sense of American innocence:

Jenkins documents how the CIA has been influencing Hollywood for years, formally accelerating the effort in the 1990s when the Cold War ended, shocking spy scandals were unfolding, the mission was uncertain, and recruitment was down. In Jenkins’s account, the CIA needed a remake, and only Hollywood could supply it…it’s not that Hollywood is in bed with the CIA in some repugnant way, but that the Agency is looking to plant positive images about itself (in other words, propaganda) through our most popular forms of entertainment.

Movies and TV are only two types of electronic media that normalize war and line the pockets of military contractors. Now, drones and computer-controlled weapons have blurred the line between war and video games. Scott Beauchamp writes that as early as 1980,

…the Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) set about appropriating the Atari game game Battlezone andrepurposing it as a revolutionary new training system called Bradley Trainer…Tim Lenoir and Luke Caldwell’s The Military-Entertainment Complex is required reading for anyone curious about just how insidious the Pentagon’s raids on our collective imagination have become…the real work of sanitizing Pentagon operations for public view resides in making the work of war seem mundane and familiar: “Routinizing war is important for a globalized capitalist empire,” they write, “and…implicit in this process is the understanding of war as a project with not only military but also ideological and political dimensions.” In particular, they observe, video games and television are indispensable to the challenge of “habituating civilians to perpetual war.”

This is a complex and expensive process, part of which includes valorizing its actual (if virtual) practitioners. As I write here,

The banality of madness: In February of 2013 outgoing Defense Secretary Panetta announced a new medal for these desk-bound warriors. The Distinguished Warfare Medal will recognize drone “pilots” for their “extraordinary achievements that directly impact on combat operations, but do not involve acts of valor or physical risks that combat entails.” The drone medal will rank above the Bronze Medal and Purple Heart, meaning computer screen heroes will receive awards more prestigious than troops who get shot in battle.

We usually have to look outside of the United States for filmmakers grounded in older cultures that understand tragedy and loss, from nations that have witnessed two world wars on the ground, people who have been able to counter the seductive pull of the image and create masterpieces such as All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Behind the Lines(1999) or the elegiac Testament of Youth (2015). Paths of Glory (1957) is the one American film I’d include in this list. All four of these films depict World War One. Perhaps filmmakers need that kind of time bridge to get some distance from their own unconscious fascinations.

I’m not aware of any films about later wars that can do this, with the exception of the 1985 Soviet film Come and See. But they remain quite rare among the thousands of war movies (not counting Holocaust films) made in the past century. And even the best of them must dance around the inevitable clash between noble intentions and the seduction of images.

In other words, depiction almost always is endorsement, and no one should understand that concept more clearly than a highly intelligent director such as Bigelow.

And there certainly are other issues that Bigelow glossed over – or deliberately framed. Every single CIA agent in ZDT is presented as idealistic rather than cynical, reluctantly violent rather than sadistic. Most of the actual violence is left to their Third-World accomplices. The film also portrays both the spooks and the Navy SEALs as young, hip (lots of beards), diverse (several black and women agents) – and, true to the tradition, drop-dead gorgeous, such as the main protagonist, played by Jessica Chastain. They encounter breathtaking adventures as often as tedious desk work.

In other words, ZDT makes a career in the CIA look very attractive – especially for women. CNN approved, pronouncing the film a “reworking of the war on terror as a feminist epic.” Indeed, writes Cora Currier, Donald Trump’s 2018 nomination of Gina Haspel as CIA chief

…points to a long and fraught history of the CIA trying to burnish its image by highlighting women’s advancements in the agency…the agency’s Twitter feed celebrated Women’s History Month in March with a series of threads on Haspel’s female forebears at the CIA…

The mythmakers and deception experts have far more in common with each other than any of them have with the rest of us. But at some point we may find ourselves asking, “Who writes this stuff – Hollywood or Langely, Virginia? Are they one and the same?

In 2014, at the height of media attention on drone strikes, an article appeared in Real Clear Politics about “the CIA’s drone queens,” borrowing its title from a “Homeland” episode and stating that “the next time Obama authorizes a strike in Pakistan, the odds are that it will be a woman who gives the green light moments before death is delivered from a drone”…it described a “sisterhood” of women involved in the targeted killing campaign who drank iced lattes and baked birthday cakes for one another (spies — they’re just like us!). The top expert on Pakistan was said to be “strikingly attractive in her stiletto heels” – so attractive, the article asserts, that Barack Obama grinned and said, “You don’t look like a Pakistan expert.”

You can’t make this shit up. Or can you?

In this story that we tell ourselves about ourselves, the old-boy, Ivy League network of the CIA has become a leading institutional factor in the inclusion of the Other – those minorities so long denied their opportunity to compete for the American dream and bequeath it to our long-suffering allies in the Third World. If all these photogenic women and people of color are doing the spook work, then so much the better; we can all relax and trust that we are in good (and good-looking) hands, even as the soft-core porn of the James Bond girls merges with Abu Ghraib’s pornography of violence. 

As Facebook posts swoon over women achieving battlefield command positions and Tulsi Gabbard softens her criticism of the American empire with proud pictures of herself in combat gear, we could also keep these quotes in mind:

Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?” – James Baldwin

You cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. – Audre Lorde

Hayden writes:

The star of The Sum of All Fears, Ben Affleck, whose hero as a young man was Howard Zinn, eventually married Jennifer Garner  and brought Argo to the screen. As venerated representatives of the New Hollywood, Affleck and Garner may unwittingly have done more to save the CIA’s image than the entire Republican Party. True, their plots include duplicitous and destructive agents at times, but their credibility depends on a certain balance. The overall effect has been to usher a new brand of hip and sexy spooks into the post-9/11 world. 

From the perspective of image, it is hard not to conclude that ZDT is essentially a CIA recruitment film. And because these spooks are perfectly willing to break the law (at least as most of the world outside of Washington and Hollywood interpret it), firstly by torturing suspected terrorists and secondly by invading the airspace of a sovereign ally (Pakistan – as the military would soon do in Syria), they embody our mythic American hero’s disdain for “normal channels.” Here is a big, open secret: this hero has as much contempt for democracy and the rule of law as does his opponent. Can you imagine Rambo – or Barack Obama – waiting for congressional approval? I know, I know: Trump is soooooo much worse, and Joe Biden would revive our pride in America, blah, blah…

Matt Taibbi gets to the core:

The real problem is what this movie says about us. When those Abu Ghraib pictures came out years ago, at least half of America was horrified. The national consensus (albeit by a frighteningly slim margin) was that this wasn’t who we, as a people, wanted to be. But now, four years later, Zero Dark Thirty comes out, and it seems that that we’ve become so blunted to the horror of what we did and/or are doing at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and Bagram and other places that we can accept it, provided we get a boffo movie out of it.

That’s why the theater managers showed all those action previews when I went to see ZDT.They knew very well what kind of people were coming to see it. They weren’t going to be intellectuals or students of politics and history, but members of that high-rolling, and much larger, demographic of young, uninitiated males. Maybe not CIA material (such people would likely be seeing the film at university showings), but certainly cannon fodder for the next war. And how could Kathryn Bigelow not know that? Hayden concludes:

Does it matter whether Zero Dark Thirty endorses or rejects torture, or ultimately applauds it for leading stalwart CIA heroes to our greatest enemy? Not really. In the end, perhaps the debate around the film is really just a distraction from what actually does matter: Zero Dark Thirty — by being such an entertaining, edge-of-your-seat thriller about the CIA that it would compel us to have a debate about it at all — is the greatest public relations gift a secret agency could possibly wish for. There we are, a captive audience, twisting our popcorn bags and Juicy Fruit boxes with nervous, sweaty palms while watching an obsessed, passionate, dedicated female CIA analyst named Maya, played by the beautiful and talented Jessica Chastain, dodge bullets, bombs, and boyfriends on her way to exacting bloodthirsty revenge. Is her revenge our own? By rooting for her, which we doubtlessly do, are we not rooting for the Agency she signifies? When she wins in the end, doesn’t America win too? If that’s not great public relations, I don’t know what is.

As I wrote in The Hero Must Die, a lengthy review of American hero mythology:

…the American hero (exceptions include James Bond parodies and Woody Allen-type antiheroes) doesn’t get or often, even want the girl. Even Bond, in his hyper-sexuality, remains a bachelor. More often, the hero must choose between an attractive sexual partner and his sense of duty to his mission; he cannot have both. Some, such as Batman and the Lone Ranger, prefer a comical male “sidekick.” How common is this unattached hero? Here are some others:

Hawkeye, the Virginian, Josey Wales, Paladin, Sam Spade, Nick Danger, Mike Hammer, Phillip Marlowe, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Dirty Harry, John Shaft, Indiana Jones, Robert Langdon, Mr. Spock, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda, the Man With No Name, the Hobbits, Gandalf, Mad Max, Superman, Green Lantern, Green Hornet, Spiderman, the Hulk, Iron Man, Human Torch, The Flash, Dr. Strange, Hellboy, Nick Fury, Swamp Thing, Aquaman, Daredevil, Lone Wolf McQuade, Sargent Rock, Braveheart, Conan the Barbarian, Jack Sparrow, Captains Kirk, Picard, Atom, Nemo, Phillips, Marvel and America and the heroes of Death Wish, The Magnificent Seven, The Dirty Dozen, Pale Rider, Unforgiven, Under Siege, Lethal Weapon, Blade, Casablanca, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, No Country for Old Men, Gran Torino, Walking Tall, Delta Force, Missing In Action, Avenger, Extreme Justice, The Equalizer, Terminator, The Exterminator, Rawhide, The Rifleman, Million Dollar Baby, Open Range andThe Exorcist.

For 350 years our preferred hero has been Jehovah-like in his vengeance and Christ-like in his refusal to remain grounded in relationship and his longing to return to his Father. Now he has been joined by Maya, she of brilliant intellect, the idealism, the mysteriousness and the drop-dead gorgeousness; she whose first name means “illusion” in Sanskrit; she who is so unattached that we never even learn if she has a last name. Now that’s progress.

http://madnessatthegates.wordpress.com/2013/02/02/barrys-blog-48-the-banality-of-evil/

The Banality of Evil

I offer this blog on February 2nd. In the six weeks since the Sandy Hook tragedy, 1,478 Americans have died of gun violence.

The German-American writer Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “banality of evil” in 1963. She argued that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and assumed that their actions were normal. To her, the mass murderer Adolph Eichmann was not a monster, but merely a bureaucrat who willingly and effectively did his job and, at the end of the day like anyone else, went home to his wife and children.

Edward S. Herman wrote: "…doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on 'normalization.' This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as 'the way things are done.'"

Hollywood, as the primary mode of storytelling in our culture, has always invited us to follow this model, to objectify the villains of the moment and to normalize our unthinking acceptance of violence as the normal mode of resolving disputes. And movie audiences have usually responded with their approval. For a hundred years we have eagerly consumed film images of American heroism and the triumph of good, innocent America over the dark, evil “Other” – frequently with violence of Biblical proportions. This is how we come to accept its normalization. This is why audiences cheer at the end of Zero Dark Thirty.

A brief digression: before viewing Zero Dark Thirty (the subject of my next blog) in liberal Berkeley the other night, I was subjected to six previews of upcoming films, every one of them an action thriller; a full twenty minutes of explosions, gun fire and car crashes.

After all, the bastards probably deserved it. But here is a problem. Since they are typically one-dimensional, so are most of our heroes. If our heroes are good, then the Other is bad, and the hero needs no justification for his actions, least of all from wimpy, liberal politicians. And here is a big secret: the American hero has as much contempt for democracy as does his opponent. Can you imagine Rambo – or Barack Obama – waiting for congressional approval?

This is nothing new in America. Nick Turse’s new book Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, gives ample evidence that the My Lai massacre of 1968 in which Americans murdered nearly 500 unarmed civilians was no aberration. Indeed, Americans perpetrated literally dozens of such actions in that war and in the wars that folowed. The American public, however, refused to face the moral implications. Polls found that 80 percent of us opposed Lieutenant William Calley’s guilty verdict.

Were the American “boys” who calmly ate their lunches sitting next to dead Vietnamese children monsters? Was Dan Mitrione, the CIA torture chief (see the film State of Siege) in South America in the 1960s – and a father of nine children – a monster?

This is nothing new in America. Consider this passage from Chapter Seven of my book:

“The myth of the Frontier defined Indians as bloodthirsty killers who swept out of the dark forests. The relationship of white to red is so shrouded in legend that modern people cannot grasp the extent to which whites feared and utterly loathed the original ‘reds.’ Herman Melville wrote that by 1840 Indian hating had become a ‘metaphysic.’ It was a unique dimension in which religious zeal, barbaric atrocity and sacrificial ritual merged to create genocide. In 1636, the same year in which they founded Harvard College, Massachusetts Puritans massacred and burned 500-700 members of the indigenous Pequot tribe:

…It was a fearfull sight to see them thus frying in the fryer, and the streams of blood … horrible was the stincke and sente there of, but the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice, and they gave the prays thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them…

Hatred – and joy – of this intensity expresses a ‘metaphysic’ that begins in abstraction and alienation from the body and drapes itself in innocence. Ritual sacrifice – fire and blood – gives its practitioners a consistent moral self-image…It lies behind the communal celebration of whiteness known as the lynch mob, and it enables us to casually dismiss the torture of suspected terrorists. But it does not completely insulate us from guilt. For that to occur, one more step is required: the erasure of memory. After the Pequot massacre, the Puritans passed a law making it a crime to utter the word Pequot.”

But again: Were these people – deeply religious, introspective, bookish family patriarchs – monsters? Or, as in the other examples noted above, hadn’t history thrust normal, decent people into utterly indecent situations, thus bringing out the worst in them?

Framing the question in this manner, we are forced to wonder whether most criminals, even murderers, are not Hannibal Lectors (as much as we may want them to be). Both depth psychology and indigenous wisdom teach us that we are each a repository of varying proportions of both good and evil, or if you prefer, creative and destructive potentials.

Perhaps we want to see the “others” of the world in simplistic, black/white terms because if they are purely evil, then we might be purely good and innocent. Perhaps we as individuals and as a nation might not then be complicit in the evil that they perpetrate. But of course it is not that simple.

We can say this, however: we now and for a very long time have been living in a “demythologized” world (Joseph Campbell’s phrase) that has lost connection with the myths and rituals that once held us together and which at times brought out the best in us. It is a world that rarely welcomes or can even identify the positive aspects of the masculine, a world of uninitiated men who raise, mentor, indoctrinate and send off other uninitiated men to do their dirty work. And yet, few of these men, at least at the beginning, are monsters.

Most of them, I believe, are children emotionally, traumatized by their unloved lives, who would like nothing better than to have their innate nobility recognized by true elders. By not having the experience of truly being seen and blessed at the appropriate times in childhood, they – and we – are wounded, some much more than others.

But when that doesn’t happen, and those elders send them into dysfunctional, traumatic situations, many of them find it only too easy to displace their disappointment, shame and rage onto convenient scapegoats. History, then, finds it too easy to bring out the worst in them.

Consider the Latin word vocare: “to call or name.” From it come words like “vocal” and “vocation.” For our purposes, consider that in ritual and initiatory circumstances, we invoke the deities from without, or evoke desirable features from within. However, if neither culture nor history allows us those options, we are likely to provoke such things in other people.

This is the basis of the psychological process of projection, and it too often leads us away from our selves. Seeing our better selves in others, we may succumb to envy and shame. We may want to sabotage it as much as emulate it.

And seeing our lesser selves in others (because it is too painful to admit that it exists within), we may easily allow our uninitiated leaders to convince us that it should be destroyed. This is how good, normal, good-intentioned American “boys” become mass killers. Add the factors of distance and detachment to the equation, and such boys happily manipulate joysticks in windowless Arizona buildings that direct drones to vaporize wedding parties 8,000 miles away. “Normalization” and denial enable us to innocently inhabit a world in which American drone strikes killed 176 Pakistani children in 2012 alone.

And who are we to quickly respond that, placed into the same, impossible situations, we would act differently? There is a great mystery about all this. Is it not a mere accident of history – reincarnation, if you prefer – that drops some of us as infants into relatively affluent and loving families that nurture our better selves? Even then, how many of us are innocently complicit in these crimes by virtue of our silence? How many of us react in shock when our own innocent children are murdered, even as the American empire destroys hundreds of lives every day?

The point, however, as always, is not to assess blame but to consider these issues:

1 – The way to wisdom runs first through acknowledging the truth, in this case, how profoundly diminished our imagination is in this demythologized world.

2 – The way toward solutions is the ritual imagination, both in reframing our old myths and in learning from indigenous thinking. Consider the island of Bali, where the people know very well the consequences of allowing their lesser selves to run “amok” (a Balinese word). There, all ritual, conducted daily in a thousand places, has the intention of balancing the good and evil that exists in everyone, rather than destroying evil. Hence, the ubiquitous black-and-white checkered cloths that the Balinese drape over the statues of their gods.

3 – The way towards healing for those who have been perpetrators and those who have been traumatized and those who suffer from PTSD is to remember the indigenous idea that no one is evil, only “unripe,” that each person is born with unique gifts needed by the community. Again from my book: “The Aramaic word spoken by Jesus and translated into Greek as diabolos and into English as ‘evil’ actually means ‘unripe.’ What if we used ‘unripe’ instead of ‘evil?’ Unripe persons are simply immature. Aren’t communities responsible for helping them ‘ripen,’ rather than punishing or eradicating them? This is critical: if we can’t imagine a sym-bolic (“throwing together”) world, then we are left with a dia-bolic world…Even ‘diabolic’ (related to dance), originally implied communication between adversaries. Unimaginative language, wrote James Hillman, ‘displaces the metaphorical drive from its appropriate display in poetry and rhetoric…into direct action. The body becomes the place for the soul’s metaphors.’ In other words, if we can’t make images in art, music or beautiful speech we get sick.”

4 – The way to a sustainable future lies in the creation of ritual containers – and eventually social institutions – that might actually evoke the best in people. All roads lead back to the revival of initiation. Imagine that.

http://madnessatthegates.posterous.com/tag/barrysblog47howandwhytostartawar

How – and Why – to Start A War

Here are some of the essential components of the myth of American Innocence:

1 – Narratives of extreme violence, both real and fictional, always justified by the need for a hero who is willing to sacrifice himself (but rarely does) in order to protect the innocent community from the irrational, evil desires of the “Other.”

2 – Violence, like that of the mythical Apollo, that is perpetrated from a distance, whether from the barrel of a gun, the wings of a fighter jet, airborne tankers dropping defoliants on peasants, a B-52 carpet-bombing entire regions from five miles off the ground or the joystick of a computer that directs drone-fired missiles flying over another continent.

3 – Denial of death. This characteristic distance is one of the factors that allow Americans to de-sensitize themselves from the reality of death. A constant diet of crime and anti-terrorist TV and movies allows us to believe that violence isn’t real, or that violence only happens to the “others” of the world. Hence our disillusionment and punctured innocence when the Sandy Hooks of the world happen to us.

4 – A perpetual war economy, at least since the end of World War Two. Why does America go to war so often? Do Imperial politics fully explain the fact that America has attacked over forty countries since 1945? Ultimately, our American stories convey an even deeper level of mythic reality. At the core of all western culture – yet expressed in its purest form in America – is the myth of the Killing of the Children. As I mentioned in my blog # 40, “The Ritual of the Presidential Debates,” our greatest secret – the most sacred knowledge, so sacred that it is taboo to ever discuss it – is that the American Empire must periodically sacrifice large numbers of its own children in foreign wars in order to shear up the cracks that appear in our national sense of innocence and white privilege. They die, we are told, to protect freedom. In fact, they die because we want them to die.

5 – Unprovoked attack. Since American violence must by definition stem from the noblest of motivations, our actions are always re-actions to nefarious attacks from the Other. Hence, no movie cowboy ever strikes the first blow. Similarly, no American President ever strikes at the enemy without first having been attacked. In these narratives, the Other always strikes first, with a “sneak” attack.

6 – With four hundred years of these stories deeply woven into the American psyche, we are well-primed to ingest each new one. Among the countless examples, think of “Remember the Maine,” the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, 9-11, “weapons of mass destruction” and Iranian nukes. But think also of the thousands of movie, TV and comic book villains who without exception strike the first blow, usually from behind. Indeed, every action of the American empire requires such provocations, because otherwise, cracks would quickly appear in the myth and Americans would begin to question the essence of our identity.

This article is about one of those stories. In 2005, Admiral James Stockdale died, almost universally revered as a genuine American hero. Most Americans knew him as Ross Perot’s 1992 vice-presidential running mate. An older generation remembered him as America’s highest-ranking prisoner-of-war in Viet Nam, a man who suffered extreme beatings and torture for seven years but never revealed classified information or spoke ill of his country.

Few of us, however, know about this:

A very public person, Stockdale gave many interviews about his military service, and he was quite candid about his participation in the Gulf of Tonkin incident of 1964 that gave President Lyndon Johnson the excuse to begin the invasion of Vietnam. Stockdale had led the fighter squadron searching for the North Vietnamese P-T boats that had allegedly fired upon an American ship.  Stockdale admitted, “I got so low I had salt water on my windshield and there's no boats out there!” (All quotes are from Stockdale’s interview on www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/sto0int-8)

So Stockdale knew very well that the President was lying when, the next day, Johnson announced that the U.S. was responding in force to this unprovoked North Vietnamese “aggression.” Either Stockdale said nothing to his superiors or he was commanded not to speak about the event.

Stockdale had been raised to be a hero but had been too young to see action in Korea, and he didn’t want to miss his chance for glory.  The next day, when other pilots were about to take off to bomb Haiphong Harbor, Stockdale (as he revealed many years later) pulled rank, demanding that he be allowed to lead the raid. When asked if he wanted defensive weapons loaded on his planes in addition to the bombs, he answered, "No, there'll be no action out there against us today except the flack…I could have said, Hell, no. This is Pearl Harbor; we're going to attack a country that's not waiting for it… I didn't say any of that and it's just as well.”

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution?  “They had already signed it and Johnson had withheld it. Now I don't know what happened to it… I laughed to myself. I didn't put it on the air but I said, Here we go. I'm starting a war under false pretenses… August 5th, 1964, and I was the guy that did it. I wouldn't have missed it but – so anyway I don't argue about the Vietnam War legitimacy or anything like that.”

Here is a most remarkable admission. Of course the war would have started anyway, even if Stockdale had spoken up or refused to go on the mission.  Months later, Johnson proclaimed, “We must love each other or die” as he secretly prepared to escalate the conflict into a major war.

But just imagine: a single person, a single point in time, a single decision to drop the bombs.  Just following orders. And eleven years later, three million people were dead. Do such actions fit the definition of “war criminal?”

A year later Stockdale was shot down over North Viet Nam and his prisoner-of-war saga began. Several best-selling books, the Medal of Honor and millions of votes came his way. His behavior in the prison was exemplary; he probably saved the lives of many of his co-prisoners. Americans came to see these men, most of whom who had been shot down while bombing North Vietnamese cities, as victims of cruel communists, the “Others” who would later be the stock villains of Sylvester Stallone movies. To this day, most Americans think of those pilots as victims, and of the 58,000 American dead as the only casualties of the war.

But who really were the victims: the 1,300 POWs, the hundred thousand veterans who committed suicide after returning, 3.8 million dead Asian peasants or an American society that still refuses to grieve for that war or for the wars we have prosecuted since then, each of them idealistic crusades to rid the world of evil, yet each of them begun “under false pretenses?”

In this third blog inspired by the murdered children of Sandy Hook I want to look at the archetypal image of the King.

The Archetypes: In their great book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine(http://www.amazon.com/King-Warrior-Magician-Lover-Rediscovering/dp/0062506064), Jungian psychologists Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette envision a four-part masculine psyche divided into the Lover (the image of relatedness and deep passion for life), theMagician or Magus (awareness and insight), the Warrior (focused aggression and devotion to a cause) and the King (the universal image of order, blessing and fertility).

These images of the soul and of the soul of the world were created over the millennia as individual humans evolved and societies grew from small, tribal groups to large kingdoms. They are interior images, but we often express versions of them in the real world. Each of these archetypes divides into an immature, “boy psychology,” the shadow of the archetype, and a mature, initiated “man psychology.” Although Moore and Gillette lament that in the modern world, “…most men are fixated at an immature level of development,” we all know of historical figures who have occasionally or briefly manifested their essences.

In this view of the psyche there is a certain symmetry and balance. At the same time, when the Warrior, Lover and Magus are in appropriate relationship to the King, he is then able to serve the cosmos or realm (psychologically the Self, and in social terms, the kingdom, nation or community). When the King is functioning appropriately in the psyche or in the culture, it is said that divine, healing energies flow from the other world to this world. In this sense, the King is a true “master of ceremonies.”

We can imagine that the archetype of the King evolved in extreme antiquity and all across the Earth in times and places when certain rare men were able to stand at the center of the realm and actually embody the characteristics of order, blessing and fertility. They could cause the crops to grow and the women to bear healthy children. They could mediate the transition from chaotic change to confidant stability. In blessing their subjects, they were serving the realm. Our human legacy is replete with stories of such men, some fictional and some real. This is the basis of the still very strong respect and longing for royalty in places like England, Hawaii, Thailand and Japan. It is also the foundation for the archetypal theme in all cultures of the return of the King (think Odysseus, and the Christ).

The King: To become whole, we need to take back our projections and know these archetypes as aspects of ourselves. But in our demythologized modern world, we are so wounded, and society has been so dysfunctional for so long, that we very rarely see such men – Gandhi and Martin Luther King come to mind – in the public sphere. And, too often the culture reacts to their presence by re-enacting the passion of the Christ and killing them.

Still, in this culture of celebrity, our need is so strong that we constantly attempt to project the archetype onto political leaders. That is: what we cannot embody in ourselves, we need to see outside of ourselves, in other people. Just as we project our darkness upon “the Other,” so do we project our innate nobility upon celebrities and politicians.

Archetypes, however, are images of perfection, and only the very innocent can expect human beings to channel perfection for very long. When our leaders, entertainers and athletes prove to be only too human, we often react with tremendous disappointment, even rage, that our projections have been unfulfilled. We fall into the old trap of confusing the personal with the impersonal.

We all remember George W. Bush playing at being a macho cowboy president. And we all know how he would have reacted to Sandy Hook. He would have spoken of meeting violence with more violence, of exacting vengeance in some way, even if against individuals or groups that had nothing to do with the murders. This is “boy psychology,” and few intelligent people took him seriously as a leader. You could see it in his face, in the smirk this emotional adolescent could barely contain.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, is capable of carrying a certain kingly gravitas. Now we have an image of him tearing up, if not openly weeping, in his press conference after Sandy Hook. In one of the very few instances in our history (Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D, Roosevelt come to mind), a president stood at the symbolic center of the realm, the White House Press Room, and actually embodied this rarely seen aspect of the mature masculine.

In doing so, he literally displayed emotion for the entire nation. In channeling the King, even if only for a few moments, he was enabling the movement of healing energy from the Other World to everyone in this time of sadness. In a culture that has grown up on reactionary vengeance and still prefers heroic violence to acknowledgement of loss, he was, in a sense, giving the nation permission to grieve.

This was a very rare and remarkable thing. Perhaps we won’t see something like it for a long time. It is no easy thing for anyone to do this, especially in a time when so many wish him such ill will.

The man: Many people clearly feel that this is the Obama they worked to elect. The tears were certainly real, as opposed to the patently insincere weeping of TV con men such as Glenn Beck.

But we must remember that Obama the man is above all a seasoned politician. In this dysfunctional, broken system, every American president is essentially a spokesperson for very powerful interests, a “master of ceremonies” in the lesser sense. Perhaps the news conference was one of those rare times when one of his public statements had not been previously vetted before focus groups. But even though the tears were authentic, we do ourselves no favor by letting the issue drop without pursuing the deeper issues.

Just exactly why was Obama the man crying? The simple answer is that he was feeling the grief we all feel for the lives destroyed so early for no reason. Clearly he was thinking of his own children. But this must lead us to further questions, because the same man has presided for four years over a dreadfully violent foreign policy that has killed hundreds if not thousands of innocents. Indeed, three days after the shooting, the media neglected to mention that it was the three-year anniversary of the cruise missile and cluster-bomb attack on al-Majala in Southern Yemen that killed 14 women and 21 children.

If this Obama wept for the children, then it is conceivable that he is as innocent of the violence that he directs as the rest of us are, that he believes like most of us that violence against the Others of the world is not really violence, because our enemies are not really human. However, as Glenn Greenwald (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/19/newtown-drones-children-deaths) writes, “The Obama administration has re-defined the term ‘militant’ to mean: ‘all military-age males in a strike zone’ - the ultimate expression of the rancid dehumanizing view that Muslims are inherently guilty of being Terrorists unless proven otherwise.”

A more generous explanation for his tears might be that he knows full well how little he can accomplish with the Republicans controlling Congress. I’d like to imagine this one. But reality eventually intervenes in our fantasies and projections: Two months after the January 2011 Tucson shooting, Obama put into writing the same pledge he made after the Sandy Hook murders: “We have a responsibility to do everything we can to put a stop to” tragedies from gun violence.

But in the very next sentence, he characteristically qualified his stance: “Like the majority of Americans, I believe that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms…And, in fact, my administration has not curtailed the rights of gun owners — it hasexpanded them.”

His actions earned Obama an “F” from the Brady Center for Gun Violence in 2010 for “extraordinary silence and passivity” on gun control. Devin Dwyer concludes, “In spite of six major shootings on his watch, Obama has not publicly pushed for a renewal of an assault weapons ban or new restrictions on high-capacity magazines.” (http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/12/flashback-obama-i-have-expanded-rights-of-gun-owners/)

This brings us back to two possibilities: either the politician who weeps out of futility and inability to affect real change, or the man who holds to his false sense of innocence as desperately as the rest of us, a sense of innocence that enables him – and us – to overlook the massive suffering America causes in the world.

There is a third and darker possibility. As I wrote above, world mythology offers us many examples of the King (think the Buddha). History, however, presents us with something else: men who, rather than channeling the psychic energy of the King, identified with the archetype. Such men (think Hitler) believed with utter certainty in the purity, goodness and necessity of their cause and in the ultimate reality of their own semi-divine nature. Think Louis the 14th of France, the “Sun King,” who claimed, “L’etat, c’est mois” – “I am the state.” Some (think Stalin or Mao Tse-Tung) began their careers as progressive activists with the noblest of intentions and, so to speak, went over to the dark side. When they did, all who opposed or even questioned them became “other,” to be eliminated with Biblical ferocity.

In archetypal terms, to identify with the King is to become a tyrant, the “shadow King.” Such men were and are capable of anything – especially the arts of deception. May Obama not be that kind of King.

Part One

Our first responsibility as mythological, archetypal thinkers is to take a step back from the dominant political and pop cultural issues to perceive the real stories that are being played out in our culture. The next step is to understand how we participate in those narratives through our own willing acceptance of their primary themes. How do we do this? One way is by being passive consumers of our national rituals. I’m not speaking about conscious, intentional, local, indigenous-based ritual, but mass, public ceremonies that reaffirm the nation-state and its (our) identity as savior of the world and Christ-like advocate for the good.

Public rituals enact and train us in our mythologies. The larger they are, the more influential they can be. Think of the Nuremberg rallies in Nazi Germany. But such rituals certainly don’t need to be so bellicose. In America, where we naively believe that we still have a functioning democracy, our public rituals, designed to reinforce our sense of innocence, are much subtler.

As I write in Chapter Five of my book (Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence), Joseph Campbell taught that a living myth refers past itself to the ineffable, serving four distinct functions.

First of all, the mystical function introduces the individual to that which underlies all names and forms. It awakens religious awe, humility and respect. Second, the cosmological function explains how the universe works. Third, the pedagogical function defines a moral life in terms of the particular culture.

Fourth – and most pervasive – the social function validates the social order and integrates individuals within the community. Originally, it oriented people to the mystery by presenting noble figures at the center of the realm – or psyche – who radiated the blessings that flowed through them from the other world. These figures served this order and showed that everyone carried such potential within. If people still revere royalty, it is from vestigial memory of what the sacred King once meant.

“It is this sociological function of myth that has taken over,” wrote Campbell, “…and it is out of date.” Myth, however, shapes our values, organizes our experience, brings emotion to our festivals, sets the boundaries of dissent, names the children, sends them off to war and justifies their sacrifice. It is the most compelling story we tell ourselves about who we are. And frequently it is the story of who we are not – the Other.

In this context, I strongly recommend Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag, by Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle. You can find the whole book here. Or read a short summary here.

They – and I – reject the notion of “patriotism” in favor of the much more relevant term “nationalism,” which for the past 150 years has supplanted mass religion in most advanced countries. But it retains much religious symbolism. The familiar Christian God has long been replaced by the group, which is symbolized in the totem fetish – the flag.

A fundamental aspect of America’s civil religion is our unique cult of the flag. Curiously, we display it in our churches as well as in many places of business, as if to reinforce the notion that in America there is little difference between them. We worship it by pledging allegiance, and occasionally by kneeling and kissing it. And we are horrified at the thought of its desecration, because, they write, it is “the ritual instrument of group cohesion…the god of nationalism.” Such rituals nearly equate God with America, writes Robert Bellah. Often “…the most jingoistic identity of nation and church has come not from our political leaders but from the churches themselves.” And the flag is embodied in the totem leader,the President.

In this view, the purpose of ritual at the level of the large, national state is to sustain the group by repeating, at various levels of intensity, the act of group creation. Participants in such rituals – especially in our culture of radical individualism – achieve a kind of communion and learn that their God demands human sacrifice. Not the sacrifice of the defeated, which implies the preparedness to kill for one’s country, but willing sacrifice,the willingness to die for it. Or at the very least, the willingness to send one’s children – the best of the best – to die for it.

This willingness, we recall, was established in the two most foundational myths of Western culture. In the first, Abraham was willing to sacrifice his own son to glorify his God. It makes no difference that the son was spared; it was the willingness that counted. In the second, that same God did sacrifice his only son (the son of a father with no mother) to redeem the world.

American mythology updated this legacy with the idea of regeneration through violence. We regenerate our culture not by killing millions of people of color (although we do that in every generation), but by sacrificing our own young – and not the dregs of society, but, like the Aztecs and Hawaiians, the very best.

In this demythologized world, where all large public events serve the sociological function of myth, rituals may be contrived or opportunistic. The most powerful rituals of nation-group solidarity, say Marvin and Ingle, are opportunistic responses, to the perception of group threat, such as war. But opportunistic rituals are unreliable in their occurrence and expensive in their prosecution. Their magic is great precisely because they are risky and costly.

Contrived or pre-planned, seasonal rituals fill in the intervals between opportunistic group-forging rituals by rehearsing the drama of sacrifice and regeneration. American presidential elections are prototypic contrived rituals of sacrifice and regeneration.

Every American President has two functions: He plays the symbolic role of king-figure, embodying the nation-state and all that the group considers good about it. But, like the last kings of Mexico and Hawaii, he is also the primary spokesperson – a salesman, essentially – for a dying empire.

As spokesman, he must continue at all times to amplify our paranoid fear of “The Other” so as to justify military intervention abroad and repression at home. In other words, he must manipulate the traditional white American sense of being the innocent victim, or at least the potential victim, of some dark (and dark-skinned), irrational, violent, predatory outsider.

As King-figure, however, his job is to absorb the idealistic projections of millions of people and convince them that his intentions (and ours) are noble, protective and altruistic. To do that, he must play the exact opposite of the victim, the Hero. He must reassure Americans of his – and our – ability to meet the threat and defeat it, while simultaneously bringing the Good Word of our compassion to those evil ones who would – for no apparent reason – harm us. This double-bind, by the way, has been described as a long-term prescription for schizophrenia.

Anyone who has survived the long, drawn-out vetting process of satisfying the power brokers and achieving major-party nomination has proven his or her willingness to play by these rules. They have made a career of playing both spokesman and potential King for the cameras. And they are perfectly aware of the penalties for straying too far from the role.

The Democratic Party’s nomination of George McGovern in 1972 was an anomaly, never to be repeated.