Every American president at least since Harry Truman, and arguably for much longer, has encountered a unique political dilemma created by two conditions. The first is a political reality. Capitalism and imperial expansion have dominated American politics since the beginning of the republic – and, if we are to properly understand the events of November 22nd, 1963 as a military coup – the end of the republic. In this context, all Presidents since Lyndon Johnson have been servants of the Deep State,  essentially spokespersons for the empire, certainly not its rulers, not even the primary “decider,” as George W. Bush called himself, well aware from the start that they have far less power than the public thinks.

The second reality is mythological, and it involves his symbolic role as king-figure. He embodies the mythic figure of the King for his people. As envisioned by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette,  the King is the archetypal image of order, blessing and fertility. When, in dreams or myths, he acts, he does so as a representative of the Realm – or the Self – in its perfect, ideal fullness, in concert with his Queen.

These two conditions require that he play two opposite aspects of our national mythology against each other. Compared to ancient and indigenous narratives, the myth of American innocence offers us a severely diminished understanding of the possibilities of the psyche. We all learn quite early on that at the deepest level, to be an American is to aspire to be a success, a winner, or mythologically speaking, a hero. We also learn that our only alternative is to be a loser – or a victim. In this drama, we all make our destinies as individuals, and we are all either winner/heroes or loser/victims. And we all understand further that if we are losers it is no one’s fault but our own.

So the President’s – every President’s – role in the drama requires that he do two things. He must continue at all times to amplify the national mood of paranoia and fear of The Other so as to justify armed intervention abroad, a continuing national military state 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. This of course, would be nothing new to him, since anyone even aspiring to his office, not to mention those actually vetted, would be perfectly aware of it.

At the same time, he must play the exact opposite of the victim, the Hero. As Bush endlessly repeated after 9/11/2001, it is absolutely certain that America will prevail against the external Other (formerly Communism, now Islamic terrorism), because the nation, which he embodies, is charged with the divine mission of defeating evil and spreading freedom and opportunity. He must reassure Americans of his – and our – ability to meet the threat and defeat it, because not to do so would be to call our most basic national and personal identities into question.

Sadly (for those who expected something more), Barack Obama has slid seamlessly into this role. Perhaps he has had no choice; perhaps he is a true believer. But his statements about the war in Afghanistan are essentially no different from Lyndon Johnson’s on Vietnam or Bush’s on Iraq: We are in terrible danger, but we will prevail, because we are Americans, and God himself has ordained that we should be the saviors of the world.

But in America only a white man can play this role without being burned. Running for President, Obama was attacked both for being “too Black” and for being “not Black enough.” The realities of racial hatred – and fundraising – in America forced him to choose the latter, and to emphasize a “post-racial” philosophy. For this he was very richly rewarded by the financial sector.  His choice, however, had consequences.

The irony is that he has been unable to defend himself from the reactionary, Tea Party attacks regarding his place of birth, his middle name, his “socialist” inclinations and, of course, his skin color. His dilemma is truly unique. Even as he has been forced to continue demonizing others (dark-skinned people abroad and deporting Latinos at the borders), he has become the subject of demonization himself. He has become the President as Other, who shamelessly accepts the abuse even as he faithfully serves his corporate masters.

In another time and place, he would have been known as one of the “house slaves.” These were the slaves who served the master inside his house, the cooks, nannies and butlers, who lived in slightly better conditions than their brethren toiling in the fields. But they were still slaves.

Obama, like every President before him for several generations, worked desperately for years to become an occupant of the White House, only to become a slave to it.

Part Three -- History and Myth

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. – Andre Gide

As both American history and American mythology have shown us, it is always easier to blame others – dark-skinned people or dark-web conspiracies – for our troubles than it is to admit our own complicity. Chapters seven and ten of my book discuss what I call the Paranoid Imagination, tracing it backwards to the roots of Christianity and forward to the very beginning of the American Republic and its original fascination with the Illuminati:

The paranoid imagination seeks itself: it constantly projects its fantasies outward onto the Other and then proceeds to demonize it. Therefore, it finds conspiracies everywhere. In 1798, ministers whipped up hysteria about a tiny Masonic group. Anticipating McCarthyism by 150 years, one minister ranted: “I have now in my possession…authenticated list of names.” In 1835, future President John Tyler blamed abolitionism on “a reptile who had crawled from some of the sinks of Europe…to sow the seeds of discord among us.”

The classic text on our unique willingness to search for that “reptile” is Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964), and most of our gatekeepers still quote it when pontificating about conspiracy theories. But Hofstadter has his own critics, who have pointed out his tendency to conflate left-wing and right-wing populism and ignore significant differences between them. In other words, Hofstadter himself was a gatekeeper who encouraged the same kind of false equivalencies that I’ve been talking about.

We don’t need another study of conspiracy theories. What we do need is a deeper understanding of why and how we decide to be part of the gatekeeping process, how we reflexively reject what doesn’t appear to be “common sense” and marginalize progressive thought. We also need to learn to discriminate. Indeed, we can learn much from some of the gatekeepers, some of whom offer brilliant analyses of right-wing conspiracism. (Since they invariably express the anxiety of the Center, however, they cannot resist the temptation to falsely equate right and left.) Steve Clarke and Brian Keeley offer a useful definition:

A theory that traces important events to a secret, nefarious cabal, and whose proponents consistently respond to contrary facts not by modifying their theory, but instead by insisting on the existence of ever-wider circles of high-level conspirators controlling most or all parts of society.

There is often a strong similarity to religious cults, as we’ll see below. Rachel Bernstein, a writer who specializes in recovery therapy, argues that there is no self-correction process within cults, since the self-reinforcing true believers are immune to fact-checking or conflicting opinions. This makes them feel special, part of something important:

When people get involved in a movement, collectively, what they’re saying is they want to be connected to each other. They want to have exclusive access to secret information other people don’t have, information they believe the powers that be are keeping from the masses, because it makes them feel protected and empowered. They’re a step ahead of those in society who remain willfully blind. This creates a feeling similar to a drug – it’s its own high.

Jonathan Kay (Among the Truthers) writes:

In America…life’s losers have no one to blame but themselves. And so the conceit that they are up against some all-powerful corporate or governmental conspiracy comes as a relief: It removes the stigma of failure, and replaces it with the more psychologically manageable feeling of anger.

Note Kay’s apparent acceptance of American mythology: “…losers have no one to blame but themselves.” But his observations do make sense to me, even if they are patronizing (using pop psychology to label and dismiss people is one of the most common gatekeeping tools. In mythological terms, this is Apollo the lone archer killing from afar, as opposed to the drunken Dionysus who lives among the common people). To patronize is to label oneself as an expert – smarter, better, more advanced than the other, and Kay excels in this tactic, peppering phrases such as “quackery,” “satisfy his hunger for public attention,” “typing out manifestoes on basement card tables,” “something they fit in between video gaming and Facebook,” “college-educated Internet addicts,” “faculty-lounge guerillas,” and the almost comic false equivalency of “Glenn Beck and Michael Moore.” Can we take this guy seriously? Can we identify his agenda?

Ultimately, this kind of analysis tells us more about the psychology of the “experts” than about their subjects. And it is precisely his style of east-coast, liberal, quasi-academic pontification and devaluing of flyover state values that drives millions of white working-class people either into reactionary politics or out of political engagement entirely.  

So we find ourselves divided into perhaps five groups. First, there is a progressive, activist, young, mostly non-white, often non-binary community who question the fundamental aspects of the myth of American innocence. Second, we have a tiny but vastly influential class of media and academic gatekeepers (divided into true believers and others who are clearly in it only for the money) whose professional mandate is to maintain the illusion of innocence and rationality for (three) the great majority in the center, innocently consuming all the American myths.

Fourth, the true believers on the right who, despite their white privilege and evangelical fervor, consider themselves victims of the Center, which they equate with the Left. Very many of them take a very selective “libertarian” stance, as the book Uncivil Liberties: Deconstructing Libertarianism explains. You can read the introductory essay (which I wrote), The Mythic Foundations of Libertarianism here. At the far end of this continuum we find the Q followers, many of whom apparently see no contradiction in, for example, their support of both Trumpus and the Black Lives Matter movement, or of both personal choice on vaccines and their hatred of abortion. Self-described “libertarians” who would ban abortion? Rand Paul is only one example.

And finally, we have some, children perhaps of the 1960s self-reliant, back-to-the-land movement, who dream of an Aquarian Age heaven on Earth if only everyone would think positive thoughts, but, because they cannot seem to perceive how they are manipulated, inhabit every zone of the margins without discriminating right from left, not to mention right from wrong. They are, truly, all over the map – like my Facebook friend who re-posts constantly, alternatingly from progressive and from ultra-right sources, denouncing racism on the one hand and praising those who enforce it on the other.

Psychology gets us only so far. I prefer mythological and religious-historical perspectives. In Chapter Seven I identify a trend that developed early on in American Protestantism in which

Cooperation between northerners and southerners birthed a paradoxical mix of extreme religious and modern Enlightenment values. Man was fallen and sinful, yet he could become whatever he wanted. Indeed, in 1776 – for the first time in history – a nation proclaimed the pursuit of happiness as its prime value. Soon, Tocqueville observed of American preachers, “…it is often difficult to be sure when listening to them whether the main object of religion is to procure eternal felicity in the next world or prosperity in this.”

Where else but in America would there exist a doctrine known as the “Prosperity Gospel”? QAnon may be propelled by paranoia and populism, but it is also propelled by religious faith, and it utilizes the language of evangelical, apocalyptic Christianity. Adrienne LaFrance writes:

In his classic 1957 book, The Pursuit of the Millennium, the historian Norman Cohn examined the emergence of apocalyptic thinking over many centuries. He found one common condition: This way of thinking consistently emerged in regions where rapid social and economic change was taking place – and at periods of time when displays of spectacular wealth were highly visible but unavailable to most people. This was true in Europe during the Crusades in the 11th century, and during the Black Death in the 14th century, and in the Rhine Valley in the 16th century…

Here are two essays on apocalyptic thinking, one by Michael Meade and one that I wrote, in which I argue that millenarians always mistaken the need for internal, symbolic change for literal end-of-days.  

…we must step away from literalist thinking (whether 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 potential new growth…

“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…(but) 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.”

The literalization of mythic images occurs everywhere that mythic thinking has broken down. But we know that a social or even political movement has elements of specifically American religiosity by the unmistakable smell of money. LaFrance continues:

The most prominent QAnon figures have a presence beyond the biggest social-media platforms and image boards. The Q universe encompasses numerous blogs, proprietary websites, and types of chat software, as well as alternative social-media platforms such as Gab, the site known for anti-Semitism and white nationalism, where many people banned from Twitter have congregated. Vloggers and bloggers promote their Patreon accounts, where people can pay them in monthly sums. There’s also money to be made from ads on YouTube. That seems to be the primary focus for (David) Hayes, whose videos have been viewed more than 33 million times altogether. His “Q for Beginners” video includes ads from companies such as the vacation-rental site Vrbo and from The Epoch Times, an international pro-Trump newspaper.

This notion of overwhelming influence, control and victimhood that is so characteristic of conspiracism is a form of literalistic thinking, an aspect of our de-mythologized world, in which the true believers have essentially eliminated both the Old Testament Jehovah and his demonic adversary and substituted the Illuminati, Bill Gates, the Clintons or George Soros. But it is still monotheistic thinking, and it expresses the Paranoid Imagination.

The mythic figure who embodies this thinking is transcendent, distant, all-knowing, all-powerful and exclusively masculine. This thinking objectifies Nature and Woman. It invites misogyny, hierarchy and dogma. It rejects cyclical time for linear time, allowing for only a single creation myth and a single ending. It reduces mystery to simplistic dualisms such as ultimate good and ultimate evil or innocence and original sin. However, since it cannot include its opposite, it requires another mythic figure to carry that role, and therefore it is obsessed with both evil and temptation, and it almost always leads to puritanism. Since it rejects paradox, diversity and ambiguity, it demands belief, which implies not merely a single set of truths but also the obligation to convert – or eliminate – those who question it.

This heritage is perhaps three thousand years old. Or, if we were to take a feminist perspective, we could say that its antecedents extend two thousand years further back, to the origins of patriarchy itself. But by the beginning of the Christian era, it had solidified into the thinking that ultimately led to the mentality of the crusader. Here is more insight from Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium: 

The elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted and yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary…ruthlessness directed towards…a total and final solution…The world is dominated by an evil, tyrannous power of boundless destructiveness. The tyranny of that power will become more and more outrageous, the sufferings of its victims more and more intolerable until suddenly the hour will strike when the Saints of God are able to rise up and overthrow it. Then the saints themselves, the chosen, holy people who hitherto have groaned under the oppressor’s heel, shall in their turn inherit the earth. This will be the culmination of history; the kingdom of the saints will not only surpass in glory all previous kingdoms, it will have no successors.

Cohn also repeatedly points out another characteristic of those times when the oppressed saints “rise up and overthrow.” In his examples from Northern Europe, they begin by attacking their rich overlords, but they quickly move on to massacring more traditional scapegoats, the Jews (if you haven’t noticed that much Q-related ranting is merely a recycling in 21^st-century terms of Medieval anti-Semitism, you haven’t been paying attention).

But what happens when, after a thousand years, a grand narrative, that sense of meaning, begins to break down? Or, as I’ve argued in my book, when an entire mythology – such as the myth of American innocence – collapses? Religion as a system holding the mass of society together has been essentially dead since the mid-19^th century, when a new way of knowing, the scientific method, replaced it and modernity was born. Very quickly, a new meta-narrative, nationalism arose. Germany, Italy and Japan, for example, did not constitute themselves as nation-states until the 1860s. And one could certainly argue that this was also true for the United States, in terms of the North-South reunification that occurred after the end of Reconstruction.

This new thinking was ideological, and in the sense that people were willing to die (and kill) for an idea, it had clear religious undertones. It gave people meaning in a world in which science had taken that meaning away from religion.

All nations certainly continued to give lip service to religion, but in reality, they utilized religion to justify the new national orders. Fundamentalism continues to motivate millions, but primarily as an adjunct to the state (as the consistently pro-war positions of nearly all televangelists show) or as its mirror-opposite (as in every socialist country).

The new literary and cultural movement of Modernism followed the universal disillusionment after World War One and attempted to make sense of what to do when we lose the certainties by which we define ourselves. But it offered only two alternatives for the non-artistic: the scientific method that had helped de-throne religion, and the political ideologies that led quickly to the second World War, the Holocaust and the Cold War. And, since neither of these belief systems addressed the soul’s longing for deeper meaning, faith in both began to collapse.

In the 1960s, Post-modernism identified this dislocation, celebrated the breakdown of structure and threw off the constraints of grand narratives. Individual identity, especially gender, was no longer fixed, but fluid and socially constructed. Postmodern individuals have no essential selfhood; they are constructed by webs of language and power relations. But very few of us can thrive in such a world, as Huston Smith wrote:

I am thinking of frontier thinkers who chart the course that others follow. These thinkers have ceased to be modern because they have seen through the so-called scientific worldview, recognizing it to be not scientific but scientistic. They continue to honor science for what it tells us about nature, but as that is not all that exists, science cannot provide us with a worldview ― not a valid one. The most it can show us is half of the world, the half where normative and intrinsic values, existential and ultimate meanings, teleologies, qualities, immaterial realities, and beings that are superior to us do not appear…Where, then, do we now turn for an inclusive worldview? Postmodernism hasn’t a clue. And this is its deepest definition… “incredulity toward metanarratives”. Having deserted revelation for science, the West has now abandoned the scientif­ic worldview as well, leaving it without replacement.

All this would be hugely magnified by technology, writes Alexander Beiner:

This is what identity is online. Fragmented, fluid, partial. Online, you can be anyone you want to be, and simultaneously, you are nobody. If this is where we gain our sense of self, we find ourselves adrift in a sea of language and relativistic narratives over which we have no control.

By the 1980s dissatisfaction with the trappings of post-modern culture – consumerism, the nuclear family, conventional religion, anti-communism and vicarious intensity (see Chapter 10 of my book) – was leading many Americans in one (or both) of two directions: the substance abuse that would eventually explode into mass death-by-opiates in the 2010s, and the retreat into fundamentalist religion.

When myths that bind us together in worlds of meaning die, the soul – and the soul of the culture – search for substitutes. All political ideologies, like the religions they emerged from, are monotheistic, since they allow no alternative viewpoints. Whereas myth once invited us to have our own ideas about the same thing, as Meade has said, ideologies force us to think the same idea.

From what I can see, many New Age Conspiracists cling neither to conventional religion nor to any nationalist ideology, but only to a simplistic and optimistic faith in “freedom.” They do seem to value the pseudo-community that characterizes the Internet, where they can freely share meta-narratives and experience neither the risks nor the support of authentic community, especially during the enforced isolation of the pandemic. And they do have one thing – the opportunity to connect the dots and explain everything, and in so doing, reduce their levels of anxiety.

Connecting the dots – finding some degree of correlation and attributing direct causality – may well be a new way of countering the terror of finding oneself in an economy, a pandemic and a political system that is broken and a climate that is out of control, in which a god of evil seems to have replaced a god of good. It’s difficult to confront the possibility that this good god may not really be concerned with our welfare (that would be a truly pagan perspective), or that he may never have existed at all. Americans still believe in that good god at much higher rates than Europeans – but 57% of American adults also believe in the existence of Satan, or in the hazy figure of the Antichrist.

Although he can’t resist throwing in false equivalencies, Kay accurately observes:

Conspiracism is attractive to the Doomsayer because it organizes all of the world’s menacing threats into one monolithic force – allowing him to reconcile the bewildering complexities of our secular world with the good-versus-evil narrative contained in the Book of Revelation and other religious texts…(he) vigilantly scans the news for signs that the world is moving toward some final apocalyptic confrontation between good and evil…so saturated is American culture with the imagery of Christian eschatology that it has been widely co-opted…Once you strip away their jargon, radicalized Marxists also can be classified as Evangelical Doomsayers… unfailingly compressing many random evils into a single, identifiable point-source of malign power…This psychic need to impute all evil to a lone, omnipotent source inevitably requires the conspiracist to create larger and larger meta-conspiracies that sweep together seemingly unconnected power centers.

…Both of them (conspiracism and millenarianism) go together: Both of them put the fact of human suffering at the center of the human condition. Conspiracism is a strategy for explaining the origin of that suffering. Millenarianism is a strategy for forging meaning from it…(in) a generalized nostalgia for America’s past.

Let’s be clear about this: No one in our culture fully escapes this legacy, since, as James Hillman said, “We are each children of the Biblical God…(it is) the essential American fact.” Deep in the unconscious psyche of every American Yogi, Buddhist or New Age influencer is a three-thousand-year-old monotheist, and it has its own agenda to convert or eliminate its competition.

Here is a clue: if your people consider their story to be literally true and other people’s stories are “myths,” then you and your people are thinking mythically or literally. Other mono-words share the brittleness of one correct way: monopoly, monogamy, monolithic, monarchy, monotonous. If solutions to our great social and environmental crises emerge, they will originate outside of the monoculture, from people on the edges – or at least those who have learned to discriminate.

Once we become comfortable thinking in terms of myth – as stories we tell ourselves about ourselves – we can step out of own monocular thinking. We can acknowledge, as Charles Eisenstein writes, that a conspiracy narrative is “…after all, neither provable nor falsifiable,” and then take a clearer look at what it can illuminate.

Underneath its literalism, it conveys important information…First, it demonstrates the shocking extent of public alienation from institutions of authority…Second, (It) gives narrative form to an authentic intuition that an inhuman power governs the world…(it) locates that power in a group of malevolent human beings…Therein lies a certain psychological comfort, because now there is someone to blame…

Alternatively, we could locate the “inhuman power” in systems or ideologies, not a group of conspirators. That is less psychologically rewarding, because we can no longer easily identify as good fighting evil; after all, we ourselves participate in these systems, which pervade our entire society…Stamped from the same template, conspiracy theories tap into an unconscious orthodoxy. They emanate from the same mythic pantheon as the social ills they protest. We might call it…the mythology of Separation…matter separate from spirit, human separate from nature…Because we are (in this myth) separate from other people and from nature, we must dominate our competitors and master nature. Progress, therefore, consists in increasing our capacity to control the Other…

…Events are indeed orchestrated in the direction of more and more control, only the orchestrating power is itself a zeitgeist, an ideology…a myth. This deep ideology…is beyond anyone’s power to invent. The Illuminati, if they exist, are not its authors; it is more true to say that the mythology is their author. We do not create our myths; they create us.

Now I think we have enough background to try and understand what makes NACs tick.

Part Four -- Conspirituality

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. – Carl Jung

Most conspiratorial thinking deliberately serves the interests of the rich and powerful. But, as I wrote above, we are now confronting something entirely new. Extreme right wingers are presenting aesthetic web presences with superficially progressive themes, but which, upon closer inspection, reveal pro-capitalist, reactionary and/or racist agendas. This phenomenon relies on two factors. The first is the major social media platforms and their algorithms that encourage rapid dissemination of unreliable information and the confirmation bias that results from seeing only what the viewer already believes in. Now, Q-followers rarely see what you see, and if they do, it is presented in a format that minimizes the moral consequences.

The second is that these platforms are deliberately designed to take advantage of millions of good-hearted, “spiritual but not religious” people who have – quite rightly, in my opinion – lost all trust in the mainstream media, but who seem to have also lost the ability to discriminate between progressive ideas and the language of hate. One writer refers to these folks as “DRH” for “Down the Rabbit Hole.” I prefer “New Age Conspiracists,” or NACs, and I’ll bet you know a few of them.

Such people often share certain personality traits such as distrust of authority and institutions, particularly in the fields of health and education; openness to unusual experiences; willingness to detect hidden patterns; deep longing for authentic community; and an attraction to alternative paradigms.

Many of these folks have long existed outside of conventional career paths, resonate with a libertarian, anarcho-capitalist entrepreneurial tone, are open to information that some psychics claim to have “channeled” from other, non-physical dimensions, and believe in the ability to manifest financial and romantic success and vibrant health through positive thinking, as taught by Rhonda Byrne’s best-selling book and film The Secret. In the film version, a series of self-help teachers promote positive thinking, primarily toward the goal of acquiring consumer goods and a great love life. This tradition extends back to the New Thought teachers of early 19^th-century America. And let’s be really clear about this: the film ignores the values of community almost totally.

Mainstream media writers, who are primarily from the middle class, have never understood people who reject their values, demeaning the post-hippie culture as “bliss ninnies” of the “the love-and-light crowd.” Nor has the mainstream acknowledged how the counterculture actually birthed the high-tech world we all take for granted, as John Markoff relates in What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry.

Among my 60s generation the characteristics that encourage artistic, religious and even scientific exploration, as well as a disdain for convention, usually produced liberal, anti-authoritarian attitudes on social issues and optimism about the future. But those same characteristics, encouraged by a lack of deep introspection, have a dark shadow. The term “conspirituality” was coined in 2011 – long before either Trumpus or QAnon. Charlotte Ward and David Voas write that

It offers a broad politico-spiritual philosophy based on two core convictions, the first traditional to conspiracy theory, the second rooted in the New Age: 1) a secret group covertly controls, or is trying to control, the political and social order, and 2) humanity is undergoing a ‘paradigm shift’ in consciousness. Proponents believe that the best strategy for dealing with the threat of a totalitarian ‘new world order’ is to act in accordance with an awakened ‘new paradigm’ worldview.

Jules Evans suggests how these two forms of experience can flow into one stream:

…. The first is a sort of extroverted euphoric mystical experience: “Everything is connected. I am synchronistically drawn to helpers and allies, the universe is carrying us forward to a wonderful climactic transformation (the Rapture, the Omega Point, the Paradigm Shift), and we are the divine warriors of light appointed by God / the Universe to manifest this glorious new phase shift in human history.” The second: “…Everything is connected, there is a secret order being revealed to me, but I am not part of it. It is an evil demonic order…perhaps I, and one or two others, can wake up to this Grand Plan, and expose it”…The first trip is a euphoric ego-expansion (I am God! I am the Cosmic Universe evolving!) and the second is paranoid ego-persecution (The Universe is controlled by Evil Demons…) In both, the individual awakens to this hidden reality. But in the first, they are a superpowered initiate in the hidden order and a catalyst for a Millenarian transformation, in the second they are a vulnerable and disempowered exposer of the powerful hidden order.

Both forms exemplify mystical or even schizoid thinking. In both, the ego is part of a grand cosmic drama. In one, it is the divine appointed catalyst for humanity’s rebirth. In the other, one is the heroic exposer of the Hidden Order. And it appears to be possible that one can switch between ecstatic, optimistic Millenarianism and paranoid persecutory conspiracy thinking, from “everything is connected and I’m a central part of this wonderful cosmic transformation!’’ to “everything is connected and I’m at risk from this global plot!”

It’s always been about waking up – being “woke.” For my children’s generation, the “red pill” moment of the 1999 film The Matrix became the central metaphor that connected these two forms of mystical thinking. On the left, being red-pilled implies awareness of social justice issues.

Rightists, however, have adopted the metaphor to represent an awakening from their perceived conditioned trance of soft, inappropriately liberal concern for the poor – those whom our American mythologies have labelled as unworthy. And any institutions that interfere with this libertarian focus on the individual are simply impediments to a narcissistic preoccupation with self-fulfillment. Then we enter the slippery slope in which the ability to discriminate diminishes in favor of an intuitive knowing and an essentially religious disdain for science and conventional sources of authority.

As I’ve said, much of that disdain is regularly justified by revelations of massive corporate corruption, especially in the fields of nutrition and wellness so treasured by NACs. The danger, however, is that they can become vulnerable to fake news that encourages that magical thinking. (Before we slide into simplistic demonization of “anti-vaxxers,” however, let’s remember that many others on the progressive Left who have retained that precious ability to discriminate are vaccine skeptics not because they disregard science, but because they reject the capitalist corruption of science.)

American history, especially the history of health care, is replete with good-hearted, naïve “holy fools” – and the con-men, from P.T. Barnum to the grifters already lining up to replace Trumpus – who have always been willing to steal our watches and sell them back to us. For more, read my series “The Con Man: An American Archetype.”

The devaluing of intellectual checks and balances combined with exclusive emphasis on positivity and the inability to grieve (another American religious characteristic) can result in “spiritual bypass” – the use of metaphysical beliefs to deny, distort, or reframe legitimate human suffering, both personal and social, and it can attract really decent and idealistic people toward cults and ideologies, whether spiritual, political or consumeristic. 

After the Dionysian explosion of the sixties, the meeting with Eastern religion, psychedelics and indigenous spirituality introduced healthier lifestyles that have benefited millions. But the phrase “human potential movement” entered the lexicon carrying the seeds of its own destruction wherever its proponents refused to address the fullness of the psyche. In late capitalist America, a society lead by uninitiated men and sociopathic narcissists long before Trumpus, they encountered institutions – work, church, media, politics, education, the police and the military, and perhaps most of all, the family – designed expressly to elicit their darkest potentials, much of which were channeled into fundamentalism, toxic masculinity, addictions and the vicarious fascination with brutal militarism.

Chapter Five of my book describes James Hillman’s Depth Psychological insight into the excessive identification with the dry values of “spirit” as opposed to the wet values we associate with “soul.” In mythological terms, this is the opposition between Apollo and Dionysus taken to its extreme. Julian Walker writes that for spiritual people,

…we end up engaging in a practice that, rather than shaping outside reality, as is often claimed in media like The Secret, instead burns a distorted operating system and perceptual lens into our neuroplastic brains…It’s the practice of thinking facts and evidence are relative, mutable, and can be made to mean whatever we want via the narcissism-enabling belief in absolute subjectivity — the divine “I” that alone creates reality and stands all-powerful within it…For spiritual folks the threshold into the overlap is crossed…into just the exact shadow reflection of the light-and-love delusion. It is the positive, synchronistic all-is-perfect obsessive pattern-seeking confirmation bias turned on its head and set on fire — and that fire fantastically fueled by the explosive emotional gasoline kept buried until now by spiritual bypass.

Walker is one of many voices writing from within the Human Potential Movement.  He describes several “worldview weaknesses” held by many NACs:

1 – Over-privileging of the individual over the collective.

2 – Denying the validity of other points of view, over-equalizing opinion and undermining of respect for expertise, all of which can lead to bigger sales and more followers. “Real scientists are always open to being wrong. Real scientists know the current hypothesis is only as good as the next batch of data. Real scientists are careful.” I would add: real scientists refuse to allow corporate toadies to corrupt their data to show quarterly profits.

3 – “Esoteric knowledge ego inflation:” rejecting virtually anything that can be called mainstream as a means of subtly bolstering one’s sense of having esoteric insights into reality.

4 – A sanitized, overly rosy spirituality that ignores the shadow “creates a bubble of positivity” that, when faced with actual suffering, can twist into its opposite and perceive its polarized antithesis in the form of evil elites. This can fuel messianic zealots who “can become compelling and charismatic leaders because they are rock solid in their convictions.”

5 – Belief in the “Law of Attraction,” which teaches that people create their own realities. This idea does have a core of truth. But it reinforces detachment from collective political action, radical individualism – that most fundamental American myth – and New Age promises of “instant gratification mental changes.” And, I would add, by ignoring its own deeply Calvinist roots, it leads to moral condemnation of those who don’t think positive thoughts. This is another specifically American story, as I describe in “Blaming the victim.”

Another person writing from within this community is Martin Winiecki, who offers “Six Reasons so Many Spiritual People Have Been Fooled by QAnon”, and I extrapolate:

1 – Lack of Structural Analysis: The culture of radical individualism sees both heroes and villains in particular individuals or small, hidden groups. But when we don’t address the systemic nature of our condition (whether spiritual or material), this kind of thinking merely reinforces the system itself.

2 – Overly simplistic, binary thinking: Suppressing “negativity” encourages the shadow to take on a life of its own, “which will terrorize and subconsciously dominate them…” Jung concluded from his study of world mythology that when suppressed aspects of the psyche finally emerge – as they always do – they tend to be angry.

3 – Implicit Racial Bias: Stories about Soros’ control of social movements clearly reflect old-school, anti-Semitic prejudice about all-powerful Jews, while New Age fear of introspection leads to the unwillingness to acknowledge the existence of white privilege. Repetition of claims that Black Lives Matter is “a tool of the liberal elites” reveals the belief that black people aren’t able to speak for themselves. “Not seeing color” insults actual people of color who live their entire lives identifying exactly as they are.

4 – To denounce conventional reality as illusion can lead to the inability to realize that one’s own political views reflect ideology and thus believe everything and nothing at once. “According to the great political philosopher Hannah Arendt, this is precisely the psychological state of people who follow totalitarian ideologies.”

5 – The post-modern experience that the left has lost its appeal due to intellectual elitism, moral and ideological rigidity and rejection of non-material realities leads to the unconscious search for another ideology as a replacement.

6 – The natural desire for community is corrupted by its shadow of radical individualism and the profit motive. This results in people with no previous connection to each other fusing together in an illusionary sense of shared identity. Why are so many wellness practitioners in particular falling for the onslaught of QAnon claims? Although the global wellness industry is reportedly worth $4.5 trillion, its more controversial elements continue to suffer disparagement not only from Big Pharma but from countless self-appointed, individual gatekeepers of the status quo (do you, reader, giggle when a friend offers a treatment with healing crystals?) Now in this current state of emergency – where defeating the pandemic requires universal social acquiescence – many purveyors of these views see their paranoia being confirmed. In a form of what Brigid Delaney calls “trauma bonding,” this strengthens their connections with figures such as Alex Jones who appear to favor individual rights, and like that broken clock, may well be right twice a day.

I would add a seventh factor:

7 – The natural desire to attain self-awareness and mystical realization is corrupted by those same factors. People often realize the deeper unity of beings and the need for a truly planetary frame of reference, at least briefly, through the experience of psychedelic plant medicines. However, as Daniel Pinchbeck writes,

The problem is that they need a cultural / initiatory context or container which supports them in fully integrating the influx of new knowledge and wisdom. Otherwise, the ego structure finds ways to distort these revelations for its own purposes, in a variety of subtle ways. This is how the Neo-spiritual and psychedelic movement have gone off track…Fascism is a kind of low-grade occultism: It satisfies the ego mind’s desire for a simplistic unity and gets rid of all the nagging paradoxes and contradictions of reality.

For more insight into conspirituality, there’s an entire website, www.Conspirituality.net, which describes itself as “a weekly study of converging right-wing conspiracy theories and faux-progressive wellness utopianism.” One of its pages lists over thirty wellness “influencers” that have posted, shared, or explicitly created QAnon-related content, even though many have recently scrubbed direct reference to Q itself.

Let’s be clear about this: we need to integrate the mystical and self-realization visions with indigenous initiation wisdom and roll it all into a perspective that reveals the systemic sources of racism, misogyny and political alienation that impact us all. Indeed, the idea of “spiritually awakening” to our true nature long ago predated the current idea of “woke.” But without the ability to discriminate, to understand the mythic narratives that drive our willingness to innocently embody and enact them, we remain “bliss ninnies” at best and crusaders for fascism at worst.

Part One:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. – W.B. Yeats

All that is solid melts into air. – Karl Marx

In a previous blog series I discussed how the gatekeepers of our culture exclude and demonize much progressive thought by associating it in the reader’s mind with bizarre right-wing claims, thereby delegitimizing both:

…countless websites and books devoted to narratives that marginalize anyone who questions the dominant paradigms of the culture. They typically do this by identifying “loony” theories from the perspective of the “rational center.” Such gatekeepers almost always lump all of the questioners together. Then with patronizing, pseudo-psychology they explore the unconscious motivations of conspiracy theorists, be they fascists or anarchists, Christians or Pagans, oligarchs or street people.

I’m talking about people who want us to forget about radical change because – they tell us – some of its adherents and some of their proposals are as laughably, preposterously unacceptable as are those on the other extreme.

The use of the term “conspiracy theory” is one of the main ways in which they banish any legitimate criticism of those in power to the realm of the truly illegitimate. The intent is insidious, even if often sincere. The only position that reasonable people could hold is the only one that remains, C – the consensual center that ranges between “not as crazy as A” to “not as crazy as B.” When they hear it often enough, people hold to that center so as to reaffirm their sense of American Innocence, and their identities.

I’ve read much by those who claim to objectively analyze conspiracy theories, and they all, left or right, serve that gatekeeping function. Even though most of what they say applies primarily to the right-wing loonies, they consistently associate the same faulty thinking with people further to the left.

But here is something new. In this age of fake news, “alternative facts”, high-resolution film and internet, when any image can be manipulated, some right wingers have become very skilled at offering theories with superficially progressive themes, but which, upon closer inspection, reveal reactionary agendas. They rely on the inability or unwillingness of countless good-hearted people who consume their well-funded rants and web posts to actually discriminate the former from the latter. One writer refers to these folks as “DRH” for “Down the Rabbit Hole.” I suggest another term: “New Age Conspiracists,” or NACs.

The wild popularity (seen by over 84 million people and translated into 27 languages) of the 2011 film Thrive is an example. Its creator Foster Gamble interviewed many progressive thinkers but hid his own libertarian views. Once they learned about those views, ten of the participants publicly denounced the film, claiming that Gamble had misrepresented himself. For more on that, see my blog, “The Mythic Foundations of Libertarianism” or Ben Boyce’s essay, in which he acknowledges “…how a skillfully edited documentary, backed with a big budget, can draw new adherents to a long-discredited political doctrine.” Later in this essay, I’ll describe how other “influencers” are manipulating thousands of people.

The pandemic year 2020 has seen massive resistance to social distancing and masking guidelines that have overlapped with vaccine skepticism. The great majority of it has emanated from right-wing and libertarian sources. But for now, I offer some confusing truths: quite a few left-wingers also favor personal choice on these matters – and the right is well aware of this. So we’re seeing slick, well-designed, “free-speech” websites such as Londonreal that, like Thrive, include articles by Noam Chomsky. But the further down one reads in their links, the more explicitly right-wing writings appear. This appears to be a deliberate strategy to influence young, anti-establishment, New Age readers.  

Let’s get a few things straight. Of course, there are conspiracies in which powerful people or classes discuss their shared goals and strategies away from the public eye. After all, to con-spire is merely to “breathe together.” Call it the Committee of 300, the Illuminati, the British Royal Family, the Rothschilds or the Khazarian Mafia – or just call it late capitalism and neo-colonialism rationally pursuing its short-term goals. Such people would be crazy not to get together periodically to shape national policies and international trends in their interests. And for my money, in this kind of a world, Trumpus is a minor mob thug and a useful idiot, while George H.W. Bush was Capo di Tutti I Capi of the Deep State.

“Deep State” is a phrase that can mean anything to anyone, and it seems that NACs especially use it too loosely. So I’ll try to define it from three perspectives:

1 – From the Center: The Deep State is the entrenched status quo that (in public perception) gets nothing done, whose members, lazy career bureaucrats and unmotivated administrators, care only to protect their own positions and retirement benefits. From a slightly more charitable perspective, it is composed of areas of government, including regulatory agencies such as the (pre-Trumpus) EPA that exist permanently, keeping the whole thing going, regardless of periodic changes in the White House. For more, read here.

2 – From the Right: The Deep State is “Big Government,” ideologically devoted to piling up infinite numbers of regulations intended to crush personal initiative and redistribute the national wealth to the undeserving poor. As Ronald Reagan said, “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Note the mythological assumptions: only in America, with its aggrandizement of radical individualism, is poverty considered the fault of the individual. Similarly, we celebrate people who claim to have accumulated vast wealth without the benefits of inheritance or the assistance of that same State. For more on this topic, see my essay, “Blaming the Victim,” and take note of how deeply this cruel belief system has penetrated the American religious psyche, especially in New Age thinking.

This is the libertarian perspective of many NACs, who perceive federal regulatory agencies as instruments of a massive conspiracy to deprive them of the right to choose for themselves, especially in matters of health. To be clear, I agree with them to an extent, but it is very much a matter of discrimination, as we will see below. This thinking can slide down a long continuum that posits secret groups that control even the Deep State itself. In the most extreme scenarios, they are composed of alien (or Jewish) pedophiles determined to impose and dominate a New World Order; there is little practical difference between Big Government and the shadowy figures who conspire to control everything and everyone.

Note the mythological assumption: It’s a dualistic world of extreme good vs. extreme evil. This thinking has its roots in ancient Zoroastrianism, became solidified in Medieval Catholicism and justified centuries of European barbarism that led directly to the Holocaust.  

3 – From the Left: The Deep State is what we used to call the Military-Industrial Complex. Now we could describe it as the Military / National Security / Intelligence / Corporate / Petrochemical / Big Pharma / Big Banking / Big Agriculture Complex. From this perspective, government is not inherently bad, but it has been so utterly corrupted by capitalism that the State itself creates and maintains a culture of fear to generate a perpetual state of war. It crushes the imagination and redistributes the national wealth to the undeserving rich. Note another mythological assumption: nothing in our 400-year history has so deeply held our attention and limited our natural kindness as fear of the Other (the internal Other of race and the external Others of immigration, communism and terrorism). In this model, there is hardly any practical difference between Big Business and Big Government. When Defense Secretary Charles Wilson said, “What’s good for General Motors is good for America” in 1953, he was speaking quite literally.

Of course, more than one person conspired to kill John F. Kennedy. Even the U.S. Senate found this to be likely. Of course, elements within the government conspired to assassinate Martin Luther King, Jr. Indeed, a court determined that this is a legal fact. Obviously, elements of the Bush administration had some foreknowledge of the 9-11 attacks and did nothing to prevent them. And there are plenty of broader conspiracies to worry about.

But many people who have rejected the official narratives, who clearly understand that the mainstream media have shaped a false picture of the world (and possibly of American innocence) for decades, also seem to be getting caught up in some really wacky, paranoid, misogynistic and certainly racist claims. It appears that once you reject the center as illegitimate and the media as mendacious and locate yourself as a maverick out on the margins, you naturally become open to other marginalized opinions. From this perspective, when you entertain the possibility that everything we’ve been taught is wrong, then any alternatives may well be right.

Not long ago, most so-called conspiracy theories were clearly divided between right (Obama “Truthers”) and left (assassinations, CIA drug dealing). Gradually, many people have come to muddy the distinctions (if with very different conclusions), beginning with health issues such as fluoridation and the vaccine controversy, with the right mistrusting the government for intruding on their liberties and the left rightly criticizing Big Pharma’s perversion of the FDA. Meanwhile, the liberal, rational center – the abode of the gatekeepers – desperately holds to a naïve trust in objective and uncorruptible science, a working democracy, mainstream media who inform us (rather than selling us to their sponsors) and a foreign policy that protects freedom.

But then something new happened. The palpably obvious lie of the official 9-11 narrative brought individuals on both right and left together, if again with wildly different conclusions. Meanwhile, the mainstream media circled the wagons to marginalize all dissent in favor of unified military belligerence, just as they had done 84 years before to drag the nation into World War One, 60 years before to drag the nation into World War Two, 37 years before to drag the nation into Viet Nam, and only nine years before to drag the nation into Iraq.

People such as David Icke (one of the few people interviewed in Thrive who has not repudiated the film) have taken advantage of this really large segment of the public – remember, 100 million potential voters have opted out of the system – to posit a world in which powerful yet secret groups are striving to control the destiny of the entire world. This leads us to the QAnon phenomenon.

Part Two

The essence of American politics is the manipulation of populism by elitism. – Christopher Hitchens

The QAnon narrative, as most of us know by now, explains how we are in a sinister and dimly visible global power struggle. On one side of the fight is a depraved group of pedophiles, secretly sowing chaos and strife to create a pretext for their rule. On the other side is the public, decent people who have been deceived by the power brokers and their collaborators in the press. But patriotic elements within the military recruited Trumpus, and he’s been working hard behind the scenes to defeat the evil ones.

Whoever Q is (or are), its millions of followers receive and re-post thousands of hints about its agenda, and Trumpus himself (who many believe to actually be Q) has taken full advantage of it, especially in terms of coronavirus skepticism. Q followers agree that a great awakening is approaching to bring salvation. A promise of foreknowledge seems to be part of Q’s appeal, as is the feeling of being part of a secret community, which is reinforced through the use of acronyms and ritual phrases such as “Nothing can stop what is coming” and “Trust the plan.”

The year 2020 has added another dimension to the conspiracy mongering. Many people on both the right and the left who have legitimate concerns about corporate corruption of federal regulatory agencies, specifically on the question of vaccines, are finding it easier to question some aspects of the consensus on the Covid pandemic. And the Q people have skillfully taken advantage of this skepticism to convince them that the evil cabal of insiders deliberately created the pandemic or is at least ruthlessly exploiting it to frighten the public into accepting a totalitarian world government under permanent medical martial law. William Stranger writes:

The QAnon conspiracy represents nothing less than the chickens coming home to roost for the massive loss of public trust created by the plethora of outlandishly uninvestigated, under-investigated, and even fraudulently investigated marquee crimes in American history…

But we need to realize that QAnon is well-situated in a long and racialized American tradition in which people who feel threatened by evil cabals are in fact relatively well-off. It’s a story about victimhood (as I write in Chapters Seven and Eight of my book) and an excuse for violence, real or vicarious, that we’ve been telling ourselves ever since the first massacre of Indians in the early seventeenth century. But in this new version, the savior is the President himself, who is arguably the most powerful person in the world already, and his people are already in charge. It’s a story that seems to have been designed to cope with the cognitive dissonance caused by the gap between Trumpus as his fans imagine him and Trumpus as he is. Here are some articles I’ve found useful:

The Wizard of Q  

Decoding QAnon: How the delusional theory beloved by far-right loons began 

QAnon spreads across globe, shadowing COVID-19

The Prophecies of Q: American conspiracy theories are entering a dangerous new phase

The deep, twisted roots of QAnon: Delusions of demon-cannibal conspiracies aren’t even original 

Majority of Republicans believe the QAnon conspiracy theory is partly or mostly true

A list of key words and phrases used by QAnon followers

How to know what’s true? Or, as Caitlin Johnstone asks, How You Can Be 100% Certain That QAnon Is Bullshit:

1. It always excuses Trump’s facilitation of corporate agendas.

2. It always refuses to prove the validity of its position.

3. It’s made countless bogus claims and inaccurate predictions.

I would add a fourth point, as a question: How many people who claim to be victims of the deep state are people of color? Or are they in fact people who are generally quite privileged and almost universally white?

But we mythologists cannot afford to wallow in our own form of patronizing self-deception. This is a mass phenomenon, and besides, plenty of its adherents are armed to the teeth. More critically, we have to acknowledge that at its core, it represents a legitimate, if misdirected anger at a secular state (and its media) that in their (and my) mind is no longer legitimate. Johnstone continues:

…it’s an obvious propaganda construct designed to manufacture support for the status quo among people who otherwise would not support it. It presents itself as an exciting movement where the little guy is finally rising up and throwing off the chains of the tyrannical forces which have been exploiting and oppressing us, yet in reality all it’s doing is telling a discontented sector of the population to relax and “trust the plan” and put all their faith in the leader of the US government.

And that’s exactly what makes QAnon so uniquely toxic. It’s not just that it gets people believing false things which confuse and alienate them, it’s that it’s a fake, decoy imitation of what a healthy revolutionary impulse would look like. It sells people on important truths that they already intuitively know on some level…It takes those vital, truthful, healthy revolutionary impulses, then twists them around into support for the…president and the agendas of the Republican Party.

The Anti-Fascist Network places Q and its strategies squarely within an old tradition:

Part of the fascist strategy is to misguide people into thinking the centrist neoliberal policies that trouble them are leftist policies. The far-right then pretend to be rebels against capitalism, whilst in fact standing for an even more extreme and brutal form of capitalism.

To simply dismiss these people, however, is to ignore the implications of two of the basic ideas I’ll be speaking about further on. The first is that even a broken clock is right twice a day.Q followers and progressives agree that the mainstream media and mainstream political parties can’t be trusted, and some of the things that Q people say may well sound superficially attractive. But – and here is the second – we all need to learn how to discriminate, to notice when the clock really is broken, why it’s been broken and who broke it.

The issue is immensely complicated by technology – despite those few points of agreement, Q followers no longer share a common language with progressives. Indeed, the documentary The Social Dilemma reveals that the major social media sites have deliberately ensured that these people don’t ever read or hear the same news that we do.

Still, we must acknowledge that the worst lies can effective if they contain a core of truth. The great majority of Americans are suffering from a brutally unequal economic system and behind that, a soul-killing mythology, and the one thing all but the happy ten percent agree on is the need for change. Again: Q is “a fake, decoy imitation of what a healthy revolutionary impulse would look like.” That said, I’m interested not so much in its Tea-Party, libertarian or evangelical followers, most of whom identified with racist, misogynist, Republican politics long before Q arose, and will return to their roots when it disappears.

I’m more interested in figuring out what makes the NACs tick, and why so many of them have fallen for this con. It has been suggested that such people are particularly susceptible to being manipulated because they are perceived as high on empathy and low on boundaries. Also, it appears that one of the far right’s current strategies is to actively rebrand themselves as spiritual teachers or “new paradigm influencers.”

But we first we have to detour through American history and myth.

Psychologist, author (The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief) and ritual leader Francis Weller has evolved a useful psychological concept.

The Predator is a very common internal voice that means us no good. Sound familiar? It wants us to fail, setting impossibly high standards and then shaming us for not attaining them. Indeed, its message is that we never deserved peace, love, health or fulfillment, that the world is not interested in any gifts we might offer to it. In theological terms, it is pure evil. In fairy tales we have historically imagined it as the giant or the witch. In mythological terms, the Greeks saw the Predator as Chronos, the father-god who eats his children. The Hebrews, with more ambivalence, imagined it in Father Abraham, who so needed the approval of Jehovah that he was willing to sacrifice his son Isaac.

This idea has much value for us. A few years ago, at the end of a men’s conference, Francis advised us to stay in contact with each other so as to anchor our hard-earned insights in our bodies and in our communities. He suggested that the Predator would quickly try to make us forget our connections to neglected parts of ourselves, to our friends and to our ancestors, that the Predator “wants to cull you from the herd.”

The biological image of leopards crouching in the African darkness waiting to leap up and grab young or sickly animals from the periphery of their community moves this idea of the Predator into a conversation about American mythology.

Is the Predator a universal archetype? I can’t say, but it has certainly found a home in the American psyche, formed as it was within a Puritan theology and a resultant mythology that places all praise for success – and, most critically, all blame for failure – on the individual. Chapters Seven and Nine of my book (Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence) investigate the American faith in radical individualism that has led to our culture of freedom, self-expression, privilege and achievement, but also to our dreadful sense of alienation and our unique disdain for the natural world.

As I write in Chapter One:

Sadly, the creative imagination has long been almost entirely lost. With the rise of patriarchy it polarized into the paranoid imagination and the predatory imagination. The first is based on irrational fear, the second on an insatiable drive for control. Both express a narcissism that objectifies and negates other perspectives. They limit our perceptions and choices, and powerful elites use them to manipulate us.

And in Chapter Seven:

The children of these Northern religious extremists amassed the first great mercantile fortunes. Southerners, however, had more worldly motivations. Their first History of Virginia boasted, “The chief design of all parties concerned was to fetch away the Treasure from thence, aiming more at sudden gain than to form any regular colony.” Aristocrats like Sir Walter Raleigh were not interested in the City on a Hill but in the golden El Dorado that Spaniards had been chasing for decades. “In that sense,” writes Michael Ventura, “America had Las Vegas a century before it had Plymouth Rock.” Our history has been caught between the paranoid nightmares of the Puritans and the greedy, predatory fantasies of these opportunists ever since.

Opportunists demonize government regulation, while Puritans emphasize individual spiritual (and financial) responsibility. Obsession with self-improvement and personal achievement keeps them both ignorant of the suffering around them. Wealth remains proof of grace – and poverty indicates the opposite – even if the religious terminology has fallen away.

But there is a price, because individualism, entitlement and mobility facilitate a mask of innocence; and innocence always evokes its opposite. 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.

Americans, like no people before them, strive for self-improvement. But within the word “improve” lies the anxiety of those who can never know if they’ve attained the otherworldly goal. Thus we must continually “prove” our status in this one.

This mythology of radical individualism has also led to our deep-seated anger and violent nature. With my apologies to those who dislike broad generalizations, here is an overly simplified flow chart of the internal state of the American psyche, spoken in the words of the Predator:

1 – You are an individual, existing independently of others, and as such you have been invited to attain the American Dream.

2 – If you succeed, it is because you have the natural capacity to work hard, delay gratification and control your impulses, especially if you are white.

3 – If you fail or are unhappy, it is because you didn’t try hard enough, especially if you are a person of color or a white person who was born in poverty.

4 – If you didn’t try hard enough, it is because you don’t have what it takes to succeed.

5 – Therefore, you are a failure, regardless of your social or ethnic origins, and all failures in America are moral failures.

6 – A sinner, blaming yourself for your innate inability, you are depressed or angry.

7 – Since depression, anger turned inward at yourself, can only end in suicide, you must look elsewhere.

8 – You cannot express anger at “the system,” because the system, like God himself, is perfect and does not hold you back; indeed, since others have obviously succeeded within this system, you must focus your anger on others.

9 – Therefore, you are privileged to direct your anger at those individuals or groups whom the system has identified as “the Other,” those whom it has labeled as evil, those upon whom it has given you permission to release that anger, because you are a victim of such people.  You have successfully released the Predator from your psyche and projected it upon them. You are now innocent of sin.

10 – You have been reborn. Since you naturally want to lift others out of the state of sin, you are more than willing to support con men who promise to lead periodic, international crusades to wipe the world free of those sinners who would question that American Dream.

11 – If you are a white male, you are particularly privileged to do so, and the system will support you economically and politically.

In the past thirty years predatory capitalism has tightened its grip on both the economy and popular culture. Consider the popularity of films like Wall Street  and, appropriately enough, The Wolf of Wall Street, where we can’t really tell if the main characters are heroes or villains, whether we hate them or want to be them. But for generations before, away from the financial districts of the mind, we have thrilled to hundreds of gangster films, perhaps because (in the best of them) the same ambivalence exists, and perhaps because it reflects the conflict between the paranoid and predatory imaginations that form the substrate of our American character.

In those same thirty years, two generations of men have begun to consider – and grieve – having been reared by Chronos-like fathers. So perhaps it is no coincidence that we have apparently been obsessed  with actual film Predators: Predator (1987), Predator 2 (1990), Predators (2010), The Predator (2018), Alien vs. Predator (2004) and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007).

One of psychologist James Hillman’s most provocative insights was that the first assumption of the “therapeutic culture” is that emotional maturity entails a progressive differentiation of self from others, especially family. Most psychology is “Ego Psychology” – we grow and “individuate” by separating ourselves from others, very often from the physical places and people where we were born. In this way of thinking, family and community, as much as we desire their benefits, represent all that we must leave in order to become who we truly are meant to be.

Indigenous people would see that statement as a fundamental lie. Mythologists might say that Chronos eating his children symbolizes the authoritarian parent eating his children’s individuality, and replacing it, ironically, with a literalistic sense of individualism.

So Hillman taught that American psychology mirrors its economics: the heroic, isolated ego in a hostile world. In this libertarian and narcissistic vision, others – all others – exist for the sole purpose of either fulfilling our needs or sabotaging them. What about growth? The only place in nature where unlimited growth occurs is in the cancer cell.

Oddly enough, the idea of “culling us from the herd” takes us out of this brutal, apocalyptic, American “Survivor” mode and reminds us that throughout the ancient, tribal and indigenous worlds – everywhere, indeed, except for our post-modern culture – people universally assumed that we are, by nature, social animals. For thousands of years, we have known who we are, and the wounds to our souls have been healed only in community, only in the context of our relationships with each other, with the natural world that surrounds us, and with the still wider world of ancestors and spirits.

I prefer the indigenous wisdom that values individuality over individualism: we have been born into community because that community needs us. It needs the unique gifts that only we can offer, and we can only bring it forth when authentic community welcomes us. We belong in the herd. D. H. Lawrence knew about wounds to the soul:

            Healing

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
and it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self,
and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance
long difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.

Part One

To really understand our stubborn and increasingly dangerous attachment to the myth of American Innocence, we must become familiar with our heritage of what I have called the paranoid imagination, which combines eternal vigilance, relentless anxiety and literalistic religion with contempt for the erotic and tolerance for sadistic treatment of the weak or marginalized. Why these last two features? Because what we will not allow ourselves to desire becomes a vector of judgment, fear and hatred of those people and groups whom we perceive as being willing to enact those desires.

Another characteristic of the paranoid imagination is our obsessive voyeurism. We like to watch, and we especially like to watch our heroes, those who embody our highest ideals, punish our villains – those who invert those ideals. American life, popular culture and politics reveal an endless litany of fascination with the so-called violent and sexually unrestrained behavior of “the Other.” And we seem to like nothing better than seeing the Other suffering for their moral transgressions. I write about the paranoid imagination in much greater detail in Chapter Seven of my book, Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence. 

Archetypal psychology has made us familiar with the concept of the Shadow, that vast range of our unconscious minds that we will not acknowledge. But it also suggests that every curse has a corresponding blessing. Very often, below our traumatic fear and contempt for the Other lies envy, and even deeper below that is the universal drive to achieve authentic psychological integration. This is both the great longing and the worst terror of those millions of white Americans who still carry the formidable burden of our Puritan heritage.

Denying our unacceptable fantasies, we condemn them to the dark regions of the mythological underworld. We identify ourselves and our nation as cultured, hardworking, peaceful, rational, Apollonian and, above all, innocent of all evil intentions. This is white privilege: the willingness to see those desires not in ourselves but in people of color across the world, whom we define as primitive, Dionysian, lazy, dangerously irrational and (this is the core of the projection) unable or unwilling to restrain their impulses, unlike us.

Another fundamental aspect of American Innocence is the myth of progress, which I address in Chapter Nine. We believe that we must keep moving upwards and onwards, or risk re-gressing. But a lifetime of pushing ourselves to conform and achieve has its costs. Hence the universal appeal of periodically – and safely – trans-gressing conventional moral and behavioral standards. We see this theme in the common film trope (think Marx Brothers) of sticking it to our bosses, teachers and social superiors. This is clearly one of the attractions, by the way, of Trumpus rallies (I’ve invented this word to remind myself that Trump serves the myth of innocence by enacting it for all of us, and in that sense, we are all Trump-us).

The terrible personal and cultural strain of repressing one’s emotions and fantasies – of delaying gratification, of tamping down our passions, of pursuing advancement in the relentless rat race of capitalism, of putting up with ignorant managers and sadistic bureaucracies – always threatens to burst out past our internal censors into consciousness and wreak havoc with convention. This is one of the reasons why many traditional societies institutionalized regular periods of carnival, so as to literally blow off the excess steam before it causes an explosive “return of the repressed.” Chapters Four and Ten of my book explore this theme in greater detail.

The body knows all this, and the body understands metaphors and mythic images, even if the mind does not. As Carl Jung wrote, the gods never died; they went underground and resurfaced as illness in the body, in the body politic and in the soul of the world. Dionysus, the god of wine, madness and intensity, constantly lurks at the edges and boundaries of our rational and predictable lives, beckoning us, for our own good, to take an occasional walk on the wild side. But we typically settle only for the minimum, the toxic mimic of the real thing, allowing Dionysus and the other divinities into American life in ways that keep ourselves barely alive yet hungry for real nutrition. Like the mythic Tantalos in Hades, we are tantalized, dimly perceiving the soul’s food almost within reach. But our eating muscles – our capacities for thinking mythologically – have atrophied, even as our need grows. Psychologist Robert Johnson saw this as a defining characteristic of our age:

… we hear a screech of brakes and a crash…Cold chills go up and down our spine; we say, “How awful!” – and run outside to see the accident. This is poor-quality Dionysus…what happens to a basic human drive that has not been lived out for nearly four thousand years.

This need for intensity and ecstasy is both personal and collective. Chapter Ten is an extended discussion of what I call five styles of poor-quality Dionysus. This is how we unconsciously search for what anthropologist Victor Turner  called communitas, the group experience of liminal space, where social and ego boundaries relax and people sense that “everyone’s in this together.” It may occur spontaneously in situations such as shared grief, the funerals of major celebrities, religious pilgrimage, rock concerts, club dancing, sports venues, horror movies and, most recently, political spectacles. It lies behind Marx’s vision of the classless society and other utopias in which men drop their perpetual competition for status. Communitas is the social and ritual space of transformation, when we can potentially drop an immature, outdated or dysfunctional identity and become who we need to be.

A twisted form of communitas also occurs (see below) when we go to war, and when a large-scale environmental disaster or pandemic threatens the entire community.

If there ever was a time in the modern history of our country when we were all in this together, this is the moment. – Bernie Sanders, 3/12/20

If we were honest, we’d admit to a sense of relief and even festivity when disaster hits, because it often brings a refreshing sense of potency, community and purpose. Both the problem and the response become clear. We skip work and speak intimately with neighbors we normally ignore. Something important has grabbed our attention: the opportunity to relax our painfully rigid social boundaries. Dionysus Lusios, the Loosener, has arrived in his non-alcoholic form, getting us drunk with excitement and temporarily unifying us. “I” become we. Something overrules my conditioning against any cooperation that doesn’t serve my personal interests; I’m glad, in more ways than one, to help.

But we cannot institutionalize authentic communitas. We can only discover it, briefly enter it and lose it, because it is a very temporary gift of Dionysus. And, since few of our modern attempts to create it result in significant initiatory change, we endlessly repeat our attempts to achieve ecstasy and turn them into addictions. Whether we find a brief hint of it in church or forget ourselves in a bar fight, the haunting sense of loneliness returns.

Increasingly, we have only second-hand experience of communitas. “To go from a job you don’t like,” writes Michael Ventura, “to watching a screen on which others live more intensely than you… is American life…”  Electronic media have become our immediate environment – not the land, not people, but images of the land and people. For three generations now, tens of millions have retreated from social engagement to spend their evenings alone or with their spouses in front of a television or computer, or in taverns dominated by the ubiquitous TV. And in only one generation, we’ve become all too familiar with the image (in coffeehouses and waiting rooms, on trains, at bus stops) of people staring at their smart phones rather than speaking to each other. But we know intuitively how diminished our lives have become when we hear these words of Rumi: “RUN from everything that’s comfortable and profitable!”

We have set aside certain very specific places to escape this life (perhaps half-life would be more appropriate) for a while. As I wrote here, for nearly 300 years in New Orleans (one of the very few American cities, along with Santa Fe and San Francisco, that were originally settled by Catholics), Mardi Gras has served this function for an America whose value system has never fully allowed the mind to connect joyfully with the body. Because of this dilemma, Protestants in particular are filled with a longing that rarely achieves even temporary satisfaction, except through the brief, communal sense of innocence achieved in fundamentalist religion – and vicarious violence: we like to watch.

But every day, current events present opportunities to take an honest look at what we have allowed our lives to become, to acknowledge that we have hardly begun to understand the catastrophic consequences of our unwillingness to confront our national darkness. James Hillman said:

The more innocence you have, the more violence you constellate. And you can’t get rid of violence by returning to innocence. You just repeat a cycle…These are deep themes of our culture…We came with innocence in mind…But our movements were filled with violence. The earth of the United States is filled with (the) blood of what we killed in order to make it our paradise…Other peoples are always aware of what’s in the soil. But innocence keeps us from even looking at it…From the Greek perspective, what’s in the soil is constantly looking at you…They would call it “blood guilt.”

Part Two

We all long – unconsciously – to know who we are, and to be seen and acknowledged by our community. And we suspect intuitively, if with trepidation, that in a Puritanical culture such as ours, the way to Spirit must pass through the realm of the sensuous, through the intense, communal experience that Dionysus offers. But America offers us very few ways to go there in a healthy manner. Most of them skirt the edge of addiction.

This longing for intensity drives gambling fever, which is also an alternative expression of our peculiarly American drive to achieve a kind of salvation by attaining wealth. In this case, our opportunistic greed overcomes our Puritan virtues of thrift, hard work and deferred gratification. The anxiety associated with the risk yields to the greater American fantasy of winning. The Puritan heritage remains most robust among Trumpus’s reliable supporters, those who insist on a strictly literal interpretation of a two-thousand-year old myth from the Middle East. But so does its shadow. How else can we explain how rates of gay porn viewing are highest in Bible Belt states? 

I have to imagine that many of these people are quite desperate for an escape, if only brief, from their constricted lifestyles and from the furious judgment of their internalized moralities. Perhaps this (along with their open racism) helps explain why their support for Trumpus remains so resistant to reasonable argument. Perhaps the long litany of his crimes, his obvious mendacity, his infantile bragging, his absurd facial makeup, his cruel treatment of minorities and his shameless, misogynistic behavior – speech and behavior that they would rarely admit being capable of themselves – is precisely why they claim to love him. Perhaps having such a venal clown as symbolic head of the national psyche is precisely the vacation in chaos, vicarious as it is, that they can allow themselves.

In any event, the need for a cultural safety valve is stronger than ever, and if America is about anything, it is about identifying markets (legal or otherwise) and providing products to satisfy them.

https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/casinopit_1409x577.jpg?w=1280 1280w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/casinopit_1409x577.jpg?w=150 150w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/casinopit_1409x577.jpg?w=300 300w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/casinopit_1409x577.jpg?w=768 768w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/casinopit_1409x577.jpg?w=1024 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" />In the last seventy years, consumer culture has responded by providing an entire city way out in the desert where “anything goes,” and people can briefly drop their corporate or small-town lifestyles and moralities to safely enact the shadow of Puritanism.

So a week in Las Vegas, America’s fastest growing city, has taken on the characteristics of a pilgrimage to a protected environment – a sacred space – where one can engage in activity that approximates the conditions of liminality, where “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” – overeating, drinking, sleeping till noon, watching soft-porn stage shows, whoring and, especially, throwing money away. In other words, getting shamelessly, proudly, defiantly out of control.

How often do we hear a recent returnee bragging not about how much he won at the tables, but how much he lost? What talk or behavior could be a better example of (briefly) turning the Protestant Ethic on its side? A real gambler, of course, would never say something like this. Indeed, bragging about how much one has lost is really an indication of how much “disposable” income he had in the first place.

Think of the entire city as a shrine to the goddess of luck, Fortuna, and the god of intensity, Dionysus. Gambling corporations know this very well, designing their casinos to enhance the effects (total environments, constant sounds and flashing lights, no clocks, etc) of what are, in actuality, large public rituals, or more accurately, spectacles that blur the distinction between Heaven and Hell. Perhaps the well-worn association of Vegas with organized crime – the Underworld – in our minds adds to the thrill. But not to worry: the police are always nearby.

America is also supposed to be about the freedom to choose. In the 21^st century we have, in a superficial sense, more choices. We can have our safe vacation in chaos (knowing we can return to our normal lives whenever we want) for a week at Mardi Gras, or Spring Break in Fort Lauderdale or Mazatlan, or a weekend at the Superbowl, or a memorable but confidential hookup during convention week in a distant city or a staff Christmas party. Or we can go any time of the year to Vegas.

And, in a most delicious irony, many Native American tribes have got into the act, building casinos and getting rich off our need to vacation in chaos. Now we can get a cultural-appropriation selfie with a Native Princess. And the selfie is proof to our coworkers that we really did spend time, out of time, in some version of liminality.

And of course, we are also talking about addiction. From the indigenous, pagan or archetypal perspective, we are seeking out something so old that it is, in a sense, our birthright. We have been conditioned by thousands of years of communal and initiatory ritual to expect the real thing. We come into the world with these expectations, and something deeply traumatic happens to us when we don’t receive it. Worse, our Puritan legacy conditions us to believe that this wounding is our own fault, not that of capitalist and radically individualistic conditions. So we try, again and again, to achieve some version of it, either in substances, in ideologies (religious or political) or in extreme experiences. And when the high wears off, we try again.

We are talking about the Indigenous Soul and its longing to immerse itself in genuine, communal, transformative ritual, under the guidance of authentic elders, the actual “masters of ceremonies”. And when we are deprived of the real thing, our hunger for authenticity drives us toward alternatives, unsatisfactory as they always prove to be. But they really are, it seems, better than nothing. Our cliché – “What happens in ___ stays in ___” is an unconscious acknowledgement of the value and the potential of ritual space. As such, it is surprisingly and ironically close to the traditional Wiccan  invocation: And now the circle is cast. We are between the worlds. And what happens between the worlds changes all the worlds.

As countless ancient peoples understood, the annual (usually around New Year’s) descent into chaos was necessary for the reviving of culture. The Pagan world and the Indigenous Soul knew that any truth was defined by its opposite, that everyone at some time needed to walk the fine line between two irreconcilable opposites, that chaos was the crucible in which a new, creative order was forged.

Another reason why Americans long for our vacations in chaos is because our legacy of radical individualism in a capitalist economy has made us the loneliest people who have ever existed. Some argue that negative experiences on social media are tied to even higher odds of feeling lonely.  My blog series, “Why are Americans So Freaking Crazy?”  investigates this theme further.

Another reason for our fascination with vacations in chaos is that we spend so little time taking conventional vacations. As I write in Chapter Nine,

We are the only industrialized country without a national health care system and the only one that doesn’t guarantee paid maternity leave. America is not among the sixty-five countries that offer paid paternity leave, the 145 countries that mandate paid sick leave, the 134 countries that limit the length of the workweek, or the 137 countries that have paid vacation laws. Half of working Americans receive less than a week of paid vacation, a quarter have no paid vacation or holidays, and nearly half of all private sector workers have no paid sick days…

Let’s also note that while America has 585 billionaires, 40% of us don’t have $400 in the bank, and that the same percentage make less than the 1968 minimum wage, adjusted for inflation.

“What do you mean there are no jobs? I have four of them!” The joke ironically describes conditions in a world where capitalism has clearly failed to provide a decent life for a very large percentage of the population. But it’s an old joke, and it pre-dates the financial crises of the past twelve years. Whether by choice or by necessity, Americans have always labored unceasingly, because our mythology and our theology teach us that we, men especially, have no value outside of our productive capacity. If we cannot be winners (or heroes) then we see ourselves as losers (or victims). Furthermore, we are taught, consistently, from early childhood, that just as we succeed only as individuals, we fail because of personal flaws, not flaws in the system.

This was true even when, in the 1950s, both liberals and conservatives shared the New Deal values of limiting the worst excesses of capitalism and taxing the wealthy. That period lasted roughly forty years, from 1935 to 1975, or until the rage of privileged white males boiled over into a reaction against the Civil Rights movement. In simple terms, the idea of sharing the wealth was deeply popular – until black, brown and red people claimed their share of it. A reactionary period (much of its legislation passed, by the way, under Bill Clinton) set in that has lasted another forty years, and it has swept away most of the gains of the New Deal. Now, it seems clear that Europeans work to live while Americans live to work.

On average, Americans work nine weeks longer per year than Europeans. Our vacations, if we get them at all, average two weeks, compared to 5-6 weeks in Europe. Forty-three percent of us did not take a single week off in 2007, and only 14% will take a vacation of two weeks or more this year. In 2010 we spent 40% less time with our children than we did in 1965. The American Dream emphasizes independence; yet only one working American in thirteen is self-employed, compared to one in eight in Western Europe. We relax only when we have acquired the symbols of redemption. Even then, we keep working.

Is it any wonder that as a nation we continue to perceive immigrants and the poor (and people of color, who in our mythology, are the same thing) as being lazy, that we hold them in such contempt and are willing to allow our government to treat them with such callous brutality?

Or that we feel so attracted to their seemingly carefree lifestyles? The old word, popular in the 1920s, was “slumming.” For more, please see my blog series The Myth of Immigration, especially Part Six.

Such cultural projections accuse the poor of inability or disinterest in delaying gratification. To the Puritan consciousness, this is the greatest of sins, and it surfaces in odd circumstances, such as in accusations of “permissiveness.” The moral censors are particularly horrified when their own children threaten to pollute their “family values” by bringing bad habits back from Spring Break. In the 1960s and 1970s, conservatives blamed Dr. Benjamin Spock for the perceived disorderliness of young people, many of whose parents had been devotees of his book Baby and Child Care. They referred to the rebellious youth of that era as “the Spock generation,” and made sure that future educational standards would reverse that trend.

Part Three

So thousands, perhaps millions of us go to Vegas, Mexico, Amsterdam, Southern Spain, Spring Break, football games, Rolling Stones concerts and countless other places to get our “hit” (a term originally referring to drug use) of liminality or communitas.

But the vast majority of us do it the easy way, on an electronic device. As we watch people getting out of control, we allow the fantasies to parade – safely, for as long or as briefly as we want – across our minds, even as many of us condemn those who seem to be acting them out in real life. This is “vicarious intensity,” one of the ways that we unconsciously invite Dionysus into our lives. Often, it’s the excitement we feel when someone else (usually the image of someone else) confronts the edge of danger.

The hope of encountering communitas explains why we prefer to watch major sports events among friends. “Fans” (Latin: fanaticus, mad, divinely inspired, originally pertaining to a temple) make up an emotionally engaged community holding the container for rituals of “com-petition”, a word that originally meant “petitioning the gods together”. Shared interest and experience forge our identity. We take this same longing for communal ecstasy into rock concerts and dance clubs. Often, sexually ambiguous (long-haired but clean-shaven) young men enact the ritual on stage and provide our minimum requirement of Dionysian experience.

Watching sports, however, we’re never really satisfied. We demand more vicarious intensity, and often only the expectation of violence can penetrate our emotional armoring. Hence the increased popularity of football, hockey, pro wrestling and auto racing, where helmeted Christs suffer for us all. And even if we watch alone at home, we know that we are part of a virtual community of fans. We belong.

There were times, however, when societies channeled their aggression into ritual, thus containing and minimizing much of it. In Chapter Six I give many examples of symbolic violence. But in America, war and sports, especially football, are so closely linked that they share many of the same metaphors. My essay “Military Madness” offers a long list of the military metaphors we use in our daily speech.

Team spirit has archetypal roots, of course: we all share a deep and ancient longing to relax the hold of the isolated ego and submerge our identity into clan or tribe. But when we have not been initiated into a fundamentally spiritual identity, team spirit becomes war fever. Jung wrote that people become “…sick of that banal life…they want sensation…when there is a war: they say, ‘Thank heaven, now something is going to happen – something bigger than ourselves!’”

Super Bowl: There were times when organic, ecstatic and somewhat unpredictable festivals took people out of their individual selves and truly connected them to each other. But by the late-nineteenth century, nationalism replaced religion as the dominant organizing force in society, and governments everywhere began to present spectacles for audiences to passively consume. Spectacles are scripted in nearly every detail. They connect people not to each other but to the state. Hence the genuine horror so many puritan viewers experienced when Janet Jackson had her infamous “equipment malfunction” during the Super Bowl halftime show in 2004.

When not watching sports, the young watch the fictionalized experience of danger in Superhero action movies. But older people watch it in TV crime shows, which ironically feed their paranoia about people of color and the inner cities.

Years ago, observing this, critic Michael Wilmington coined the phrase that I’ve used to title this essay. Such viewing patterns are particularly appealing, he wrote, because, once the villains have been punished, they offer a comforting sense of “moral order restored after a holiday in chaos.” We like to visit Dionysus’ neighborhood, but we don’t want to live there.

As early as a hundred years ago, writes Michael Ventura, movies “usurped the public’s interest in the arts as a whole and in literature especially.” Whereas indigenous people had participated in their entertainment, Americans (except for dancing) had very quickly become passive consumers of culture. He argues that he Western mind-body split comes to its extreme in the concept of an audience. It “… has no body… all attention, all in its heads, while something on a screen or a stage enacts its body.”

Sociologist Christina Kotchemidova writes that media foster an experience of emotion that is controlled, predictable, and undemanding without impinging on our rational lifestyles. Thus, “We can engage in mass-mediated emotions to the full while retaining control over our emotion experience and avoiding the risks of personal communication.”

But one of the prices we pay for constantly watching images of other people experiencing liminality is our willingness to dissolve another boundary, between religion and nationalism. Vicarious, voyeuristic intensity meets electronic spectacle in our recent wars. We see without being seen, writes Marita Sturken:

This tension of immediacy, sadism, and a slight tinge of complicity was thus integral to the pleasures of spectatorship. We saw, we were ‘there,’ yet the technology kept us…at a safe distance.”

Suddenly submerged in a great communal cause, we anticipate holy vengeance and hope that a sacred King will allay our anxieties and bring us all together. Every time the politicians and the media drive the nation toward the next war, our most well-known religious figures can be counted upon to sacralize it. And, as the young and poor experience the actual danger, we – especially our intellectuals – enjoy the spectacle from a safe distance. After the 9/11 attacks, the formerly liberal writer Christopher Hitchens, utterly insensitive to his own privilege, articulated the thrill that he and other “Neocons” — almost none of whom had actually served in the military – experienced:

…another sensation was contending for mastery…to my own surprise and pleasure, it turned out to be exhilaration. Here was the most frightful enemy…if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost.

Part Four

It’s easy enough to criticize social trends and the self-defeating behaviors of other people. This also puts one into the familiar role of the grumpy old (white) guy complaining about how much better things used to be (and it’s uncomfortably close to the idea that we can “make America great again”). Indeed, many mythological traditions did exactly that. The ancient Greek notion of the Five Ages of Man, for example, lamented that in each stage, humanity had devolved further and further from its nearly divine original state.

But it’s also true that we live in the age of the cult of celebrity. Along with total war, literalistic fundamentalism and consumerism, this is one of the most flagrant examples of what Joseph Campbell called our demythologized world. Michael Schulman notes that we have many earlier examples of celebrity worship dating as far back as the 1840s. But it began in earnest with the astonishingly rapid rise of the movies, and it essentially defined the entire course of 20^th popular culture. I write about it in three essays, here,  here and here:

The losses of meaningful stories, effective ritual and divine images have resulted in our cult of celebrity. Instead of developing relationships with Aphrodite or Zeus, we adore each in a succession of actresses, athletes or politicians, who inevitably betray us by proving to be all too human…If we only knew: The soul grows through an endlessly repeating cycle of innocence, projection, disillusionment, grief and expanded awareness, followed inevitably by new innocence or denial. In that process, those who cannot acknowledge or manifest their own creativity or nobility are likely to perceive those features in public personalities. We personify a grand, transcendent cause – the cosmos itself – as the King.

“Fan”, of course, is short for “fanatic,” a term which long ago was associated with orgiastic rites and demonic possession. This may explain why we often describe fan behavior in religious terms, such as “worship” and “idol.”

For several generations we have idolized stage, film and TV actors, a few politicians and plenty of Rock musicians. For a detailed discussion of Elvis and his mythic implications, see Chapter Eleven of my book. We all grew up with the cult of celebrity as the ongoing background of our daily lives and our nighttime dreams. But, as William Shatner told the Star Trek conventioneers in a Saturday Night Live skit way back in 1986,

Get a life, will you, people? I mean, for crying out loud, it’s just a TV show!…You, you must be almost 30. Have you ever kissed a girl?…When I was your age, I didn’t watch television…I lived. So, move out of your parents’ basements and get your own apartments—and grow the hell up!

At least the Trekkers (who at the time could actually afford to rent their own apartments) were getting out of the house and interacting. And so were the crowds attending Comic-Con International, which had begun in 1970, with 300 attendees (it’s now a four-day bonanza attracting 135,000 fans, many of whom wear elaborate cosplay costumes).

By 2005, teenagers were being exposed to over 3,000 advertisements daily, and ten million by the age of eighteen. Very soon, however, smart phone technology drove the cult of celebrity in ways no one could have foreseen. Now, the dominant influence on all our lives is screens, and the screens direct us inevitably toward the rich and famous. 

Schulman’s article “Superfans: A Love Story” is essential reading on this subject. He begins by recounting how a music writer who tweeted some mild criticism of rapper Nicki Minaj received startlingly nasty tweets and texts within two hours from hundreds of Minaj’s twenty-one million Twitter followers. Schulman continues:

Like most music idols, Minaj has a hardcore fan base with a collective name, the Barbz; Beyoncé has the Beyhive, Justin Bieber the Beliebers, and Lady Gaga the Little Monsters. The most fervent among them are called “stans.” The term derives from a 2000 track by Eminem, in which he raps about a fictitious fan named Stan (short for “stalker fan”), who becomes so furious that Eminem hasn’t responded to his letters that he drives himself off a bridge with his pregnant girlfriend in the trunk. Unlike regular fans, stans see themselves as crusaders, pledging loyalty and rushing to their idol’s defense against dissenters…A glance around the pop-culture landscape gives the impression that fans have gone mad. In May, viewers of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” revolted against the show’s final two episodes…More than 1.7 million people signed a petition on Change.org to “remake Game of Thrones Season 8 with competent writers.”

The language evolves quickly. Another term – “shippers” – refers to fans who, often disregarding narrative logic, advocate for certain characters to couple up. Schulman lists other examples of the current madness, such as a lawsuit against the producers of a documentary about Michael Jackson, which

…gets at the heart of modern fandom: an attack against a celebrity or a beloved character is an attack against the fans, and it is their duty to retaliate…(and) nerd culture has become mainstream. Now that couch potatoes have social media, they have risen up and become active, opinionated participants. As a result, movie studios and TV showrunners have to cater to subsets of diehard devotees, who expect to have a say in how their favorite properties are handled. The producer I spoke to said, “The question we always ask ourselves in the room is: Is the fan base so strong and such an important part of the box office that we have to change something to keep them happy?”

This business has long preceded smart phones. Schulman gives an example from 1893, when Arthur Conan Doyle, sick of writing Sherlock Holmes stories, finally killed him off in a magazine story. However, when thousands of readers cancelled their subscriptions and formed “Let’s Keep Holmes Alive” clubs, Conan Doyle was forced to resurrect him.

Another aspect of the new landscape is that fan disputes are nearly indistinguishable from partisan politics, and both have thrived in the new technological landscape. Schulman writes that the rise of Trumpus (my term), “…who was a pop-culture icon before he was a politician, neatly overlaps with the rise of toxic fandom…” It’s well known that his most enthusiastic fans – white supremacists and gun crazies – have organized over the same Facebook/Twitterverse that he manipulates.

But here, we mythologists have to ask what new order might be trying to be born out of this particular vacation in chaos. We can begin to reframe the current loony environment by observing that technology now allows fans, for better or for worse, to (figuratively) rise up off their couches and get involved. Henry Jenkins, a self-described “Aca-fan” (part academic, part fan) and author of Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, one of the founding texts of fan studies, seems to be our best guide. Early on, he was struck by…

…how impoverished the academic framework for thinking about media spectatorship was – basically, though everyone framed it differently, consumers were assumed to be passive, brainless, inarticulate, and brainwashed. None of this jelled well with my own robust experience of being a fan of popular culture.

He sees fandom as

…a source of creativity and expression for massive numbers of people who would be otherwise excluded from the commercial sector…(it) is born out of a mix of fascination and frustration. If you weren’t drawn to it on some level, you wouldn’t be a fan. But, if it fully satisfies you, you wouldn’t need to rewrite it, remake it, re-perform it.

Jenkins introduced the concept of “poaching,” the idea that fans construct their own culture – fiction, artwork, costumes, music and videos – from content appropriated from the mass media and reshape it to serve their own needs and interests. Now, he points out, surveys indicate that over 60% of American teens have produced some forms of media, and large numbers of them have distributed that media content online. He proposes a “Civic Imagination”:

We believe that imaginative acts shape many elements of our understanding of the political realm helping us to: model what a better world might look like; identify ourselves as civic agents, map the process for change; build solidarity with others within our imagined/imagining community; develop empathy with those whose experiences differ from our own, and for the oppressed, imagine equality and freedom before we directly experience it.

This is mythological language; may it be so. For more on his ideas and related concepts, read about Participatory culture, the Fan Studies Network, Archive of Our Own, (which hosts more than 33,000 fan communities), Transformative Works and Cultures,  New Media Literacies, Civic Imagination, and Mark Duffett.

Political and cultural reactionaries seem to be motivated by the fear that their long-cultivated identities may be in question. But should we be surprised that such anxiety actually masks its opposite? Deeper down, the hunger we feel is not simply to be entertained (see below), but to be drawn out of ourselves, and this includes our notions of gender.

An early and profoundly important version of participatory culture began in the 1950s. The Elvis craze and Beatlemania crystallized the image of the “screaming teen” stereotype, which has often inspired a certain contempt, a way of policing adolescent-female libido. But Duffett has suggested that “fan screaming may be a form of ‘affective citizenship,’” a communal defiance of ladylike behavior.

We are back in the realm of myth and ritual. I have heard accounts of African boys dancing before the huts of their elders, demanding to be initiated. Similarly, perhaps, young white girls (who might have been timid and obedient as individuals) formed mobs, breaking through police lines to approach their Dionysian priests, and sometimes to “dismember” them as the Maenads had done with Pentheus. One of Elvis’ bandmembers

…heard feet like a thundering herd, and the next thing I knew I heard this voice from the shower area…by the time we got there several hundred must have crawled in…Elvis was on top of one of the showers…his shirt was shredded and his coat was torn to pieces. Somebody had even gotten the belt and his socks…he was up there with nothing but his pants on and they were trying to pull at them up on the shower.

Elvis beckoned to women, inviting them into Dionysian ritual – the madness, the pharmakon – that is both cause and cure of itself (later, the publishers of a 1998 translation of The Bacchae would acknowledge the connection by putting a mug shot of Elvis in his army uniform on the cover), as I write in Chapter Eleven:

Recall that Dionysus descended to Hades and raised Semele to Heaven. Similarly, while the spirit of feminism was veiled in America’s collective unconscious, young Elvis descended to America’s underworld, Memphis’s black ghetto. The blues had power (and danger) because it tapped into the soul’s depth, where extremes of joy and grief meet each other. Having become a conduit for that dark and terrible beauty, he emerged into the light – the national spotlight of show business – precisely at America’s initiatory moment. And in some profound yet inarticulate way, he brought guests with him – the Goddess and the beginning of the long memory. His eroticism, writes Doss, encouraged girls “to cross the line from voyeur to participant…from gazing at a body they desired to being that body.” Abandoning control – screaming and fainting, and eventually choosing to be sexual on their own terms, to desire their own orgasms – was the beginning of their revolution. One woman writes that Elvis “made it OK for women of my generation to be sexual beings.”

It became apparent that millions of girls had deep longings and deep pockets. Quickly, the music industry responded with “girl groups.” By the early sixties, this music was the one area in popular culture that gave voice to their contradictory experiences of oppression and possibility. It encouraged girls to become active agents in their own love lives. By allying themselves romantically and morally with rebel heroes, they could proclaim their independence from society’s expectations about their inevitable domestication. And even when the lyrics spoke of heartbreak and victimization, the beat and euphoria of the music contradicted them.

And the music was made by groups of girls. It was, writes Susan Douglas, “a pop culture harbinger in which girl groups, however innocent and commercial, anticipate women’s groups, and girl talk anticipates a future kind of women’s talk.”  If young women could define their own sexual sensibility through popular music, couldn’t they define themselves in other areas of life? Another woman claims, “Rock provided…women with a channel for saying ‘want’…that was a useful step for liberation. Eventually, their desires crystallized as the quest for the authentic in all areas. Decades later, Douglas argues that “…singing certain songs with a group of friends at the top of your lungs sometimes helps you say things, later, at the top of your heart”…Cynthia Eller writes that feminism began by asking why little girls had to wear pink and big girls had to wear high heels, but it “…segued naturally into one that asked why God was a man and women’s religious experiences went unnoticed.”

Part Five

We need our vacations in chaos that might temporarily relieve the crushing burden of life under late capitalism.

Even now (March 2020), as authorities ask millions of us to “social distance” or “shelter in place”, a “stay-cation” in chaos may be the antidote to the pandemic of fear that sweeps over us. As always, follow the money to understand what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism.”

But let’s get back to our broader theme, and to a broader and older imagination. Below our fear and contempt for the Other lies envy and the desire to achieve authentic psychological integration. Ancient cultures knew this. For much more, see Barbara Ehrenreich’s excellent book, Dancing in the Streets. This is why many Greek seasonal festivals, especially those of winter solstice and early spring, were celebrations of Dionysus. He was the god who presided over the great competitions of tragic drama, as well as the Anthesteria.

The Athenians were deeply aware of the seduction of the irrational. Every February, for over a thousand years, this all-soul’s festival welcomed the spirits of the dead – and Dionysus, who brought with him the new wine – for three days of drinking, processions, insults and merry-making. But it was also a period of deep solemnity, because many knew that they couldn’t go to one extreme without invoking its opposite.

Impersonated by a priest wearing a two-faced mask, Dionysus returned from Hades on a wheeled ship crowned with vine tendrils and pulled by panthers. People masked themselves as (sometimes angry) ancestral spirits who had emerged from the wine casks and were roaming the city. “Wild laughter,” writes Walter Burkett, “is acted out against the backdrop of terror…”

In similar Egyptian, Babylonian and Roman New Year’s festivals ritual purification announced the end of one cosmic cycle and the beginning of another. Later, Christian Europe celebrated Carnival at this time, and the King and Queen still arrive on a wheeled ship. Dionysian revels are followed by the austerities of Lent, the grieving of Good Friday and Easter.

Carnival was characterized by temporary inversion of the social order and breaking of taboos. Entire communities participated as temporary equals, with little distinction between performers and audience. In the “Feast of Fools” pent-up repression exploded in mock rituals and wild excess within churches, sometimes with clergy participating. Amid the merriment, we still observe the ancient theme of welcoming the masked spirits of the dead.

The Anthesteria was all this and more. The Basilinna, wife of the religious leader, ritually copulated with Dionysus. While scholars consider this a fertility ritual that ensured good crops, she was also re-enacting the ancient hieros gamos marriage of goddess and consort, of the inner queen and king meeting in the sea – a universal symbol for the deep Self. It recalled and evoked the unity behind all dualities. Indigenous knowledge was still alive: the proximity of decomposition and fertility, of pollution and the sacred, of death and new life.

We will never know exactly what occurred, or how people interpreted it. Who the Basillina slept with, or whether they consummated literally, doesn’t matter. This does: the Other symbolically invaded the royal household and claimed her. Then the Athenians donned masks, got drunk, and ignored all the rules, with master and slave, men and women briefly exchanging roles. Next morning, however, they symbolically fed the spirits, swept through the streets and chased them away for another year.

We have here a partial record of how an advanced urban civilization acknowledges the irrational. The rich certainly hoped these rituals would minimize the eruption of energies that could topple their palaces, that because of the attention they paid to the Lord of the Darkness there might not be a catastrophic return of the repressed, in the city or in their souls.

Clearly, the deep tensions in Athenian life could only be partially resolved by such festivals as the Anthesteria. Dionysus inhabited the center of this paradox, representing the return of the repressed needs of women and slaves, return of the non-rational part of the self, and return of the ancient connection to the living unity of nature.

The Anthesteria gradually transformed into both Carnival and Holy Week. Similarly, the Romans celebrated the winter Saturnalia, which clearly influenced Christmas traditions.

Can we sophisticated, modern people even conceive of a rational culture with an annual event in which the entire population simultaneously partied to excess and grieved their dead? Mexico, perhaps – another Catholic, non-Puritan country. It is comforting to know that our ancestors understood that these liminal periods offered ideal opportunities for symbolic re-integration of repressed aspects of both person (derived etymologically from persona, or mask) and culture.

African slaves, Haitians and other Catholics brought this dark knowledge to New Orleans. Even now we can observe vestigial aspects of the old ways, including the tradition of the “Second Line.” Other aspects include the devils and ghosts (not the cute and harmless figures of Halloween) appearing everywhere as Mardi Gras masks; the processions with their large floats that recreate the ship on wheels of Dionysus; and the tradition of the Mardi Gras Indians.

Those devils and ghosts once reminded us that the potential of reintegration calls forth the necessity of confronting all that we have repressed and condemned to the underworld of the unconscious. As Mahatma Gandi wrote, one of the modern world’s “seven deadly sins” was religion without sacrifice.

This is precisely what is lacking in our safe, contemporary vacations in chaos. To paraphrase the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, a culture that begins by denying death will end up denying life. Or as Michael Meade puts it, those who deny death will end up inflicting it upon others. Without an intentional approach to sacrifice, loss and grief, our vacations in chaos amount to nothing more than entertainment.

———–

Entertain means “to hold together.” Novelist Michael Chabon suggests that this implies “…mutual support through intertwining, like a pair of trees grown together, interwoven, each sustaining and bearing up the other.” He insists that the transmission from writer to reader must involve pleasure, a notion that clearly remains suspect to all Puritans. Indeed, James Hillman taught that the mythical daughter of Psyche (Soul) and Eros is Voluptas, or Pleasure incarnate. The end of soul work is pleasure, not escape from the body.

Chabon continues:

…entertainment – as I define it, pleasure and all – remains the only sure means we have of bridging, or at least feeling as if we have bridged, the gulf of consciousness that separates each of us from everybody else.

But reading is an active behavior. It requires people to create images in the mind that are suggested by the words they are reading. I’m thinking of something far more common, and far more passive.

The American middle class traditionally divides the day into eight hours of sleep, eight of work and eight of rest. Of course, it doesn’t work out quite so simply. But once we’ve returned home from work, had dinner, washed the dishes and put the kids to bed, the primary activity (or inactivity) we anticipate is entertainment, especially on weekends. Typically, this implies the experience of sitting back, snacking and being passively entertained by someone else, usually by the electronic image of someone else. It implies machines that create images and inject them directly into our minds. Certainly, we deserve to relax and restore ourselves. But why does it seem so unrewarding; and despite this, why do we constantly repeat the experience, as if something might change and our longing be fulfilled?

To go deeper, let’s go back to this idea of “holding together”. What does “together” refer to, subject or object? I see three possibilities. Two or more subjects can agree to hold one object, objective or idea in common, as people commonly do in Church, or in Trumpus rallies. Or one subject can hold two or more objects.

Finally, two or more subjects – a community – could hold mutually exclusive concepts. Jung argued that this ability to “hold the tension of the opposites” is a characteristic of someone who is comfortable with metaphor, poetry and myth. Our world of either-or thinking rarely rewards this. But our ancestors understood that communities needed ritual containers for such deep introspection and debate. Athenians had the Anthesteria, and they had tragic drama, as I explain in Chapter Three.

So I’m imagining that the original meaning of entertainment was ritual renewal of the community though shared suffering. Audiences in the Theater of Dionysus  did exactly that. Yes, they sat passively while people on stage enacted their oldest – and most confounding – myths. But these stories forced them to contemplate the clash of unbearable contradictions, to hold that tension without resolving it, and ultimately to weep together. They emerged spent but renewed, purged of their anxieties for a while.

The lack of such ritual containers explains why the satisfaction of passive entertainment is so fleeting. Certainly, we hold some things together, such as hero-worship, villain-hatred, team identification or lust for the commodities constantly tempting us. But since we (in our darkened rooms) rarely encounter authentic paradox or nuance, we miss the shared grief and joy that can actually unite people. Instead of embracing the mysterious and tragic coexistence of opposites, we release the tension by watching it being resolved, either violently or comically.

Because America demands or only receives Disneyfied versions of Carnival, where Death is scrubbed away (or projected, literally, with projectiles, onto targets throughout the Third World), we remain insulated from unvarnished reality. So we force it upon those people who must live – not temporarily – within the “inner cities” of our imagination. Even before Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans was known as the murder capital of America. For its African American inhabitants, life there partook of the bittersweet totality of life, but it was and is no vacation.

I write extensively about rituals of grief in Chapter Twelve. The Dagara people of Burkina Faso in East Africa are particularly known for having kept alive the tradition of lengthy and cathartic funerals (which survive in a different form in New Orleans). One American I know who has spent much time in that country recalls a woman he met there. Asked why she seemed so happy, she responded, “…because I cry so often.”

In recent years we’ve seen the rise of many new types of Carnival, from Burning Man to the countless Yogafests and Bhaktifests that attract large New Age crowds every summer.

                                                                  Bhaktifest!

Although I haven’t attended any of these events, I’m glad to hear that Burning Man does feature an annual Temple, an all-purpose sacred space that is generally but not exclusively used for remembering the departed. (Note: As of 2019, the Burning Man organizers are honoring the requests of the local Native Americans, the North/South Paiute and Goshutes, that no human remains be brought to the playa.) But I doubt if any of the New Age events acknowledge the dark side of existence (except as something to rise above), and I’d be happy to hear from any readers who have been to them.

Sociologist Nicholas Powers suggests that there are three types of modern Carnival:

— Status Quo: Living in hierarchy – the vacation in chaos is essentially a public ritual that by carefully containing transgression within time and place actually confirms the status of its participants.

— Reactionary: Breaking the rules to re-assert old hierarchies. Think of Trumpus rallies and white supremacist events.

— Revolutionary: Such events, especially when they are spontaneous and not sanctioned by the state, have the potential of transforming and even abolishing the hierarchy.

But even if most participants in the vacation in chaos do not expect or even consciously desire any real transformation, their indigenous souls understand the potential that exists in such spaces.

Thousands come to Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival for their vacations. But some local people remember its dark roots. Here is the translation of Sergio Mendes’ popular song Samba of the Blessing:

It’s better to be happy than sad
Happiness is the best thing there is
It is like a light in the heart
But to make a samba with beauty
A bit of sadness is needed
If not the samba can’t be made

To make a samba is not like telling a joke
And who makes samba like this is worth nothing
The good samba is a kind of prayer
Because samba is the sadness that sways
And sadness is always hopeful
Of one day not being sad any more

Put a little love in the cadence
And you’ll see that in this world nobody wins
The beauty that a samba have
Because samba was born in Bahia
And if today it is white in it’s poetry
It is very black in its heart.

In 1956 Allen Ginsberg asked:

America when will you be angelic?

When will you take off your clothes?

When will you look at yourself through the grave?

Someday, American culture – may it be so – will open itself up to this kind of indigenous wisdom. Until then, we have Comic Con, where “…an aspiring psychotherapist…gesturing to the crowds” told Michael Schulman:

“There are three needs that all people have: they want to be seen, they want to be heard, and they want to be valued.” That he was dressed as SpongeBob SquarePants did not dilute the insight.

In America’s fevered, paranoid imagination the “internal other” as drug dealer tempts the good citizens and leads them from the clear air of the palace roof down into the basements of sin. But the terrorist, the “external other,” wants to tunnel under the walls and destroy the palace itself. Since long before 9/11/2001, the fear mongers have been in the lucrative business of reducing rational human beings to quivering children, willing to trade their celebrated freedoms for a thin promise of temporary safety. Doing so, as Benjamin Franklin said, they “deserve neither.”

The truth, as people are finally beginning to realize, is that in the past sixty years right-wingers and white supremacists have perpetrated the vast majority of terrorist incidents in America: the Kennedy and King assassinations; the Oklahoma City bombing; literally dozens of racially motivated church-burnings (civil rights activists used to call Birmingham, Alabama, “Bombingham”); and countless bombings and shootings by right-wing Cuban-Americans and anti-abortion fanatics. And let’s not forget that the vast majority of mass shootings, of which there have been well over 300 so far in 2018, are perpetrated by white men.

Our image of domestic terrorism is a classic example of the inversion of fact. Its shadow is the agent provocateur, who has been present as an agent of the state, both local and national, at countless public demonstrations for 50 years (at least since the 1968 protests at the Democratic convention in Chicago), deliberately creating the impression that protest against the powers that be always leads to violence. “We agree with your goals,” lecture the smug media gatekeepers, “but we disapprove of your methods.”

Progressive and left-wing activists rarely describe themselves as provocateurs. On the far right-wing, however, when white supremacist intentions align with the interests of the billionaires who actually fund them, people like Milo Yiannopoulos proudly use the term.

In 2018 fear of the outsider is stronger than ever, and that fear was nurtured through the deliberate creation of an image. For four decades, J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI (yes, the same FBI later headed by Mueller and Comey) demonized anyone who threatened the status quo, regardless of their nationality, as “outside agitators” – a truly unique phrase, we must admit.

Hoover meant that these outsiders would “agitate”  our belief systems into a froth of meaninglessness and relativity that could be more easily infected by un-American ideas. He particularly patronized African-Americans with the phrase, claiming in the 1950s that on their own, Black people would never conceive of demanding their civil rights unless foreigners – Northerners, that is – prodded them to do so.

But when hatred rises to the level of poetry, we know that we are in the realm of myth, and myth points toward collective psychology. When we use such terms as provocateur and agitator, we are talking not about the Other, but about ourselves. We are acknowledging that we have repressed some part of ourselves so deeply and for so long that it can (and will) rise into consciousness only when we project it outwards onto someone else, whom we then feel justified in demonizing. His presence in our field of awareness has agitated us at a level deeper than Hoover could ever imagine.

Agitate (v.): from Latin agitatus, past participle of agitare, “to put in constant or violent motion, drive onward, impel.”

This image of the Dionysian menace implies three assumptions about us, the inhabitants of the polis. The first is innocence: when we are blameless by definition, then evil must come, quite simply, from outside. It implies that the communist ideas that Hoover warned us about couldn’t possibly originate among authentic, white, Christian Americans. The notion that an American empire would perpetrate mass violence in dozens of countries is inconceivable. Terrorism, quips Noam Chomsky, is “what others do to us.”

Long after Hoover left us, the media continue to demonize protestors with the term “outside agitators,” as this anonymous blogger suggests:

On August 19 (2014), ten days after police murdered Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, a slew of corporate media stories appeared charging that “criminals” and “outside agitators” were responsible for clashes during the protests. CNN alleged that “all sides agree there are a select number of people—distinct from the majority of protesters—who are fomenting violence,” quoting a State Highway Patrol Captain, a State Senator, and a former FBI assistant director to confirm this.

…we have to understand the deployment of rhetoric about “outside agitators” as a military operation intended to isolate and target an enemy: divide and conquer…The ultimate goal of the police is not so much to brutalize and pacify specific individuals as it is to extract rebelliousness itself from the social fabric. They seek to externalize agitation, so anyone who stands up for herself will be seen as an outsider, as deviant and antisocial.

A second assumption is weakness. Just as youths seemingly cannot resist the corrupt attraction of drugs or sex, the polis can entertain only the mildest diversity of opinion. If allowed access to the children, communists (now what? Muslims? Transgender people? Latino children?) would prevent discrimination of right from wrong and infect the national immune system with their “agit-prop,” another product of Hoover’s propaganda poetry.

A third assumption about us – these are all assumptions, I remind you, about us – is fairness. The macho boy-king Pentheus, who would attack directly, throws fastballs, while Dionysus throws curves. The terrorist could be a friend or co-worker. In a mythology (and a political system) that vastly overrates and idealizes the needs and opinions of conservative rural people who have somehow remained untainted by “cosmopolitan” values, he is urban, possibly Jewish. He infects us through trickery rather than through direct, “manly” confrontation. Since he refuses to play by the rules, we are justified in our righteous and overpowering vengeance. We call upon his mirror-opposite, the lone American superhero (or politicians who claim to embody him), who is equally willing to forego the rules of fairness.

Willing to drop our pretense of fairness so as to achieve a bit of temporary safety, perhaps we deserve neither.

You look at the migration, it’s young, strong men. We cannot take a chance that the people coming over here are going to be ISIS-affiliated…So I think it’s a way…you know, it could very well be the ultimate Trojan horse. – DJT

Fairness? It would appear that when the rhetoric of race-baiting and warmongering is not enough to fully mobilize the haters, it becomes a simple matter of providing actual agitators from the inside, the provocateurs. Here is a photo of an Oakland policeman who was unmasked as an actual provocateur at a demonstration, also in 2014:

Both actual terrorists and young men of color provoke the curiosity of the innocent, white citizen because they are close, much closer than the rest of us, to death. In the psyche, death evokes initiation. Perhaps the deniers of death, writes psychologist Luigi Zoja, envy the initiate, “he or she who has contact with another dimension… someone to whom a truth has been revealed.”

This speculation leads us to the original Greek meaning of scapegoat, the pharmakos, who was both the poison and its antidote. Anthropologists agree that sacrifice (literally, “to make sacred”) is a religious act, in which the victim is raised to the status of the deity so as to briefly bridge (Latin, pons, root of pontiff) the gap between the worlds, unite the community and wash away their sins. The communist, the outside agitator, the terrorist, the drug dealer all populate our mythic American imagination, just as the “red Indian” did for 350 years, so that we may remain innocent. But they are also there as provocateurs.

Provocateur: one who provokes. Provoke: Latin provocare, “call forth, challenge.” This word is related, very significantly, to evoke and invoke. Imagine the ritual possibilities: At some level we all, like Pentheus, can choose. We can invoke or evoke our own Dionysian nature, or we can innocently project it outwards, only to provoke its expression somewhere else.

Lately, perhaps more than at any other time in recent history, Americans find themselves in a full-blown epidemic of “othering.” We are obsessed with cataloging the qualities of those individuals and groups who appear to embody everything that we cannot accept about ourselves.

Pick one or more: Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Latino immigrants, transgender people, African-American teenagers, anyone at all from the Mid-East. Trump supporters.

But it is important, perhaps critical, to understand that whenever our attention settles upon one of these Others, we are attempting in our minds to describe, to convince ourselves of the limits of our own identity. In “other” words, we are constantly listing the characteristics of these other individuals and groups to know that we are “not them,” and thus to know who “we” are.

This is how identity is formed and constantly reinforced in this modern, de-mythologized world. Once, I imagine, we knew who we were because of positive things we could say about ourselves: we were the children of the gods; we were part of this land; we knew all the animals and the plants.

For thousands of years indigenous or so-called “primitive” people knew quite well that the soul (and the soul of a nation) matures by gradually coming to the awareness that the Other is simply a mirror onto ourselves. The ancient Greeks certainly knew this. Their word for “stranger” – xenos – the root of “xenophobia” – also meant “guest.”

But now we define ourselves by knowing that we are “not them.” And we are not them because they are (pick a few): violent, sexual, hateful, ignorant, lazy, immature, irrational, untrustworthy, overly rhythmic and/or primitive. Together, these traits represent the greatest of all sins to the White, Anglo-Saxon mind: the inability or unwillingness to repress or control one’s desires.

We can trace “Othering” back to the Old Testament, large sections of which are essentially narratives that forge Hebrew identity by distinguishing themselves from their neighbors.

With these mythic/historical roots of “Othering” in mind, we might consider an irony of the most massive proportions. The esteemed Israeli historian Shlomo Sand, author of the great book, The Invention of the Jewish People, has called into question many of the assumptions that Israelis (and by extension, all the rest of us) take for granted by way of knowing their history and identity.

For more background, see my essay, The Myth of Israeli Innocence, Parts One and Two. Also, two essays by Sheldon Richman: How the US Created Israel and a Whole Lot of Trouble and Depopulating Palestine, Dehumanizing the Palestinians.

One of Sand’s well-researched arguments is that, contrary to our long-held beliefs, the vast majority of Jews in first-century Palestine (several hundred thousand of them) were notexpelled by the Romans after the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. and did not leave the area. How could they? Almost all were poor farmers. Only the small number of rich elites went into exile. Romans or no Romans, the population remained quite stable for centuries, changing only in the twentieth century, and even then only after the Holocaust.

Another of his arguments, controversial, yet grounded in solid argument, is that most Eastern-European Jews cannot trace their ancestry to ancient Palestine. Indeed, most are the descendants of people who converted to Judaism in the ninth century.

Why do I bring these ideas to your attention? Very simply, because (if we accept his arguments) we cannot avoid a certain conclusion. Those hundreds of thousands of Jews didn’t leave and they didn’t disappear.

In the seventh century, when Muslim armies conquered the entire Middle East, these Jews and almost everyone else in the area were forcibly converted to Islam.

Thirteen centuries later, with that historical memory long forgotten, when Jewish Israelis (and most older American Jews) “know” who they are by seeing the Palestinians as the ultimate Other, they would be astonished to learn the truth. In this case, the Other is ourselves.

Indeed, since most Jewish Israelis (by the way, 20% of the population is Arab) are descendants of Eastern Europeans, and the ancestors of most Palestinians may well have been Jewish themselves, we confront the great irony: the Other is maybe even more you than you think you are.

 Questioner: How are we to treat others?

Ramana Maharshi: There are no others.

Part Four

Myth is conveyed – and consumed – in narratives and images. So it is important to understand our most fundamental mythic image. The American obsession with individualism has been built up and buttressed by three centuries of stories, repeated in thousands of variations, of the lone, violent hero.

All societies evolved versions of Joseph Campbell’s classic “monomyth” — except America. Whereas the classic hero is born in community, hears a call, ventures forth on his journey and returns sadder but wiser, the American hero comes from elsewhere, entering the community only to defend it from malevolent attacks. He is without flaw but also without depth. He is not re-integrated into society. Not knowing his own darkness, he cannot symbolize genuine renewal.

When confronted with the villain (his mirror-opposite), he never strikes first because, above all, he embodies the Puritan quality of self-control. This is what proves his superior character. And since his adversaries lack self-control, they embody the Dionysian Other. He is individualistic, lonely, extraordinarily powerful, selfless – and, like the Christ he is modeled upon, almost totally sexless. Classic heroes often wed beautiful maidens and produce many children. But the American hero (with few exceptions such as James Bond and comic antiheroes) doesn’t get – or even want – the girl.

Consider John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima, Red River, The Searchers, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon and The Horse Soldiers. In each of these films he portrays widowed, divorced or uninvolved loners. They symbolize the man who has failed – or never attempted – the initiatory confrontation with the feminine depths of his soul. He carries with him the myth of violent redemption.

Am I exaggerating? How common is this unattached American hero? Consider 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, Rambo, 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, as well as 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, The Exorcist and countless other movies, novels and comic strips.

All are either single, divorced or (especially in Wayne’s films) widowers. Robert Jewett and John Lawrence write, “The purity of his motivations ensures moral infallibility,” but denies both the tragic complexity of the real world as well as the possibility of healing through merging with and incorporating the values of the Other.

In this mythology, women are merely excuses for the hero’s quest. I googled “prominent Libertarians” and discovered 17 women out of 194 (about 9%). Even the Senate has a higher percentage of women (23%). Again: the Libertarian’s allegiance, if he is honest (and he is usually a he), is to himself, whether he claims to be part of a family, a relationship, a business or a military unit.

The classic hero endures the initiatory torments in order to suffer into knowledge and renew the world. In this pagan and tragic vision, something must die for new life to grow. But the American hero cares only to redeem (“buy back”) others. Born in monotheism, he saves Eden by combining elements of the sacrificial Christ who dies for the sins of the world and his zealous, omnipotent father. The community begins and ends in innocence. And the Hero – absolutely unique in all the world’s mythologies – remains outside of that community.

Only in our salvation obsessed culture and the places our movies go does he appear. Then, he changes the lives of others without transforming them. This redemption hero has inherited an immensely long process of abstraction, alienation and splitting of the western psyche. He exemplifies that peculiar process upon which our civilization rests: dissociation. He is disconnected from both the feminine and the Other (psychologically, his own unacknowledged darkness), whom he has demonized into his mirror opposite, the irredeemably evil. Since he never laments the furious violence employed in destroying such evil, he reinforces our characteristic American denial of death.

Our monotheistic legacy of dissociation and our sense that we individuate by separating ourselves from the tangles of relationship and community merged long ago with the Puritan’s profound contempt for the poor. Together, they inform both the libertarian’s disinterest in social responsibility as well as his stunning ignorance of how centralized government built up his white privilege (oh, did I mention that there were few people of color in that list of prominent libertarians?)

The Hero’s appeal lies deep below rational thinking. He requires no nurturance, doesn’t grow in wisdom, creates nothing, and teaches only violent resolution of disputes. The regular repetition of his stories in the mass media clearly has a modeling effect on millions of adolescent males in each new generation. Defending democracy through fascist means, he renounces citizenship. He offers, writes Jewett and Lawrence, vigilantism without lawlessness, sexual repression without resultant perversion, and moral infallibility without intellect.

Unlike the universal hero who lifts the veil between the worlds to discover eternal values, the redemption hero pulls the veil back down, confirms our innocence, and puts everyone back to sleep.

Part Five

The Paradox of the Outsider

The redemption hero, like Christ, leaves once his work is done. He must leave; he came from somewhere else, and he must return. It should be clear by now how this mythology has had a very practical effect on the American family, especially on patterns of fathering. It is a very simple step from identifying (consciously or not) as a libertarian to minimizing and eventually denying one’s responsibility to the children of the poor, and eventually to one’s own children.

And it’s another series of simple and logical steps from choosing that libertarian identity to asserting one’s freedom from all duties to the community and government in any of its forms, to the position of rebel, and then on to the claim that law itself has no intrinsic hold on one, and then to the eventual assertion that one has the right to do anything at all, from child molestation to mass murder. One then finds oneself – proudly – in the position of the Other.

As I have suggested, innocent Eden is defined by the existence of the Other – the external Other of terrorism, and the internal Other of race. The Other is the outsider. Or: evil comes from outside. But so does redemption.

Riding off into the sunset, writes James Robertson, “…the cowboy hero never integrated himself with his society.” But he has quite a bit in common with his villainous adversary. Each rejects conventional authority, each despises democracy and, although they serve opposing ends (the classic pair is Ethan Edwards and Scar in The Searchers), their methods are similar. 

The hero often becomes an outlaw (think Rambo) to defeat evil, because legitimate, democratic means are ineffective. Richard Slotkin writes that as early as the 1820s, the standard frontier hero of literature rescued captives by fighting the Indian “in his own manner, becoming in the process a reflection or a double of his dark opponent.”

Eventually, the dual relationship in the mirror shatters and the villain must die, frequently in a duel. The one who can control his impulses defeats the one who cannot. In mythic terms, Apollo defeats Dionysus. (The Greeks, however, knew better. In myth, the hyper-rational god Apollo willingly left his shrine at Delphi for three months every year, so that his irrational, mad half-brother Dionysus could move in.)

Yet because he takes whatever he wants, has no responsibilities and transgresses all moral codes, the villain is exciting, and frankly attractive. Americans admire outlaws. Newspapers described an 1872 hold-up by Jesse James as “so diabolically daring and so utterly in contempt of fear that we are bound to admire it and revere its perpetrators.” For a time, this was a regular theme in cinema: in 1931 alone, Hollywood produced over fifty gangster movies in which the bad guys get away without being punished. It was said that when Al Capone took his seat at ballparks, people applauded. The Godfather is a regular candidate for the Great American Novel. In the era of capitalism’s greatest profits, millions identified with the criminal families depicted in The Sopranos and Growing Up Gotti.

The policeman and the criminal express contradictory impulses within American character. Puritan zeal for order clashes with its equal, the frenzied quest for wealth. Robert Warshow writes that the gangster is “what we want to be and what we are afraid we may become.”  For more on this topic, see George De Stefano’s An Offer We Can’t Refuse: The Mafia in the Mind of America.

Both share still another characteristic: the villain’s rage is a natural component of his pleasure in violating all boundaries, while the hero is also full of rage. Only by killing the villain, writes sociologist James Gibson, can the hero “release the rage accumulated from a life of emotional self-denial.”

Like the villain, the libertarian also loathes governmental limits on his quest for wealth. And, in rejecting religious constraints as well, he believes that he has the best of both worlds.

But what about the libertarian’s vaunted opposition to the military and its sworn duty to enact the extremes of empire? Looking back at that list of prominent, self-described “libertarians,” we notice plenty of men (Bob Barr, Gary Johnson, the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdoch, Rand Paul, Paul Singer, Peter Thiel, Bill Weld, etc) who have displayed little concern with this question. Granted, they are all obvious hypocrites, devoted to conning the rubes in the service of Wall Street. But perhaps we can judge the ideological tree by its strange fruit.

Though the hero rejects society’s rules, he is hardly alone; the desperado and the hedge fund CEO, whom we can’t resist admiring, join him, along with all the Others who have been pushed beyond the walls or down into the underworld (a term which was first used to describe organized crime in the 1920s). The mythic roots of crime in America, organized or not, are different from those in other countries. As I write in Chapter Nine of my book,

…when our assumptions of social mobility are revealed as fiction, the hero encounters his opposite – the victim – within himself, and we become what we really are (except for Nazi Germany), the most violent people in history. American crime is a natural by-product of our values, an alternative means of social mobility in a society where “anything goes” in the pursuit of success. “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 guns become the purest expression of controlling one’s fate. As such, they are “the dark epitome of the self-made way of life.” We as a people may well dream bigger dreams than other peoples. With great possibilities, however, come great risks. Gaps between aspiration and reality – the lost dream – are also far higher here than anywhere else. When we don’t meet our expectations of success, when that 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.

Again, we must note that, as Lewis Lapham argues, “…material objects serve as testimonials to the desired states of immateriality – not what the money buys but what the money says about our…standing in the company of the saved.” These are the logical extremes to which libertarianism – either anarchy or a police state – would invite us, and the American psyche is too willing to follow.

The Race Card

Exploring further into American myth, we inevitably confront the deeply racist nature of our society. American innocence is built upon fear of the “Other” – Indians, Mexicans, Asians, Communists and terrorists, but always and primarily, African-Americans. The fact that, in our time, politicians and pundits regularly admonish progressives for playing the “race card” indicates the terrifying truth that, to a great extent, the subject remains taboo. And anthropology teaches us that what is taboo is sacred. Like the Hebrew god Jehovah, it is too holy to be named.

White supremacy (as fear, as white privilege and as the underpinning of our entire economy) is the great unspoken – and therefore sacred – basis of our very identity as Americans. White Americans know who they are because they are not the Other. In a culture built upon repression of the instincts, delayed gratification and a severe mind/body split, we have, for three centuries, defined the Other as those who cannot or will not restrain their impulses. And we continue to project those qualities upon Black and Brown people.

In this American context, the fear of government intrusion upon the individual too often serves as a euphemism for the concern that one’s personally hard-earned assets (despite the legacy of white privilege and corporate welfare) might be taken away and given to people who are too lazy to work for themselves.

These attitudes are essentially religious, even if articulated in secular terms. Underneath the clichés lies our still-powerful Puritan contempt for the poor. Surveys show that the majority of Americans deeply believe that losers are bad and morally corrupt. To fail economically is not simple failure but – in America – moral failure. And neither American myth nor American politics distinguishes between race and class.

Thus, the libertarian has a deeply religious argument for keeping all of his money. He rationalizes his greed with a secularized argument that subsidizing the poor will only encourage them in their laziness. If they suffer it is their own fault. That a Black child should be undernourished because her parents cannot find employment is irrelevant.

These themes have been played out with increasing effect since the end of the 1960s, when conservatives, far more literate in American myth than liberals, began to masquerade as rebels against the establishment. Their narrative took full advantage of the fact that American myth offers only these alternatives to the hero – the victim and the villain. They emphasized “values” over “interests,” redefining class war, again, in racial and cultural rather than economic terms. Although this fable was aimed at traditional, conservative men, undoubtedly many libertarians soaked up their own rhetoric, perceiving themselves as victims of greedy, inefficient, inappropriately compassionate bureaucrats.

Ronald Reagan’s genius was to articulate hate within the wider myth of American inclusiveness, appealing to white males by evoking both ends of the mythic spectrum. He told them, writes Robert Bellah, that they could have it both ways: “You can…get rich, and you can also have the traditional values…have everything and not pay any price for it…” They could be both Puritans and Opportunists. Reagan’s backlash against the perceived excesses of the 1960s resolved whites of responsibility and renewed their sense of innocence and privilege,

Ever since, Middle America has supported leaders whose policies continue to wreck both the affluence and the family values that they hold so dear. Indeed, Reagan managed the greatest shift of wealth in history, turning the world’s most affluent nation into its greatest debtor nation.

He presided over a time during which, in a thousand subtle ways, government announced that the 300-year old American social contract, the balance between freedom (the rights of the individual) and equality (the community’s needs) was broken. A major theme of his revolution was a return to small town values. But its subtext was greed, racism, contempt for the poor and narcissistic individualism. Reagan gave white men permission to circle the wagons, retreat within the pale (pale skin) and reduce the polis to a size that excluded most of its inhabitants, and all current Republican leaders learned the lesson well.

To the ancient Athenians, someone who wouldn’t participate in the welfare of the poliswas an idiota. Reagan gave Americans permission to be idiots. Now they have elected one, or at least a man who plays one on TV.

Ironically, one could trace the recent roots of this socially libertarian yet fiscally conservative fashion to the radical individualism of the sixties.  Fritz Perls, a founder of the Human Potential Movement, had coined the ubiquitous statement of detachment from the polis seen on every t-shirt in those days, sometimes known as the “Gestalt Prayer”:

I do my thing, and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations…you are not in this world to live up to mine…if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful. If not, it can’t be helped.

Carl Cederström, in The Happiness Fantasy, takes this idea further, arguing that counterculture values— liberation, freedom, and authenticity — were co-opted by corporations and advertisers, who used them to perpetuate a culture of consumption:

Happiness became increasingly about personal liberation and pursuing an authentic life. So happiness is seen as a uniquely individualist pursuit — it’s all about inner freedom and inner development…the advertising industry changed their tactics and vocabulary and effectively co-opted these countercultural trends. At the same time…Reagan and Margaret Thatcher…were advancing a very individualistic notion of happiness and consumerism, and all of this together had a huge impact on our culture and politics…these values have been co-opted and transformed and used to normalize a deeply unjust and undesirable situation.

I think that ends where we are now, with a culture of extreme individualism and extreme competitiveness and extreme isolation…a situation where people feel constantly anxious, alienated, and where bonds between people are being broken down, and any sense of solidarity is being crushed.

Meanwhile, an extremely well-funded conservative media barrage was taking advantage of the old tradition of anti-intellectualism. “Elite” now meant stuffy, superior, arrogant liberals who trivialized the concerns of ordinary people. Many retreated into religious fundamentalism. White males, oblivious to their privilege, identified as victims – not of the rich, but of the minorities who were competing with them, the women claiming equality with them, the gays who publicly questioned the value of their masculinity and the intellectuals who appeared to be telling them how to live. The investment paid off; by 2000, only a fifth of Americans would describe themselves as liberal, even though a clear majority have always held liberal values.

For others, radical individualism and the culture of consumption were replacing older forms of group solidarity. Indeed, the U.S. Libertarian Party had run its first presidential candidate in 1972, just as the reaction against the 1960s was gaining steam. Eventually, the streams ran together and produced some crazy combinations, such as the above-mentioned “libertarian” Rand Paul who opposes gun control but would ban abortion and same-sex marriage. And all, whether religious extremists or free-market true believers, would find easy targets to blame.

One of the primary objectives of the corporate media and our other mythic instructors is to distract Americans from identifying both the true spiritual and economic sources of their pain, and the actual opportunities for addressing them. Therefore, the victim who cannot be a hero will search for villains or scapegoats. This is one way to understand right-wing activism: deeply committed, emotionally intense, sustained effort under the identification as victim, their targets being precisely those categories (race and gender) whom they have been educated to perceive as questioning or contesting that privilege.

Hence, we have, and certainly not for the first time in our history, groups of relatively well-off people who actually perceive themselves to be the victims of people who have far less than they do. And not just the relatively well-off. For example, I used to know a 50-year-old man who did odd jobs for me. He lived with his mother and was usually broke. Once, he declared that things were going badly for middle-class people like him and me. Middle-class? He was a good man, but the only way he could identify as middle-class was to remain blind to his own white privilege (and the welfare he was receiving).

This is the broader context behind Libertarianism. For at least the last thirty years, millions of Americans have described themselves as “liberal on social issues but fiscally responsible.” Factoring out the complex issues of tax policy, immigration, jobs, white-collar crime and the military, this translates as increasingly broad support for abortion rights, gay marriage, environmental protection, and de-criminalization of drugs on the one hand – and drastically lower taxes on the other. With most Americans wanting to have their cake (freedom plus government services) without having to pay for it, it hardly seems surprising that a minority would be attracted to Libertarianism, which is, after all, merely an extreme expression of that which makes us all – exceptionally – Americans.

Part Six

Coda: The Myth of Growth

The goal of Survivor, now in its 37^th season, is to manipulate and scheme against other participants until only one winner is left. Its longevity exemplifies the American dogma of unlimited economic growth, which teaches that all must be free to achieve their potential through independent, meritorious (and if not, then creatively dishonest) action.  Its relentless logic, however, turns nature into a resource and objectifies humans into individual rather than social animals. All motivation becomes self-interest, and – this is critical – no winners can exist without losers to compare themselves to.

For libertarians, simplistic faith in “the market” mirrors the fundamentalist’s faith in scriptural authority. In this story, the greatest sins are not violence but personal laziness (the crime of the Puritan) and social intrusion (the nightmare of the Opportunist.) Activist government, by taxing the privileged to sustain the needy, calls this faith into question: if everyone, even the poor, is entitled to basic human rights and dignity, then no one is automatically among the elect. If even the children of the homeless deserve care, nutrition and decent schooling, then students at the Georgetown Preparatory School are really not that special after all.

But we are talking about a belief system. Libertarianism is merely the extreme version of the creed of the individual who should be free to build, buy, steal or waste whatever he wants. True adherents of this theology then argue against all evidence that the “rising boat” of generalized wealth may possibly lift the less deserving along with the rich. On the other hand, as J.M. Keynes argued, capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for everyone’s benefit. And such beliefs inevitably lead to a world of euphemisms, such as terms like “productivity” hiding the truth of “increased unemployment.”

A hundred and fifty years before recent Supreme Court decisions, the myth of growth enshrined the idea that abstract concepts devoted solely to accumulating capital – corporations – have all the rights of persons, plus limited liability and the freedom to externalize costs. Who are the gods of this theology? Corporations are immortal. They can reside in many places simultaneously, transform themselves at will and do virtually whatever they choose, but they can’t be punished (or in practical terms, taxed).

Corporate headquarters, like medieval religious shrines, are housed in America’s tallest buildings. Americans express our aspiration to greatness through the metaphors of size, speed, height, expansion, acceleration and constant action. Our uniquely American term “manifest destiny” has always implied both territorial expansion and cultural influence. We outrun the competition and climb out of ignorance, up the rungs of the ladder of evolution. Great music “uplifts” us. The greater grows by “rising” out of the lesser. Many books on American history utilize this phallic language: The Rise of American Civilization, The Rise of the Common Man and The Rise of the City. Even in slang, both intoxication and euphoria are “highs,” psychologically depressed individuals are “down” and bad news is a “downer.”

Counter-arguments produce anxiety, because we perceive them as attacks upon the faith itself. If one grows from wet/dark/feminine to dry/light/masculine, then appeals to sustainability become entwined with threats to masculinity itself. Male identity converges with the imperative to grow; everything is bound up in “potential” and “potency.” Bigger is not simply better, but the only alternative to “smaller,” as “hero” is to “loser.” Jimmy Carter suggested mild limits to growth and was destroyed politically for the attempt. Studying his fate, Reagan, Clinton, both Bushes, Obama and Trump have promised to limits government, even as they increased its size.

The belief that the imperative of growth (as quarterly profits) trumps life itself underlies all corporate and most government policies and leads to the conservative mental gyrations of attacking big government while praising its responsibility to support the private sector through subsidies, infrastructure and military intervention – all forms of externalizing costs. The result is an economy, wrote James Hillman, that is “…the God we nourish with actual human blood.”

The holy text of this theology, the Gross Domestic Product, symbolizes the pathology of growth in four ways. First, it counts all economic activity as valuable, such as the $20 billion we annually spend on divorce lawyers, or cleaning up after a hurricane, and never distinguishes between textbooks and porn magazines. It includes every possible aspect of a person’s death from lung cancer – medical, hospital, pharmaceutical, legal and funereal – as well as the land purchasing, growing, transporting, packaging, marketing and eventual disposal of tobacco products, and the defense of their producers from class-action lawsuits. Increased gas expenditures add to the GDP without a corresponding subtraction for the toll fossil fuels take on the thermostatic and buffering functions of the atmosphere. Luxury buying by the rich covers up a lack of necessary buying by the poor.

So the GDP actually disguises suffering. The ultimate example is war: exceptionally costly, energy-intensive, requiring lengthy cleanup and long-term medical bills. By adding to the GDP, however, it builds an artificial sense of economic health. And for the last sixty years, preparation for war (the Defense Department and all related expenditures in the Energy Department and Homeland Security as well as veteran’s benefits and proportional percentages of interest payments of the national debt) has accounted for well over half of the nation’s annual budgets and similar percentages of the GDP.

Second, judging profitability on quarterly stock reports rather than on long-term sustainability leads to the maximization of short-term strategies (such as investing in the SUV rather than in energy-efficient cars)  at the cost of long-term losses. It also leads to outright, deliberate lying about those long-term effects, from “healthy” cigarettes and mercury-laden dental fillings to death-trap cars and global warming.

Third, the GDP is so wildly inaccurate – because it completely ignores the massive underground economy of drugs, prostitution, gambling and crime (blue- or white-collar) – that it has nothing really practical to indicate about the economy anyway.

Fourth, it discounts and ignores the actual, natural economy. As Robert F. Kennedy said, it “measures everything…except for that which makes life worthwhile.”  Most crucial life-supporting functions take place not through the market, but through social processes and voluntary activities (families and churches) or through completely natural processes (the cooling and cleansing functions of trees, etc). None register in the GDP until something damages them and people have to buy substitutes in the market. In this mad calculus, fuel conservation, stable marriages, children who exercise and eat healthy foods and world peace are threats to the economy.

Many “progressives” are also unaware of the pervasiveness of this story. Clearly, recession hurts the poor most. But we reveal ignorance of our myths when we demand larger shares of an ever-expanding economic pie, or lament “underdevelopment” in other nations. Growth, whether inequitable or sustainable, leads inevitably to the terrifying vision of seven billion people each driving their own SUV.

Eastern wisdom teaches that we can never satisfy the soul’s hunger with material food alone. Yet self-improvement and growth are such bedrock American values that, by the 1970s, they were, once again, models for the spiritual life. Hillman argued that the first assumption of the “therapeutic culture” is that emotional maturity entails a progressive differentiation of self from others, especially family. American psychology mirrors its economics: the heroic, isolated ego in a hostile world.

For a significant segment of the population, “inner growth” replaced the old ideal of the democratic citizen. Well-meaning people, more American than they knew, spoke of what they could get from life, rather than, to paraphrase John F. Kennedy, what they could give to it. Spiritual growth became another version of the pursuit of happiness, now defined by “heightened awareness” and “peak” experiences. “Feeling good,” wrote psychologist Lesley Hazleton, became “no longer simply a right, but a social and personal duty.” And the economy offered the material symbols that gave evidence – proof, in Puritan terms – of spiritual “growth.”

This idea takes its energy from two older ones: life-long initiation, and biological maturation. But it has split off from the natural and indigenous worlds in its unexamined assumptions. All living things die and return to Earth, but a “growing” person, by definition, cannot. Initiation absolutely requires the death of something that has grown past its prime. And worse, since the myth of growth (material or spiritual) is essentially a personal story, it narcissistically assumes the unlimited objectification and exploitation of others for the ultimate aggrandizement of the Self.

Gary Snyder points out that we find unlimited growth in neither nature nor culture, but only in the cancer cell, which multiplies until it destroys its host. The miracle of reproduction serves death instead of life. Growth inevitably evokes its opposite. The body produces anti-bodies, which destroy the invasion of grandiosity. There is no more basic ecological rule. Natural growth only occurs within a broader cycle that also includes decay.

But when growth, potency, happiness, pressure to be in a good mood, to “have a nice day,” to be “high” are hopelessly intertwined with consumer goodies, not having them means a drop into shame and depression, from the Hero to the Victim. In the real world of limited resources, growth is a Ponzi scheme in which our great-grandchildren subsidize the childish and narcissistic fantasies of those who call themselves libertarians.

Part One

An earlier version of this essay was published in 2013 as the introductory chapter in Uncivil Liberties: Deconstructing Libertarianism, published by the Praxis Peace Institute.

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

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

In most parts of the world, the terms “libertarian” and “libertarianism” are synonymous with Left anarchism.  Noam Chomsky writes:

The term libertarian as used in the U.S. means something quite different from what it meant historically and still means in the rest of the world. Historically, the libertarian movement has been the anti-statist wing of the socialist movement. Socialist anarchism was libertarian socialism. In the US, which is a society much more dominated by business…it means eliminating or reducing state controls, mainly controls over private tyrannies. Libertarians in the US don’t say let’s get rid of corporations. It is a sort of ultra-rightism.

But political philosophy doesn’t fully explain why libertarianism as we know it has been popular in only one nation in the world – America. To go deeper, we need to ground ourselves in mythological thinking.

The myth of American innocence is a story we have been telling ourselves about ourselves for nearly four hundred years. The idea of a nation divinely ordained to save the world evolved so as to justify the original colonization effort. Later, in changing conditions, it helped account for America’s unique and rapid expansion and its worldwide economic and cultural domination.

This story still moves us deeply because it inverts the guilt of history. It instructs us that white colonizers were the actual victims of the westward expansion — attacked and massacred for no reason by evil savages emerging from the dark forests. Its subtext, of course, is our violent and racist history. But precisely because of this history, no other nation has gone to such lengths to define itself by excluding so many from full membership, while regularly congratulating itself with pervasive stories of freedom and opportunity. This is how we resolve the contradictions of this history, and how we live with ourselves, and with the cruel white supremacy that pervades our daily lives.

While white Americans across the entire political spectrum adhere to this myth in deep, often unconscious ways, libertarians exemplify it in its purest form. Their ideas of history, culture and the relationship between the individual and the community reveal an essentially American, almost childlike innocence that borders on willful ignorance. Or, as the old joke goes, Question: what’s the difference between ignorance and apathy? Answer: I don’t know and I don’t care!

First, let’s get the easy issues out of the way.

1 – Any teenager could quickly dismiss any politician who claims to favor “small government” with a quick examination of his or her positions on military spending, foreign policy, domestic surveillance, corporate welfare, abortion rights, immigration, gay marriage or medical marijuana – all of which assume a large, centralized government and mandate regular state intervention in private lives.

On the national scene, this leaves only Ron and Rand Paul, whose stated willingness to use the power of the federal government to outlaw abortion clearly contradicts their claims to be libertarians. As for their limited anti-war views, activist Tim Wise writes, “Even a broken clock is right twice a day.”

2 – Chomsky disposes of the magical notion that American prosperity was built upon free markets: “Genocide and slavery: try to imagine a more severe market distortion than that.” We are talking about an entire hemisphere conquered by military invasion and then distributed free to (very) selected populations, who then went on to make their fortunes. Indeed, almost all developed countries originally got rich not through free markets but through tariff protection and government-subsidized military conquest. 19th and early 20th century U.S. tariffs of 40 to 50 percent were the highest in the world. Later, the U.S. government paid for 50-70 % of the country’s total expenditures on research and development from the 1950s through the mid-1990s, usually under the cover of defense spending

3 – Americans are already taxed at far lower rates than other developed nations. This has resulted in miniscule social services and third-world levels of economic inequality. One cause of this situation is the tax code, which taxes ordinary income at up to thirty-five percent. The very rich, however, who receive most of their money from capital gains (“unearned income”), pay only fifteen percent. The situation was very different in the prosperous 1950’s, when they were taxed at up to ninety percent. In other contexts, “unearned income” is known as “welfare.”

As a mythologist, however, I am more interested in what we might call the mythic substrate of beliefs and attitudes that right-wing rhetoric engages so easily. Why are so many so willing to listen? Why, uniquely among nations, are we so stirred by hymns to freedom, riled up by rumors of government excess and enraged by the thought that one’s hard-earned, raised-by-the-bootstrap money might be taxed for some vague sense of the “common good?”

American Myth

 Our story describes a continent that was pure potential, the stuff of dreams. Since, in a European sense, the natives were not using the land productively, it was seen as “virgin” land, implicitly available for defloration and fertilization. As I write in Chapter Seven of my book, Sir Walter Raleigh made the analogy of land, woman and rape very clear: Guiana “hath yet her maydenhead.”

This is our creation myth of the American people, innocently arriving from diverse lands, charged with a holy mission to destroy evil, save souls, carve civilization out of the wilderness – and get rich. Professor R.W.B. Lewis wrote that this story saw the world:

…starting up again under fresh initiative, in a divinely granted second chance for the human race…(Americans were) emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry…Adam before the Fall.

The American dream-story was built up over four centuries of preaching, oratory, fiction, poetry, storytelling, popular songs, textbooks, advertisements, films and television. Its essence was that anything was possible.

In this land of opportunity, one’s greatness was limited only by his or her own desires. Americans like to believe in the tabula rasa, the “clean slate.” Even now, we happily consume TV commercials for the military that encourage us to “be all you can be.” The cliché moves us because it rests upon the old notion of human purpose. Americans, however, are constantly told that we can be anything we want to be. This is an adolescent misreading of the indigenous teaching that each person is born to be one thing only, and that the human challenge is to discover what it is.

By the late 18^th century, Americans had developed a curious and contradictory mix of traditional Puritanism and modern Enlightenment values. Individuals were fallen and sinful; yet one could make of oneself whatever one might want. Indeed, in 1776 – for the first time in history – a nation proclaimed the “pursuit of happiness” as its primary reason for existence. 

America redefined the word liberty. On the one hand, liberty (from the Latin liber, an epithet of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and madness) implies release, pointing toward liberation, in both its Marxist and Buddhist meanings. Liberty, however, has a continuum of meanings, including permissionto do what one wants, the power to do what one likes and the privilegeto “take liberties” with others. The Founding Fathers were apparently unconcerned with the obvious fact that the passionate, unregulated pursuit of liberty by some people inevitably results in the destruction of the rights of others. In practical terms, freedom outside of an ethical framework – freedom without responsibility – becomes license, and it is inseparable from simple criminality. It is also inseparable from unfettered capitalism.

Early white Americans experienced a heady mix of the puritan emphasis on personal salvation and the opportunistic disdain for class distinctions. For three centuries free land in the west served as a safety valve for the discontented; thus abject poverty was relatively uncommon. Most whites (prior to the mass immigrations of the late 19^th century), to an extent unimaginable in Europe, became landowners.

But when extremes of wealth and poverty appeared, the rich felt little obligation to the poor. After all, declared Puritanism, poverty was proof of sin. Its belief in predestination survived into the 21^st century as a Social Darwinism that has eviscerated the welfare state. And this thinking clearly underlies most libertarian pronouncements. When the poor are concerned, the idea of the tabula rasa recedes into the background.

To be a white American was to have the right to “make something of oneself.” If one failed, he had no one to blame but himself. America, in our myth, became a nation of purposeless, “self-made men,” each individually making his destiny.

But curiously, the nation itself had a unique purpose. The myth proclaimed that God had chosen this people to spread freedom and opportunity. Eventually, Americans extrapolated this idea onto world affairs. The nation of individualists became an individual among nations, shaping other societies to its image of the good life. All empires have rationalized conquest; but only Americans justified enslavement and genocide with myths of freedom, good intentions and manifest destiny. The Bush II administration carried this magical notion to its extreme, but it has always been the core of American policy, and Barack Obama restated it as recently as 2016.

The myth predicted inevitable progress toward the best of all possible worlds. Thus mobility became a major value, and history moved from east to west, allowing one to forget its lessons and continually exist in a “new” America. The ideal American was always moving towards something better; and he tended to look condescendingly upon those who held to the values of place. For those who believe in upwardly mobility, said James Hillman, to be is to be stuck.

The psychological implications are significant. Fifteen to twenty generations of restless Americans have come of age assuming that maturity implies freedom from all restraints, that family and community (and, for many men, all binding relationships) are constraints to be escaped from. Historian James Robertson writes, “The ritual American act of courage is the declaration of independence-rebellion-migration of the American adolescent.”

Part Two

Mobility

Our sacred notion of mobility — the freedom to move — evokes one of our most enduring themes: the New Start. Always, one could pull up stakes, move on, start a new church, change one’s name, dream a new American dream and start over. Mobility also implies expansion: geographic, economic and spiritual. Americans from the start have taken for granted the imperative to constantly expand and grow – and the internalized judgment of those who are not upwardly mobile. 

This leads to wildly divergent yet surprisingly similar ideals – both the infinitely expanding consumer economy and “personal growth.” New Age spirituality could not be more American. Consider the book, The Secret (30 million copies in 50 languages), by Rhonda Byrne. In the film version, a series of self-help teachers promote positive thinking, primarily toward the goal of acquiring consumer goods and a great love life. This tradition extends back to the New Thought teachers of early 19^th-century America. The film ignores the values of community almost totally. For more on the myths of progress and growth, see Chapter Nine of my book.

A mere half century after the revolution, Alexis De Toqueville observed of American preachers,

…it is often difficult to be sure when listening to them whether the main object of religion is to procure eternal felicity in the next world or prosperity in this.

Eventually, religion and the mentality of business merged as they did nowhere else. Without a state religion and with Protestant churches constantly splitting in schisms, each individual preacher was forced to become an entrepreneur of souls, a salesman, in order to distinguish his church from other churches. Consequently, a business-growth mentality grew within American Protestantism, and its philosophy of optimistic self-improvement merged with the capitalist ideology of greed and perpetual growth.

“New Start” also implies another old idea. In the tribal world, initiation removes youths from their community before returning them with their sense of purpose revitalized. It is a point in time rooted within space. But America inverted this ancient truth; since one could simply leave his community to acquire a new identity, initiation became a point in space rooted in time. As early as 1600, America symbolized the New Start for the entire western world. This aspect of the myth remains nearly as strong today. And it tells us that we rise up not as members of an ethnic group or social class, but as individuals. 

The Myth of Individualism

In an odd reversal of initiation motifs, the American heroic son “kills” his father symbolically – if he has one – by individuating, moving away and repudiating everything the father stands for. In truth, we perceive family as at best a necessary evil, something to leave, so that one may get on with the pursuit of happiness. In America, progress happens through separation.

In terms of child-raising, Americans generally consider infants to be so fused with their mothers that we make every effort to encourage autonomy as early as possible. We hold and carry babies less than most nations do, very early admonishing them to be “big boys.” The Japanese, by contrast, consider the infant to be utterly alien, from some strange, other world. Like most traditional people, they make every effort to enfold it within community as early as possible. Neither view of the child is right or wrong, said James Hillman; both are myths, because they are “lived unconsciously, collectively as truths, performed unwaveringly as rituals.”

In the story of modernity, which is essentially an American story, unlike anything that came before, we have convinced ourselves that purpose can be divorced from community. But in a culture of consumerism, the desire to be seen as special produces a quest for expensive symbols – a quest that is ultimately futile, wrote sociologist Philip Slater, “…since it is individualism itself that produces uniformity.”

Paradoxically, our American obsession with individualism produces persons who “cannot recognize the nature of their distress.” This results in a desire to relinquish responsibility for control and decision-making to the images provided by the media. Here lies a great paradox of American life: our emphasis on the needs of the individual always constellates its shadow of cultural and political conformism.

But conformism and rebellious individualism should not be our only choices. In the indigenous world, community exists in order to identify and nurture the individuality of each of its members, who are, in turn, necessary for the community to thrive and reproduce its values. Malidoma Somé writes that in West Africa, “Individuality is synonymous with uniqueness. This means that a person and his or her unique gifts are irreplaceable… A healthy community not only supports diversity, it requires diversity.”

Americans – when not involved in our periodic moral crusades – valued the individual over the community more than any society in history. The opportunist argued for individual responsibility against the suffocating presence of big government. Determined on success, he was in a perpetual state of rebellion against authority (while ignoring the cavalry that protected his property, massive subsidies to the railroads that carried his goods, and later, a military-industrial complex that ensured his oil supply and markets for his products).

His wealth was proof that he lived in God’s grace – and his neighbor’s poverty indicated the opposite. But there was a price, writes Historian Greil Marcus:

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.

Whether in the relentless drive for wealth or in his obsession to know God’s plan, the American, like no one before him, strove for self-improvement. Inside the word “improve,” however, is the anxiety of one who can never positively know if he is saved. Thus he must continually “prove” his worth. He does so, he believes, only on his own merits. And he proves this worth only in relation to those who have less, those who (according to Puritanism) deserve less.

Mythmakers continually emphasize the individual over the collective. Most notably, Horatio Alger’s nineteenth century dime-novel melodramas affirmed the Protestant virtues of frugality, hard work and delayed gratification. His young heroes “pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps.” These immensely popular stories of personal success counteracted populist agitation in a time when socialist ideas from Europe were questioning the mythic narrative.

In the 1880s they were already well-established in the American narrative. And for the last 140 years they have only grown stronger. So many of us, born on third base, think we hit a triple.

Part Three

American Dualities

All societies confront the perennial conflict between individual and community. America’s emphasis on individualism and its puritanical shadow produced a bewildering series of dualities that express, temporarily resolve and often cover up this tension.

Fear: For every story of heroic, optimistic, progressive, entrepreneurial, forward-thinking, frontier-crossing heroism, we have the background of fear and anxiety. Our stories have always focused that fear upon the inner and outer Others of our imagination. And I mean always, as Glenn Greenwald observes,  because a mythology built to justify empire and white supremacy absolutely requires a state of constant anxiety  to motivate people who, left to their own devices and traditional mythic worlds, would not tolerate such an unsatisfying life.

People, of course, can feel fear about many things, especially of loss. But in America this mythology gets condensed through the generations down into the loss of freedom, which expresses as the loss of opportunity and the loss of money. Just behind the libertarian’s obsession with freedom lies his fear of losing his hard-earned resources, which he believes he achieved entirely independently of a broader social network.

And in this zero-sum American mythology it is impossible to separate the fear of loss of resources from the fear of redistribution of those resources, and those racialized groups whom government would give them to.

Early white fear and hatred of the dangerous, Indian Other created mythic opposites: the hero and the captive. Both our history and our psychology waver between the viewpoints of the helpless, innocent victim of pure evil, and the redeemer/hunter/hero, who vanquishes it and saves innocent Eden. By 1700, America’s first coherent myth-literature appeared: potent tales of people — usually women — who’d survived capture by the Indians.

The heroes of the western expansion became the stock characters of the second theme in American myth. The greatest, Daniel Boone, moved further west as  civilization encroached, complaining, I had not been two years at the licks before a d—d Yankee came, and settled down within an hundred miles of me!

Whether Boone actually said that is irrelevant; Americans needed him to. The myth of the frontier contrasted Apollonian Cities with the Dionysian Wilderness (hence, three hundred years later, the spatial center of libertarianism in our Western states). The frontier was a safety valve of free western land when urban conditions became unmanageable, linking militarism with civilization’s moral progress. Since society must grow or perish, it insisted on the racial basis of class difference and taught that such progress required the subjugation or extermination of both wild nature and savage races.

These themes had deep resonance, because they superficially resembled ancient hero myths. Both the hunter (willingly) and the captive (unwillingly) entered a primal world. If they could maintain their racial/cultural integrity there, they might incorporate its power, defeat its demons and return to morally renew their community (even if they rarely did so). It was initiation – and redemption – through violence.

The opposition of Puritan obsessions and the opportunists’ predatory mania led to a division in the psyche that remains with us today. We regularly confront the opposing values of freedom and equality, framed as individualism vs. conformism. To modern Puritans, all are equally sinful, requiring eternal vigilance to prevent infection. But descendants of the opportunists, from robber barons to anti-tax crusaders, sexual hedonists and libertarians, venerate the sacred right to ignore community standards.

Conservatives (more appropriately: reactionaries) often intertwine these values, because one of the privileges of whiteness is to pick and choose among seemingly contradictory positions. Hence, we have the curious phenomena of gay Republicans who overlook their party’s hatred of sexuality; proponents of increased police presence who oppose gun control; others who oppose abortion rights but support capital punishment; and demagogues like Richard Nixon, who terrorized Middle America with warnings of both“the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy” in the same speech.

The pendulum has swung back and forth. But wherever one of these values predominates, its shadow soon constellates. The conflict emerges in the tension between libertarian hedonism and wartime conformism – often in the voices of the same persons. Another example is equal opportunity vs. the meritocratic values of our institutions – and the old-boy networks that actually ensure continued WASP dominance (the C-grade high school student George W. Bush was the ultimate “Legacy” admission at Yale).

The consensus on the issue of equality is that all Americans have equal access to jobs, education and housing. Assuming that all start on a “level playing field,” we proclaim May the best man win. The winners are those who “try hardest,” applying the Protestant values of discipline and delayed gratification. Theologically speaking, they show by their success that they are among the elect of God — and exempt, by the way,  from the Christian obligation to help the poor.

Conflicts in the myth can emerge in terms of fairness vs. cheating. The notion of fairness promises that all who play by the rules will prosper. Cheating breaks the rules, but it also reveals our core, capitalist, individualist values. This explains our moral indignation about steroid abuse and rule violation in sports, one of the few areas in modern life, a ritual space perhaps, in which we claim to honor truth and fairness. But Eldridge Cleaver sawthat when we all secretly subscribe to…“every man for himself,” we really do perceive the weak as the prey of the strong.

But since this dark principle violates our democratic ideals… we force it underground… sports are geared to disguise, while affording expression to, the acting out in elaborate pageantry of the myth of the fittest in the process of surviving.

This is a deeply mythic story not necessarily because it is untrue, but because its pervasiveness and its unexamined assumptions produce a consensus reality. It is a container of multiple and inconsistent meanings; its very ambiguity gives it the energy that motivates us.

It allows the privileged to select either one of the two polar ideals to justify themselves. For example, segregation – “separate but equal” – was legal for sixty years. Libertarians invoke equality to reject affirmative action, calling it reverse discrimination. Assistance to minorities only encourages idleness (let us not forget that in Puritan theology there is no greater sin than laziness). Though the argument is false, it has potency because it contains some truth: since individuals have occasionally succeeded on their own, then, claim conservatives, everyone should be able to. If others cannot, then it is their own fault.

(Few libertarians, with their permissive attitudes around sexuality, would admit to being part of any organized religion, especially anything puritanical. But we are talking about “boy psychology,” the characteristic expression of uninitiated young men, where one’s rebelliousness is merely the mirror-opposite of the father’s authoritarianism.)

Conservatives attack progressive legislation by invoking the ideal of individualism, terrorizing working-class white males with the prospect of lost jobs and, paradoxically, suburban homogeneity. “Freedom” reverts to the right to accumulate and invest wealth without government regulation.

Marketing exploits both sides. As early as the 1830’s, De Tocqueville noticed the tendency toward conformity that resulted from an ideology of equality in a materialistic society. Now, we purchase identical sunglasses, cigarettes, leather jackets and motorcycles becausethey symbolize rebellion against conformity. Fashion is a simultaneous declaration of freedom and membership: we present a unique self to the world while looking like selected others. “Individualists” often look and think, for the most part, within narrow parameters.

Military recruiters offer romantic images of individualistic warriors while simultaneously emphasizing the joys of dissolving oneself into the group. They seduce young men with images of noble knights in heroic, solo combat, conquering dragons in video games so as to entrain them in the automatic responses of large, anonymous armies.

Each contains the seed of its shadow. The conservative ideal of shrinking government inevitably produces restrictions on personal freedom and a prison-industrial complex.

Here is the essence of our story: both the Puritan and the Opportunist perceived freedom in autonomy and material possessions rather than in social relatedness. Eventually, both figures became somewhat interchangeable, as history transformed the aesthetic, religious notion of predestination into Social Darwinism and the secular culture of consumerism.

The grand product of this mix was the American: enthusiastic, confident, practical, optimistic, extraverted, competitive and classless. But to those who endured his excesses, he was arrogant, childish, narcissistic and belligerent, the “Ugly American,” innocently trampling tradition, making fine distinctions between the elect and the damned, or gleefully crushing the weak with astonishing cruelty.

Generally, a unique if superficial balance has ruled; the land of freedom and equality remains profoundly attractive to the world. Philosopher Jacob Needleman suggests the American ideal poses the ancient question of “what man is as opposed to what he can become.”

And yet, we have a Bill of Rights but no Bill of Responsibilities. Radical critics find the source of this paradox of freedom and equality in unexamined definitions of just who is a member of the community, the polis. When only a small percentage of the population is admitted to that rarified atmosphere and all “Others” are excluded, then both the contradiction in the rhetoric and the sense of denial and innocence are heightened.

During wartime, we quickly forget the civil liberties that the nation was founded upon. Terrorized by the Other – or being told this – we almost unanimously ignore or condone the grossest violations of the right to dissent. As the mid-term elections of 2018 approach, and keeping in mind the history of various “October Surprises,” we would do well to recall that on September 10^th, 2001, G.W. Bush was the most unpopular president in our history, and that on the 12^th, he had a 90 percent approval rating.

This is Tocqueville’s tyranny of the majority. For all their emphasis on individual rights, Americans had put so much emphasis on equality rather than upon diversity that they became intolerant of the very freedom to be different. He wrote, “I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.”

Over time, unrestrained capitalism provokes responses such as the New Deal. Franklin D. Roosevelt reframed freedom: of speech, of religion, from want and from fear. But after FDR’s death, Harry Truman dropped the last two, replacing them with freedom of enterprise.

More fundamental to American myth than ideals of freedom or equality, the unrestrained quest for wealth trumps them both. And yet, as noted above, during the Eisenhower administration, the rich paid extremely high income taxes, because (until the Reagan years) the consensus of social compassion still existed. Still, even now, corporate welfare, federal subsidies and regressive taxation prop up big business and big agriculture; both they and their “small government” libertarian spokespersons would be horrified at the notion of a truly free market.

Yet the myth retains its pervasiveness, as middle class resistance to increased taxation on the super-wealthy indicates. Americans characteristically dream of becoming wealthy. Our sacred expectation of social mobility – the opportunity to move up into a higher social class – has been decreasing significantly for many years. But as recently as 2003, in a poll on the Bush tax-cut plan, 56% of the blue-collar men who correctly perceived it as favoring the rich still supported it.

The myth of the self-made man is so deeply engrained in our national psyche that our ignorance of the facts is equaled only by our optimism: in 2000 19% of respondents believed that they would “soon” be in the top one percent income bracket, and another 19% thought that they already were. And it certainly wouldn’t be difficult to find similar thinking among Trump supporters today.

Part Five

Whether they are uttered by Trump or by respectable media pundits, false equivalencies typically come into use in order to marginalize progressive alternatives when actual counter-arguments to them would be unconvincing. Here’s the logic:

A is the moderate opinion acceptable to those in power.

B is a progressive alternative, which gatekeepers ignore.

C is a loony, right wing conspiracy theory.

Eventually, public pressure forces the gatekeepers to address B.

When they can no longer ignore B, they attack it with ineffective criticism.

When criticism proves useless, they resort to FEs, equating it with C.

Another related issue is the FE of strictly non-violent movements for racial justice with a vicious white supremacist reaction, often expressed by police murders of unarmed people of color.

In 2017, reports the conservative magazine Fortune, firearm-related killings of police officers actually declined from 2016. And police are, according to the same statistics, more likely to kill themselves than be killed by a criminal. 2017 was actually one of the safest years in decades for on-duty police officers. It also marked the third year in a row in which police killed nearly 1,000 Americans.

How then do we explain the fact that in the first two months of that same year, lawmakers in 14 states introduced 32 “Blue Lives Matter” bills proposing that police be included in hate crime protections, except by understanding the phenomena of FEs? Or that in May 2018 an overwhelming majority of the House passed the “Protect and Serve Act of 2018,”which mandates harsher penalties for people who commit violence against police than for those who hurt civilians?  The Senate’s version of the bill went even further, making police a “protected class.” From whom? Black Lives Matter activists? Natasha Lennard observes the irony that now we have yet another category of victim, created by yet another FE:

The same ideological commitment to police-as-persecuted underpins FBI efforts to frame Black Lives Matter activists as potential “black identity extremists” — a designation, conjured from thin air, that claims anti-racist activism is breeding a terroristic targeting of cops…the Senate has denigrated the very notion of persecution. Treating cops as a persecuted minority equates a uniform — which you can take off — with skin color, religion, gender, or sexual orientation.

Think about that: these laws are (falsely of course) attempting to equate the degree of unchosen and natural melatonin in one’s skin with an occupation, a job, which one must decide to apply for. Now, an unarmed black teenager and a heavily armed white cop are “equally” potential victims.

And when the public impression is that white supremacists and anti-fascists are merely two faces of the same coin, it becomes easier for police to actually cooperate with the former so as to further marginalize the latter. For more on this, read here and here.

And here’s a beauty: CBS News accuses Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of being the “Sarah Palin of the Left.”

FEs have stalked the conversation about racial justice for decades. From the old distractor that “Africans enslaved each other, so therefore American slavery wasn’t so bad” to the deliberately confusing claims that “most Blacks are killed by other Blacks” to Trump’s recent crusade against “white genocide” in South Africa.

The same issues appear in international politics. For decades, media coverage of Israel and Palestine has been a litany of FEs, such as the claim that to be anti-Zionist is to be anti-Semitic.  Another is the “dueling narratives” story, which laments the impossibility of any long-term solution because there has always been “violence on both sides.”

Once that is assumed, the next FE is to make the absurd argument of equivalence between the degrees of power and the levels of violence committed by the two sides. But to do that, the gatekeepers must utterly ignore the Geneva Convention definition that collective punishment – precisely what Israel regularly inflicts upon the population of Gaza – is a war crime. 

The NYT has long set the tone for other media to follow:

“Violence on Both Sides: The NYT erases the Nakba.

NYT falsifies history of 1948, 1967.

Here, one of its columnists compares Jewish Voice for Peace with white nationalists.

Here, it allows an Israeli minister to call BDS activists “enemy soldiers” and compare them to Nazis:

Here, it marginalizes anti-Zionism by equating it with anti-Semitism:

And here, it repeatedly finds reasons to defend the ongoing war crimes in Gaza.

Partially because of the unrelenting barrage of FEs led by the Times, the FBI has relied on unvetted, right-wing blacklists to surveil and harass anti-Zionist activists, and Congress has been considering an “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act’ that would severely limit free speech.

The Israel / Palestine dispute has been a long-term issue on university campuses, and it has become another arena of FEs, since there is little coverage of the huge discrepancy in funding between the two sides,  or on the fact that many academics have been fired and/or blacklisted for their pro-Palestinian – yet anti-violence – positions, Including Norman Finkelstein and Steven Salaita.

Why has there been such a long-term barrage of pro-Israel propaganda and gatekeeping? Certainly, world opinion has long favored the Palestinians. And even in the U.S., polls have shown that Democrats, especially younger voters, have begun to stray from one of the most foundational stances of the American Empire, the notion that liberals must support Israel without question.  In a world where Israeli bombers destroy Palestinian children and snipers assassinate Palestinian medics inside the concentration camp known as Gaza, people are actually waking up and questioning the imperative to be PEPs (progressives except for Palestine).

Hence the perceived need for FEs. And since the media can choose what to emphasize and whom to equalize, the marginalization can also happen when they attack activists and writers for making what they determine to be FEs. Noam Chomsky, for example, receives very little attention, except for when he makes the mild observation that the U.S. as well as Russia has intervened in countless elections in other countries. And the NYT was horrified when journalist Gary Johnson dared to equate war crimes committed in Syria by both the Syrians and the U.S.

So what about the “9-11 Truthers,” (they, of course, don’t use that term, nor do people who question the vaccination orthodoxy call themselves “anti-vaxxers”), whom the gatekeepers have been equating with the looniest of Obama haters (Kenya, socialist, Muslim, etc) for years? The issue here is not about veracity, but about how the media marginalizes those who question the empire, and about how the passage of time gradually takes the energy out of the reactionary response.

In 2014 a group called Rethink911 put up large advertisements in eleven cities, including a massive billboard in New York’s Times Square. They were about Building Seven, the third high rise that fell on 9/11,  the one that had not been hit by the planes, and about which many were still unaware of. It was too big an event to ignore, so Time reported it with a typical headline: “Sept. 11 ‘Truthers’ Mark Anniversary.” It would seem, however, that thirteen years after the event, it was now permissible for the actual text of the article to be surprisingly objective and free of the usual ridicule. Six months later, writes Elizabeth Woodworth,

…20 stories in major papers have covered the September-December 2013 ReThink911 campaign – including Time Magazine, the NYT, the Ottawa Citizen, and BBC News Magazine…As time passes our memories of 9/11 becomes less painful and more open to public discussion. There is increasing skepticism in both the social and corporate media about the credibility of 9/11 as the foundation for the continuing global war on terror…seven congressmen, backed by impacted 9/11 families, are calling for the release of a secret 2002 congressional study that implicates Saudi Arabia in financing the alleged hijackers…A 2011 poll shows that 42% of Canadians believe US government information about 9/11 has been intentionally hidden from the public.

And this week, four more years later, the venerable gatekeeper Newsweek, with surprising objectivity, reviewed a new book that claimed “CIA and Saudi Arabia Conspired to keep 9/11 details secret.”

Again, I’m not trying to provoke a fight about the truth of the situation, but to examine how the gatekeepers do what they do, how they grab the “moderate center” and how they convince educated people to stop thinking, or at least until the passage of time softens the import of certain events. However, for those who have always questioned the official narrative of American innocence, I’ll offer yet another bit of argumentative logic. This one is attributed to Mahatma Ghandi:

First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win.

Part Six

Then we have the question of who is “fair and balanced,” as Fox News once described itself(significantly, they don’t any longer). Of course, the press and most journals of opinion have always claimed to offer opposing points of view in order to flesh out the finer points of an issue. This is what the free press is supposed to be about. In fact, beginning in 1949, the Fairness Doctrine of the Federal Communications Commission required this of all holders of broadcast licenses. Ronald Reagan revoked it in 1987 and it was removed from the Federal Register in 2011 by – yes – Barack Obama.

Now neither Fox (the house organ of the Republicans) nor MSNBC (ditto for the Democrats) is required to maintain the pretense of balanced reporting. But when we look at “serious” journals that do claim to do so, once again we find the common use of FEs. Was it a search for “fairness” that made The Atlantic and CNN give space and airtime to outright racists this year, or was it a cynical ratings-grab? Do their mild, “Russia-Gate” attacks on Trump that lack any criticism of the military-industrial complex or Israel justify the promotion of men who advocate killing reporters, advocate waterboarding and call Mexicans “peasants?” Should those attacks, justified or not, convince us that the career criminals of the FBI, CIA and the military are any more honorable than Trump himself?

Then we have the issue of the real media of the present and future, social media. Again, we see the use of FEs to drape the mantel of “outside the pale” on progressive writers by associating them with right-wingers. Caitlin Johnstone argues that when there is no meaningful separation between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship. In 2016, she reports,

…representatives of Facebook, Twitter, and Google were instructed on the US Senate floor that it is their responsibility to “quell information rebellions” and adopt a “mission statement” expressing their commitment to “prevent the fomenting of discord.” “Civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words,” the representatives were told. “America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.”

She also describes a typical “mainstream debate” in which

…Two mainstream parties, both backed to the hilt by the entirety of corporate media…arguing with each other over who is doing more to help advance cold war aggressions between two nuclear superpowers. They’re not arguing about whether or not the world should be destroyed, they’re arguing over who gets to push the button.

Robert Parry, a real and lamented journalist, wrote in late 2017:

…I cannot think of a single prominent figure in the mainstream news media who questions any claim – no matter how unlikely or absurd – that vilifies Russian President Vladimir Putin and his country…And, behind this disturbing anti-Russian uniformity are increasing assaults against independent and dissident journalists and news outlets outside the mainstream.

He mentions the Justice Department’s demand that the Russian news outlet, RT, register under the restrictive Foreign Agent Registration Act.

This attack on RT was rationalized by the Jan. 6 “Intelligence Community Assessment” that was, in reality, prepared by a handful of “hand-picked” analysts from the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency…However, if any real journalist actually read the Jan. 6 report, he or she would have discovered that RT’s sinister assault on American democracy included such offenses as holding a debate among third-party candidates who were excluded from the Republican-Democratic debates in 2012…reporting on the Occupy Wall Street protests and examining the environmental dangers from “fracking,” issues that also have been widely covered by the domestic American media. Apparently, whenever RT covers a newsworthy event – even if others have too – that constitutes “propaganda,” which must be throttled to protect the American people from the danger of seeing it…The U.S. government’s real beef with RT seems to be that it allows on air some Americans who have been blacklisted from the mainstream media – including highly credentialed former U.S. intelligence analysts and well-informed American journalists – because they have challenged various Official Narratives.

“…to protect the American people from the danger of seeing it.” Once again, the reasoning seems to be that citizens can no longer be trusted (by whom?) to ingest competing descriptions of the truth and make intelligent decisions. This seems like authoritarianism at worst and patronizing at best. But it really opens up into a profoundly mythic issue. In my book I repeatedly ask the rhetorical question, What are they so afraid of? In Chapter Ten I write,

…fear of the outsider is stronger than ever, and that fear was nurtured through the deliberate creation of an image. For four decades J. Edgar Hoover described those who threatened the status quo as “outside agitators,” regardless of their nationality. This almost poetic image of the Dionysian menace implies three assumptions about the polis. The first is innocence: evil comes from abroad. It implies that communist ideas couldn’t possibly originate here. Terrorism, quips Chomsky, is “what others do to us.”

A second assumption is weakness. Just as youths seemingly cannot resist drugs or sex, the polis can entertain only the mildest diversity of opinion. If allowed access to the children, communists would prevent discrimination of right from wrong and infect the national immune system with their “agit-prop.”

A third assumption about us is fairness. Pentheus, who would attack directly, throws fastballs, while Dionysus throws curves. The terrorist could be a friend or co-worker. He is urban, possibly Jewish. He infects us through trickery rather than through direct, “manly” confrontation. And since he refuses to play by our rules, we are justified in our righteous and overpowering vengeance.

Here is a broad summary of how the backlash against so-called Russian interference and “fake News” is shutting down real debate and giving the media the opportunity to marginalize progressive voices with the use of FEs.

And here is how the giants of social media are doing it. Sure, you have the right to be a bit skeptical, but these links are from sources that I have come to trust:

Google:

 Google is now in the business of controlling what viewers see. It “de-ranked” RT on its news feed, despite the fact that its own internal review system found that the news site had broken no rules.

The new algorithms have moved these websites from previously prominent positions to positions up to 50 search result pages from the first page, essentially removing them from the search results some searchers see. It appears that Google is using concerns over fake news as a cover to suppress opinions from socialist, antiwar or left-wing websites, including AlterNet, Truthdig, Global Research, Democracy Now, American Civil liberties Union, Wikileaks, Chris Hedges, Counterpunch and Consortiumnews (all of them, BTW, sites that I consider legitimate). The World Socialist Web Site, for example, reports that traffic coming in from web search is down 70 percent, and claims that In mid-April 2017, a Google search for “socialism vs. capitalism” brought back one of the site’s links on the first results page but, by August, that same search didn’t feature any of its links. The site said 145 of the top 150 search terms that had redirected people to the site in April were now devoid of its links.

World Socialist obtained statistical data estimating the decline of traffic generated by Google searches for 13 sites with substantial readerships:

* wsws.org fell by 67 percent
* alternet.org fell by 63 percent
* globalresearch.ca fell by 62 percent
* consortiumnews.com fell by 47 percent
* socialistworker.org fell by 47 percent
* mediamatters.org fell by 42 percent
* commondreams.org fell by 37 percent
* internationalviewpoint.org fell by 36 percent
* democracynow.org fell by 36 percent
* wikileaks.org fell by 30 percent
* truth-out.org fell by 25 percent
* counterpunch.org fell by 21 percent
* theintercept.com fell by 19 percent

By August of 2018, at least on my computer, it seemed that public pressure has led Google to relent – at least for now. C. J. Hopkins writes:

What’s happening isn’t censorship, technically, at least not in the majority of cases…This isn’t Czechoslovakia, after all. This is global capitalism, where the repression of dissent is a little more subtle. The point of Google “unpersoning” CounterPunch…is not to prevent them from publishing their work or otherwise render them invisible to readers. The goal is to delegitmize them, and thus decrease traffic to their websites and articles, and ultimately drive them out of business, if possible…Another objective of this non-censorship censorship is discouraging writers like myself from contributing to publications…(that) the corporatocracy deems “illegitimate.” Google unpersoning a writer like Hedges is a message to other non-ball-playing writers…“This could happen to you.”

This article goes deeper into the mess.

But when Trump accuses Google of “rigged” search results to showcase too many liberal media outlets and too few “Republic/Conservative (Sic) & Fair Media” sites, he makes it even easier for the company’s gatekeepers to use FE tactics against the left.

Paypal:

Paypal is also falsely equating non-violent anti-Zionist activism with anti-Semitic terrorism. It has refused to provide services to Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation and has shut down the accounts of major Palestine solidarity groups in France without providing an explanation. Why? Apparently because 20 human rights organizations were placed on a blacklist by Israeli authorities. Indeed, according to Ali Abunimah, Paypal has shown a willingness to censor journalists who criticize Israel:

An operative of Israel’s global censorship campaign has admitted to exaggerating claims of anti-Semitism in order to engineer crackdowns on supporters of Palestinian rights…In the latest instance, Benjamin Weinthal has apparently succeeded in persuading PayPal to close down the account of the French online publication Agence Media Palestine.

On the other end of the FE spectrum, many have pointed out that Paypal and other payment processors have repeatedly promised to stop helping white nationalists raise money online. But a year after the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, several openly racist groups still use mainstream payment providers to process credit card payments and crowdfund their efforts.

What about music, the universal language? Censoring of pro-Palestinian views has also happened at Apple Music and Youtube.

Facebook:

 Apparently, Facebook has been ‘deliberately targeting’ Palestinian accounts.  Glenn Greenwald describes cooperation between Facebook and Israeli officials:

The meetings…came after Israel threatened Facebook that its failure to voluntarily comply with Israeli deletion orders would result in the enactment of laws requiring Facebook to do so, upon pain of being severely fined or even blocked in the country…The predictable results of those meetings are now clear and well-documented. Ever since, Facebook has been on a censorship rampage against Palestinian activists who protest the decades-long, illegal Israeli occupation…Indeed, Israeli officials have been publicly boasting about how obedient Facebook is when it comes to Israeli censorship orders…Needless to say, Israelis have virtually free rein to post whatever they want about Palestinians. Calls by Israelis for the killing of Palestinians are commonplace on Facebook, and largely remain undisturbed.

It seems that FB has been dishonest in its public statements about the “anti-Zionist = anti-Semitism” FE. But FB’s mendacity has gone well beyond that issue. Having banned Infowars for thirty days (thirty days!), it went on to permanently shut down all manner of progressive accounts because they “…sought to inflame social and political tensions in the United States, and…their activity was similar (my italics) — and in some cases connected — to that of Russian accounts during the 2016 election.” Matt Tibbi writes:

Facebook was “helped” in its efforts to wipe out these dangerous memes by the Atlantic Council, on whose board you’ll find confidence-inspiring names like Henry Kissinger, former CIA chief Michael Hayden, former acting CIA head Michael Morell and former Bush-era Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff. (The latter is the guy who used to bring you the insane color-coded terror threat level system.)…As noted in Rolling Stone earlier this year, 70 percent of Americans get their news from just two sources, Facebook and Google. As that number rises, the power of just a few people to decide what information does and does not reach the public will amplify significantly.

Alternet (one of those sites experiencing lowered viewership) reports that FB has also approved conservative news outlet The Weekly Standard to partner in fact-checking “false news.” This partnership

…makes little sense given the outlet’s long history of making misleading claims, pushing extreme right-wing talking points, and publishing lies to bolster conservative arguments…Calling the magazine a “serial misinformer”, Media Matters cited the Weekly Standard’s role in pushing false and misleading claims about Obamacare, Hillary Clinton and other political stories.

It gets worse. Even as FB uses FEs to block legitimate progressive postings, many are accusing it of allowing real hate speech to remain. Indeed, in a new documentary, an investigative journalist went undercover as a FB moderator in Ireland. He reports that it lets pages from far-right fringe groups exceed the deletion threshold, and that those pages are “subject to different treatment in the same category as pages belonging to governments and news organizations.” The accusation undermines FB’s claims that it is actively trying to cut down on fake news and hate speech. The reporter says he was also instructed to ignore users who looked as if they were under 13 years of age, the legal minimum.

Well, these revelations certainly shouldn’t surprise students of the long-term, well-documented collusion between American media and the national security state. Social media are now bigger and more influential than newspapers, and the money involved (Cui bono – follow the money) is correspondingly greater. Nor should we be surprised when the NYT cheers on these efforts to censor alternative opinion through the use of FE algorithms.

Part Seven

But as always, my greater interest is in considering the mythological implications, because our American attitudes, our American prejudices, our American blindness and naiveté are determined by the unconscious ways in which we attend to our American myths. And to do that, we have to look at how the “left” also engages in FEs. Sorry, no Greek myths here.

Throughout almost all of American history, the witch-hunts and hysteria that crop up every generation have mobilized the right wing, especially including those males who could be manipulated into identifying as white rather than as working class.

Or at least until our generation. Perhaps it began with the fluoridation dispute in the 1950s. It picked up intensity with the JFK assassination and blossomed fully after 9-11, when many serious, good-hearted, influential progressives absolutely demonized some of their brethren who dared to articulate the latest “conspiracy theory.” Last year Tim Wise (www.timwise.org), a profoundly important activist and writer, exploded in maximal sarcasm:

So please, stay at home 24/7, insisting to yourself and all who will listen about how vaccinations are the cause of autism and how Tower 7 was brought down by Dick Cheney or whatever, and how hyper-oxygenation can cure HIV/AIDS (or at least it would, if HIV/AIDS really existed which it doesn’t of course), and how everything – yes everything – is a “false flag” because Alex Jones said so after skipping his meds for like a month. So there was no Sandy Hook shooting, and no 9/11, and no attack on the Pentagon and no shooting at the theatre in Aurora: all those folks who supposedly died are hanging out on an island like in “Lost” where they are fed and cared for by the NSA and CIA, along with those folks who faked the moon landing and the curvature of the Earth. Oh and while doing this…claim to be a progressive or leftist or radical. Because saying it makes it true!

Tim Wise is a good man who is justifiably angry and extremely articulate within his areas of expertise, racism and white privilege. And I’m not saying that he’s wrong (the broader issue, once again, is not about right and wrong; it’s about innocence and experience.) But look at the language of FE, how he lumps progressives who question certain dominant paradigms that he takes for granted together with severely right-wing loonies. In his mind they are all conspiracy theorists, and they deserve nothing but ridicule. And I’ve found that his opinions, and worse, his tone, are quite characteristic of opinion pieces I’ve seen on normally reliable websites such as Moveon.org and Alternet.

Ridicule is a tool of the gatekeepers. Now the above quote is way too far over the top to characterize “reasonable” (NYT, etc) opinion, but its intention is the same: to marginalize people rather than engage with them. When did sarcasm and ridicule ever change anyone’s mind? Is it even intended to be read by people who don’t agree with him?

Look at Tim’s assumptions: by using the language of the gatekeepers, he is demonizing other people, and in the world of polar opposites that he seems to have fallen into, either you are with him on every single issue or you are not to be trusted on any issue. Change the terminology just a little, and we are back in the language of the American frontier, where you are either among the elect inside the pale of the innocent community, or you represent the dark (ironic, considering Tim’s huge heart on the race issue) evil on the outside that is inscrutable: we just can’t understand why they hate us so. And in American myth, evil is so, well, evil that it must be utterly and permanently obliterated and removed from memory. There is no middle ground.

This is the language of a demythologized world, in which subtle nuance (supposedly something that progressives claim to understand, has been replaced by dualistic language. However, as I write in Chapter One of my book:

The Aramaic word spoken by Jesus and translated into Greek as diabolosand 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.

This is the language of Fox News.

                                                                       foxnewsblonds

And worse: they want him to sound shrill and intolerant. It makes their work that much easier. It assists in their broader intentions, to convince more and more of us to simply turn off to the cacophony of bitterness and ranting. Tim Wise is really much better than that.

The language of ridicule reveals how leftists are also engaging in FEs. Most of the progressive print and online voices that I read have got on board the “ridicule the anti-vaxxers” train, and in a very specific way. They have bought the gatekeeper line that actually lumps many legitimate anti-corporate, anti-military dissenters together with Tea Party loonies simply because of their views on vaccination.

This particular smear campaign has succeeded; progressives view the vaccination issue as just another left/right dispute, and so they no longer need to think about it. If they were experiencing anxiety over this issue (as we all do when our mythic thinking is called into question), now their anxiety has been reduced. But the myth of American innocence is inherently unstable. Like any other addiction (alcoholism, consumerism, fundamentalism, Marxism, free market libertarianism, workaholism and our greatest addiction of all, fear), it has very little nutritional capacity and must be constantly fed. But I say this issue is most certainly not about right and left.

And keep in mind that it was the CIA that coined the phrase, “conspiracy theorist,” and only when it perceived the need to marginalize those progressives who were questioning the official story of the Kennedy assassination.

Are you feeling manipulated, that you’ve read this far only to be dragged into the vaccination argument? Well, isn’t manipulation the real issue here? Can you at least entertain the possibility that for our entire history Americans – yes, all Americans – by the nature of our mythology, by the nature of our vast cultural shadow,  by the nature of our historic crimes against Africans and the indigenous people, have been particularly susceptible to hysterias and violent witch-hunts? That we have always been willing to suspend our sacred individualism and give our identity over to the spokespersons of centralized control in the desperate hope that it might push away the nightmares that they themselves have created?

Let’s make three things clear:

1 – To use the terms “anti-vaxxer,” “conspiracy theorist,” “assassination buff,” “9-11 Truther,” etc, is to begin the conversation from the position of the dominators. It is to concede to the colonialist, misogynist or white supremacist who establishes his superiority by determining the language: native, my dear girl, nigger.

2 – Things are always more complex than ideological purists or centrists would prefer. As in all political debates, there is a continuum among those who question the vaccination orthodoxy, from those who will not allow their children to receive vaccines under any circumstances, to those who want to space out the frequency of vaccination, to those who would allow the MMR treatment (read about it) if the components were given separately, to those who would allow any vaccines if the aluminum (read about it) were removed. These people are not monolithic, and every one of them that I know is a political progressive who hates Trump, votes Demo or Green, donates to good causes, marches for peace and has no interest in Alex Jones. So stop the damn FEs and try to be willing to listen, because:

3 – Accusations about the “war on science” are yet another form of FE, in which the gatekeepers lump those who question the vaccination orthodoxy in the same garbage bin of ignorance as climate deniers.  Most people who raise doubts about vaccination, not just the doctors and immunologists (read about them), have approached the issue with open minds and made well-informed decisions. I’m talking about the corruption of science. In a time when the great myths of western culture are collapsing, it follows that all of our institutions are collapsing, or at least falling fully under the sway of late capitalism. Can anyone deny that Big Pharma is one of the most corrupt of all? Can anyone deny that long before Trump’s deregulation crusade, both the FDA and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) were drowning in accusations of fraud and bad science? And coverups, as well.

I don’t want to get too far off topic, so if you are open to “rational debate,” please consider some of these links:

Why we can’t trust academic journals to tell the scientific truth.

Editor In Chief Of World’s Best Known Medical Journal: Half Of All The Literature Is False.

Fourteen per cent of scientists claim to know a scientist who has fabricated entire datasets, and 72% say they know one who has indulged in other questionable research practices.

Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.  

Study: half of the studies you read about in the news are wrong.  

At least 50% of life science research cannot be replicated.

And specifically on the subject of vaccination, its orthodoxy and its critics:

Did vaccines save humanity? 

The U.S. Vaccine Court has paid $3.7 billion in damages to families. 

The Misunderstood Theory of Herd Immunity. 

 MMR doctor wins High Court appeal.

The Lancet acknowledges that “disgraced” Dr. Andrew Wakefield is exonerated.

MSM Marginalizes CDC Whistleblower Story on Vaccine-Autism Coverup.

Drug companies donated millions to California lawmakers before vaccine debate.

National Vaccine Information Center.

Part Eight

Look, I won’t deny my strong opinions, and I invite conversations that don’t descend into ridicule. But I’ve only been focusing on vaccination because it’s so critical to understand how many progressives are allowing themselves to be diverted from important issues. “Russiagate” does exactly that. Here is the liberal logic:

A – The conventional wisdom is that the Russians hacked the 2016 election.

B – Trump says there was no collusion, etc.

C – Trump is bad.

D – Leftists assert that Trump won because of apathy, gerrymandering and voter suppression.

E – Therefore, leftists are all dupes of Putin, as bad as Trump.

When we stop questioning why liberals are allowed to marginalize leftists, it becomes easy to accept this drivel, from the WAPO: Poll: 60 percent disapprove of Trump, while clear majorities back Mueller and Sessions.

Now, not only are we happily hating on Trump, but we find a new meme injected into our spinning heads: the alleged savior, Mueller, is on the same side as the fascist Jeff Sessions, and we barely noticed.

Here’s a right-wing FE. This one requires cognitive dissonance:

A – Communists are bad and un-American.

B – Russia was communist.

C – Russia became capitalist 27 years ago.

D – Putin is bad.

E – Putin is Russian.

F – Therefore Putin is communist.

G – To believe F, one must ignore C (this is cognitive dissonance).

But my concerns go very far beyond this one issue. I am talking about a post-9/11 era in which our freedoms, including freedom of privacy and freedom of choice, have been disappearing gradually and almost without our notice. It is only our bred-in-the-bones sense of innocence that keeps us from noticing that the pot is boiling, that we are all being cooked; it is only our constantly manipulated fear of the Other that can still, reliably, distract us from far more important issues.

Both the left and the right (at least those with stock in Big Pharma) are probably already celebrating the gathering momentum to mandate vaccinations for all Americans, young or old. Perhaps you agree. But please spare me your argument about “personal freedoms” in which you compare “anti-vaxxers” to people who would ignore traffic signals and endanger everyone else in their community in their libertarian selfishness. Because I will respond: any way you parse it, in our quickening slide toward American Fascism, you are condoning yet another loss of freedom in yet another dispute where all of the money is on one side of the issue. Cui bono?

Let me repeat that: all of the money is on one side of the issue.

Think about it. Consider the significant political debates in our lifetimes or anyone else’s. Every single time – with the sole exception of the fight to unionize – the vast majority of money spent has been by the military-industrial complex, the churches, the lobbyists, the corporations seeking deregulation, the AMA, the NRA, Big Agriculture, Big Lumber, Big Mining, Big Chemical, Big Tobacco, Big Banks, Big Auto, Big Cancer Research, Big Oil, Big Fracking, Big Coal, Big Soda, Big Voter Suppression, Big Internet, Private Prisons, the anti-immigration industry. Even the “family values” debates: it was and remains the ultra-rich who have subsidized the segregationists, the Tea Party, the anti-union, anti-birth control, anti-abortion, anti-medical marijuana and anti-gay marriage movements.

All except for the vaccination dispute, which has a consumer protection movement begun by aggrieved parents and some libertarians on one side, and a trillion-dollar industry on the other hand, one that spends $150 million/year lobbying Congress and $5 billion/year on advertising, one that generates so much profit that it can annually absorb billion-dollar fines for corruption and bad science without scaring its stockholders.

And who supports this side? A legion of “Quackwatch”- type gatekeepers of dubious reputation and secretive funding – and a volunteer legion of Lefties armed with FEs. This includes the manager of KPFA, Berkeley’s Pacifica radio station, who last month abruptly cancelled the popular show “Guns and Butter” and deleted its sixteen years of archives. It also includes one of your and my favorite progressive commedians, John Oliver, using Trump himself as an example of a loony vaccine skeptic. Now that is professional FEing: Trump over there, along with those anti-vaxxers; us smart people over here.

I hope you’ve noticed that I am not advocating anything but simply trying to put things in perspective. If I’ve raised any doubts in your mind – or perhaps more important, if I’ve provoked a strong negative response – I’m hoping that at least you’ll open some of the above links, as well as your mind. Though I welcome a good argument, I avoid ideological absolutes. That is a language to which I am trying to offer an alternative, the language of mythological thinking. I am not talking about compromise. I’m trying to move from a dualistic world of “two” (polar opposites, right or wrong) to a world of “three” – holding the tension of those opposites, resisting the temptation to resolve that tension by believing only one side until something greater – a third element – appears. This is the essence of the Creative Imagination.

But I can’t avoid this one: there is simply no political conflict in which progressives should find themselves aligned so indisputably, so arrogantly, so unconsciously with the interests of Big Business, and indeed of one of the most corrupt of them all, Big Pharma. Forgive me, but I have to say this a third time: all of the money is on one side of the issue.

And let me say this again as well: it’s not about a war on science. It’s about how science is the religion of the secular world. It’s about becoming conscious of how late capitalism and the pathological drive for profits has so corrupted science that it would collude in poisoning three generations of children. It’s about the myth of the killing of the children. It’s about no longer referring to scientists as arbiters until they clean up their act and regain our trust. I’m talking about science that can prove it isn’t bought up by Big Business, science that can be replicated regularly.

This permission to demonize from the left may well be one of the greatest scams of all. They’ve got some of us shilling for them, on a very slippery slope. They’ve turned some us into FOX wannabes, more and more comfortable with their nasty, divisive language. And when we start using their language we are no longer speaking from our creative imagination, but from our paranoid imagination.

The present hysteria (whatever it is as you read this) will end soon, because they all do. That is the most characteristic aspect of our American predisposition to fall from fear into crusades. It’s not about the fear-du-jour; it’s about our willingness to go there.

Once the legislation mandating universal vaccination becomes law, will you or I be able to save ourselves (as at Salem, as during the Red Scare, as during McCarthyism and the bogus “war on terror,” as during the Mueller probe) by naming names? You can count on this: the next hysteria is already planned, and those who will profit from it expect to count on some of us to use false equivalencies in the service of marginalizing alternative thinking. When the call to join the next witch-hunt is sounded, will you have your pitchfork and torch ready?

Part One

In January 2013, Chuck Todd, chief White House correspondent for NBC, addressed a conference of professional vote-counters. His audience included sales reps for voting machine and software companies, as well as several state secretaries of state. Todd ridiculed critics of electronic election machines, saying that they must be paranoid to think that anyone would deliberately alter election results. Earlier that week he had tweeted: “The voting machine conspiracies belong in the same category as the Trump birther garbage.”

(It was a time of innocence, you might say, long before 2018, when almost all of the corporate media, including Todd himself, would regularly make allegations about Trump colluding with “the Russians” to “hack” election machines in 2016.)

 Just a few days later, throughout February of that year, readers of daily newspapers saw a series of very funny “Doonesbury” comic strips in which a consultant named Austin who works for “MyFacts” furnishes spurious “facts” on demand. In this panel he makes fun of right-wing conspiracies:

In the interest of fairness, perhaps, a later panel attacked “conspirators” on the left:

Austin:            This is MyFacts, Austin speaking.

Caller:             My phone is tapped.  So I can’t tell you my name.  But I’m looking for fresh evidence  that 9/11 was a government conspiracy.

Austin:            I’m sorry sir, but I’m showing our truther line has been discontinued.  Can I interest  you in another elaborate hoax?

Caller:             Who paid you off?  It was Cheney, wasn’t it?  Just nod.

Austin:            How about Bin Laden.  We carry irrefutable proof he’s still alive.

This was a type of humor that Doonesbury has excelled in for years, making fun of “everybody,” especially the most earnest among us. In 2009 one of his panels featured his liberal talk-show host Mark Slackmeyer interviewing a college professor:

Professor:      It’s quite remarkable, Mark…Americans believe in many things that can’t be verified. For instance, almost half of us believe in ghosts and 40% in alien                          abductions. And that availability to alternative reality is reflected in conspiracy                      theory. From truthism, which holds that Bush was behind 9/11, to Birthism. And, of            course, we still have many legacy fringe groups like JFK grassy knollers, the staged                moon landingists, etc.

Slackmeyer:   Professor, is there any counter to these powerful theorists?

Professor:      Not really, Mark. Only the reasonists.

Slackmeyer:   Reasonists?

Professor:      They believe in an evidence-based world, something called rationalism. But it’s a tiny group, not so influential.

What’s going on here? By including very widely held left-wing political opinions 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 as a corporate spokesperson disguised as a “commentator.”

This is the narrative of false equivalency, which instructs Americans that any notions differing from mainstream understandings of reality – no matter how popular – are equally worthless. Here’s the logic:

We define A as silly.

Silly is unacceptable.

We mention B next to A.

Therefore, B is silly and unacceptable.

Here’s another one:

Racism was once the law of the land.

Racism is now illegal.

Legally, whites and blacks have equal access to jobs and housing.

Therefore, there is no longer any need for anti-discrimination policies.

This kind of FE (I’ll be using the abbreviation throughout this essay) is often told by those people who were, as the saying goes, “born on third base, and think they had hit a triple.”

FEs tell us more about the subject (who is making the FE) than about the object (whom they are making it about). When FEs are told honestly and innocently (as opposed to, say, by a well-paid FOX News hack), they often imply a certain cognitive dissonance:

A – Trump is bad.

B – We dislike Trump.

C – Therefore, we are good, and we feel good about ourselves.

D – John McCain was a warmonger who voted with Trump 83% of the time.

E – But McCain disliked Trump.

F – Therefore, McCain was good. He was a “maverick.”

G – To convince ourselves of F, we must ignore D. (This is cognitive dissonance.)

H – Since McCain was good, he was like us.

I – Therefore, we feel even better about ourselves.

This is one way in which we perpetuate the myth of American Innocence.

There are countless websites and books devoted to narratives that marginalize those who question the dominant paradigms of the culture. They typically do this by offering lists of “loony” theories from the perspective of the “rational center.” In almost every case, such gatekeepers lump all of the questioners together. Then with patronizing, pseudo-psychology, they explore the unconscious motivations of conspiracy theorists, be they fascists or anarchists, Christians or Pagans, oligarchs or street people.

Such styles are well within one of two very old American traditions of gatekeeping, the purpose of which is to shore up the cracks in the myth of American innocence. One is to lie outright about American history. Here’s the logic:

A is a story that makes us feel good about ourselves. It reminds us of who we are.

There is no other story, no B.

Since A is the only story, we are justified in knowing who we are and feeling good     about ourselves.

It is the gatekeepers – religious, media and academic, who decide which stories we hear. As I wrote in a previous blog,

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 Jacksonnever 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. This is clearly true for journalists as well. Noam Chomsky has said that this 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. Despite the public stereotypes of rebellious students during the Viet Nam years, for example, it turns out that resistance to the draft varied inversely with income and educational levels.

The other tradition is to ridicule any political positions further out on the spectrum (left or right) often enough so as to deprive them of legitimacy and, by contrast, manufacture the legitimacy of the “center.” Here’s the logic:

A is too far out in one direction. It may be admirable, but it’s unrealistic or impractical.

B, similarly, is too far in the other direction – even if it is not admirable.

C lies in between them.

A and B should negotiate until they compromise at C.

Therefore, C is legitimate, practical, realistic and workable.

This, most politicians and activists tell us, is how things get done in the real world. Especially since the upheavals of the 1960s, countless books have extolled the innate wisdom of the great middle and the need for idealists to find common ground with their adversaries. It’s often very good advice.

But I’m not talking about people who see some good in each side of a debate, who play by the same rules and have comparable, idealistic visions of the common good. I’m talking about those spokespersons for that same corporate-consumerist, business-as-usual, consensual reality of American empire that the 60s called into question. I’m talking about people whose jobs depend on their knowing very well that allowing actual alternative thinking (socialist; anarchist; anti-imperialist; environmentalist; anti-consumerist; anti-policing; advocates for racial, healthcare, prison, gender, immigration and drug justice, etc.) into the public discourse and airwaves would threaten both that consensus and their own jobs. I’m talking about people who want us to forget about radical change because – they tell us – some of its adherents and some of their proposals are as laughably, preposterously unacceptable as are those on the other extreme.

Part Two

In the old days, reasonable, middle-class people heard the stories that tell us who we are by reading the reasonable, well-written giants of the press: the NYT, the WAPO, the New Yorker, the NYRB, etc, and from the major news broadcasters. The really intelligent people, of course, got their news and opinions from the smooth, reassuring voices of NPR. Now, social media are rapidly taking their places. But they are all functioning as gatekeepers to the commonly agreed upon sense of acceptable discourse. 

The use of the term “conspiracy theory” is one of the main ways in which they banish any legitimate criticism of those in power to the realm of the truly illegitimate. The intent is insidious, even if often sincere. The only position that reasonable people could hold is the only one that remains, C – the consensual center that ranges between “not as crazy as A” to “not as crazy as B.” When they hear it often enough, people hold to that center so as to reaffirm their sense of American Innocence.

Anyone can be a gatekeeper. All it takes is a public role, some media credibility and a willingness to marginalize an opinion to the left of your own by equating its “unreasonableness” with that of something truly loony to the right of you. Oddly enough, the fact that so many journalists and commentators have taken on this role is, I think, one of the major reasons why so many of us distrust the media. Trump, for his own reasons, is onto something here. Although he never was and never will be an authentic critic of centrist assumptions, he can read his angry white constituents well.

Here, Noam Chomsky discusses what actually makes mainstream media “mainstream.”

There are all sorts of filtering devices to get rid of people who are a pain in the neck and think independently…the educational system is very highly geared to rewarding conformity and obedience…which ends up with people who really honestly (they aren’t lying) internalize the framework of belief and attitudes of the surrounding power system in the society. The elite institutions like, say, Harvard and Princeton and the small upscale colleges, for example, are very much geared to socialization. If you go through a place like Harvard, most of what goes on there is teaching manners; how to behave like a member of the upper classes, how to think the right thoughts, and so on…you learn that there are certain things it’s not proper to say and there are certain thoughts that are not proper to have. That is the socialization role of elite institutions and if you don’t adapt to that, you’re usually out.

When you critique the media and you say, look, here is what Anthony Lewis or somebody else is writing, they get very angry. They say, quite correctly, “nobody ever tells me what to write. I write anything I like. All this business about pressures and constraints is nonsense because I’m never under any pressure.” Which is completely true, but the point is that they wouldn’t be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going say the right thing…

Centrists and liberals are not the only ones to use the phrase to de-legitimize ideas further out on the spectrum than they are comfortable with. Many progressives, for example, are disappointed with Chomsky himself, both for ridiculing the 9/11 Truth movement as well as for not questioning the “single gunman” narrative of the Kennedy assassination.

Offering FEs is not by any means the same as actually arguing against more progressive opinions than your own. Those who do this depend upon laziness and lack of critical thinking – and I’m not talking about the “under-educated” (who, as I mentioned in Part One, have always been more anti-war than middle-class people) but those who actually consider themselves well-informed by the major gatekeepers.

But when the majority of Americans actually do hold opinions on most issues, domestic and international, that are considerably to the left of both major parties – as has been the case for at least forty years – and when liberal politicians know full well both the weakness of their arguments against real progressives as well as the sources of their financial support – it is tempting to fall back on FE’s.

Certainly, most well-known journalists sincerely believe in the truth and value of the moderate, reasonable center. As Chomsky said, they wouldn’t have risen to their current positions if they didn’t. But with some, I’m just not sure. Something tells me that if Bill O’Reilly were offered enough money from some mythical progressive TV network, he’d suddenly become a raving leftist.

Raving – that’s our working modifier for those outside the pale.

We have to remain aware of the mythic implications here: Apollo is the god of fine arts, beauty, truth and dry, reasonable, cerebral discourse. By contrast, Dionysus, the archetypal “Other,” is ecstatic, raving, physical, wet, irrational, emotional and unreasonable.

Dionysus is the shadow 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. They know that if they can tar radicals with the Dionysian label, the middle class, terrified of the implications, will follow along.

To deliberately equate, for example, 9-11 skeptics (by calling them “truthers”) or those who question the Warren Report narrative of the Kennedy assassination with outright racists and paranoids who label Barack Obama as a Muslim, Kenya-born, socialist or cruelly claim that survivors of school shootings are “crisis actors” is not simply to delegitimize both; it is to imply that both are equally irrational and (in mythic terms) Dionysian. “We,” by contrast, are safely, acceptably Apollonian. Here’s the logic:

We laugh at the right-wing paranoids.

We repeatedly hear of left-wing criticisms in the same sentences as the paranoids.

We begin to laugh at the left-wing criticisms.

We feel better about ourselves.

BTW, as I write this (late August, 2018), I note that an Infowars host is suggesting that the hurricane bearing down upon Hawaii has been split in two by an energy beam shot from Antarctica, possibly by John Kerry. So what are we expected to think – what do the gatekeepers want us to think – when they mention professional (and extremely well-funded) lunacy like this in the same sentence as parents who point out that 97% of the population of western Europe drinks non-fluoridated water, and perhaps Americans might want to think about the issue?

As the myth of American Innocence continues to lose potency, we will see more and more of these attacks upon actual alternative perspectives.

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 had made the difficult, even terrifying transition from innocence to experience. And because of this, they were nobles. This is why the mythology of kingshipretains its power, and why modern culture has reduced it to celebrity worship.

 The word “noble” comes from the same root as gnosis, or knowledge. A noble is someone who knows who he or she is, not who he or she isn’t, that as the Hindu sage Ramana Maharshi said, There are no others.

Part Three

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 the pale risked being impaled on the sharp stakes of irrefutable “argument,” or worse.

Gatekeepers know what is expected of them, and they know each other very well. Here’s one of them (New York Times book reviewer Jacob Heilbrunn) praising another one, Jonathan Kay in 2011:

Inside the World of Conspiracy Theorists – “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.”

Notice how a NYT book reviewer (one of the very top levels of gatekeepers) subtly allowed his subject to do two things. First, to psychologize people, to reduce them to pitiful jokes, easily definable types acting out their midlife crises. And second, to include “investigative journalists” among the “cranks” – years before Trump would describe the Times itself as “failing” because it was so fake. And Kay’s 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. To do my own psychologizing, one might well wonder about the hidden motives of someone (and his editors) 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. Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels allegedly said, “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth” (or at least enough writers have repeated that charge for me to assume its veracity). 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.

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 – or should know – about government lies and media collusion around the invasion of Iraq, to take just one example. BTW, you might find this 2003 video of Robert Mueller (then FBI Director) testifying about Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” disturbing in the context of gatekeeping:

Long before Iraq, 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 back 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 utterly. We range far beyond notions of “good intentions” and “fair representation” when we hear arguments about the equivalency of access to the airwaves. Even primary gatekeepers such as the NYT (here) and The New Yorker (here) have admitted that long before the “Citizen’s United” Supreme Court decision, the Tea Party was created (in the tens of millions of dollars) by the Koch brothers and the tobacco industry. The “populist uprising” that “spontaneously” developed in 2009 and propelled Donald Trump into the White House would have been nothing but a minor conspirator’s convention without its massive, corporate subsidies.

At the Koch brothers’ level of influence, they can simply buy or create entire gatekeeping institutions, such as a libertarian “think tank” that labeled North Dakota as the “most free” state in the union even as it was attempting to ban abortion. Similarly, Rupert Murdoch bought The Wall Street Journal and dozens of other gatekeeper media outlets. And Jeff Bezos, who has contracted with the CIA, is now the proud owner of the venerable Washington Post, second only to the NYT as first gatekeeper of the nation.

The only way to argue that “left” and “right” have equal access to media is to set the bar so low as to marginalize any voices to the left of the Democratic National Committee. There is not and never was any equivalency. Still, there is little point in blaming the rich for wanting to maintain control. We mythologists should be far more interested in why so many Americans 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 – witness the ongoing, national hagiography of the warmonger John McCain – so many others have always opted out. This fact actually forces people like Sheldon Adelson, Betsy DeVoss, Murdoch and the Kochs to expend their fortunes trying to keep enough of us thinking within the pale – or to abandon the political engagement entirely, which serves the same purposes.

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 organize bake sales to raise the money to educate the public about global warming 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.

FEs played a major role in 2016. What did the media want – besides marginalizing Bernie Sanders – in an election that for months appeared to be one in which Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in? The media wanted business, and a close election would be good for business. We recall CBS chairman Les Moonves’ appraisal of the Trump phenomenon: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

So from that perspective, it made perfect sense to emphasize equivalences, rather than differences, between Clinton and Trump. Large numbers of Americans, of course, didn’t need to be reminded that the Democratic Party powers had done their own job of marginalizing Sanders, and that Clinton was highly unpopular among progressives, many of whom refused to hold their noses and vote for the lesser of two evils.

What actually turned the tide in the last weeks? Russians? Voter suppression and disenfranchisement? Hacking of voting machines? James Comey’s last-minute revelations about investigating Clinton? The argument goes on. But clearly, the media got the close election that it wanted, and presenting FEs was one of its methods. The great irony is that the media that Trump would come to attack as “fake” had actually created him, built up his image, diminished Clinton, propelled him into office and proceeded to nourish that image through many more months of FE’s

Regardless of what we think of Hillary Clinton, the tapes of Trump bragging of abusive behavior and allegations of sexual assault and the Clinton emails were both legitimate stories, but not equivalent in their import, as the media barrage claimed. The NYT even implied that Clinton supporters were equally responsible for violence at Trump rallies.

Lester Holt and Elaine Quijano used the term “Race Relations” Instead of “White Supremacy” while moderating the presidential and vice presidential debates. Holt spoke of “healing the divide” between the races, implying another simple equivalency. And the Times’ primary gatekeeper David Brooks, the voice of the reasonable center, attacked “political correctness,” casually equating racists and those who fight them:

But it’s not only racists who reduce people to a single identity. These days it’s the anti-racists, too. To raise money and mobilize people, advocates play up ethnic categories to an extreme degree.

Really? Was defining racists as racist equivalent to threatening violence against vulnerable populations?

Bias incidents on both sides have been reported. A student walking near a campus was threatened with being lit on fire because she wore a hijab. Other students were accused of being racist for supporting Mr.Trump…

Eric Alterman writes:

The only explanation I can muster for this embarrassment is The Times’unyielding commitment to false-equivalency narratives, the product of decades of conservative efforts to work the refs. The thinking seems to boil down to this: “We’re running an article about Trump supporters’ violence against immigrants, people of color, Muslims and Jews, so shouldn’t we also say something mean about liberals too? We wouldn’t want anyone to accuse us of liberal bias.” This has long been the modus operandi at virtually every establishment media institution, and its cost has been normalizing Trump and his assaults on our free press and democratic norms.

The perspective of the pro-Clinton, reasonable center was that Trump and Sanders were simply two sides of the same coin:

NPR: “5 Ways Bernie Sanders And Donald Trump Are More Alike Than You Think”

The Atlantic: “What Trump and Sanders Have in Common”

Huffington Post: “How Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump’s Campaigns Are Similar”

Guardian: “Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump Look Like Saviors to Voters Who Feel Left Out of the American Dream”

Washington Post: “This Is How Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump Are the Same Person”

And finally, for now,  this whopper, again from the WAPO: “The Obvious Trump Running Mate? Bernie Sanders, of Course.”

Part Four

Trump’s bellowing about fake news implies that the media lies about him and his policies. Well, of course they offer very selective versions of the news all the time. Newspapers have always been partisan, often quite openly. Only two or three generations ago, every major city in the U.S. (and still now, in most European, Asian and Latin American countries) had several dailies, with some clearly favoring the working class, even being proudly socialist, and others being the “papers of record” that fed carefully edited opinion masquerading as news news to the middle and upper classes. But even the working-class papers, if pro-union, often were nativist, racist and pro-war. And, with the media consolidation of the past fifty years – and willing cooperation with the national security establishment – (/) the differences have diminished further.

In this sense, I would argue that most American media have been “fake” for decades, consistently playing two alternating and contradictory roles. On the one hand, they terrorize us about the latest threats (fear of communism shifting smoothly to Islamophobia precisely when the Soviet Union collapsed). On the other, they assure us with Disneyesque sweetness and full-page consumer advertising that everything is quite all right. This is long-term crazy-making, or schizogenetic, behavior.  At the risk of being accused of being a gatekeeper myself, I’m noting a few useful links from sites that I trust:

— The Lie of the 21st Century: How Mainstream Media “Fake News” Led to the U.S. Invasion of Iraq

— 7 Reasons that the Corporate Media Is Pro-War

— The CIA and the Press: When the Washington Post Ran the CIA’s Propaganda Network

— The Major Purveyor of ‘Fake News’ is the CIA-Corporate Complex

— The Entire Mainstream Warmongering Media is Fake

There have been exceptions, but we can assume a basic rule: as far back as the war with Mexico in 1846 the major media and their gatekeepers have always lied to push the nation into war. Some have expressed regret, long after the fact, but that is the fact. But we’re talking about something new. Now we’re talking about the collapse of American myth in our time, and the intended effects of FEs.

In 2017, Harvard University established a large list of online publications that it tagged as “fake” and “false,” based primarily on the recommendations of a shadowy group called “PropOrNot” that blacklisted over 200 websites as agents or assets of the Russian state. The “Harvard Index” established a new normal, a guideline to colleges and universities, regarding what students and researchers should not trust or even read.

Consider the implications of those last three words. The cream of the crop, students at elite universities, are being told that they are so uninformed (un-formed), so untrustworthy, so impressionable, so utterly unable to study and form their own conclusions, that Mother Harvard, like the cultural guardians of McCarthyism, doesn’t even want them to be exposed to this stuff.

Apparently, Harvard’s gatekeepers established their list without reading or even consulting the contents of most of the alleged fake online publications. It was a massive and utterly unscientific attack upon virtually the entire spectrum of alternative media, including thousands of authors and dozens of news organizations which would now be categorized not only as unreliable but even as conspiracy theorists.

It was one of the most egregious examples of FE, listing (in my view) quite legitimate investigative researchers and sites in the same breathless list as Alex Jones and other rabidly misogynistic, white supremacist, anti-immigrant and outright Nazi publications. It had the authority of Harvard, it went out to thousands of schools, and it quite deliberately led readers to believe that nothing to the right or left of the major gatekeeping media should be consumed. The WAPO and other corporate media then cited this index repeatedly. It was circular logic as well: one of the fact-checking sources that Harvard used was the WAPO. Matt Taibbi writes:

The vast majority of reporters would have needed to see something a lot more concrete than a half-assed theoretical paper from such a dicey source before denouncing 200 news organizations as traitors.

FEs turn up in all kinds of public discourses, such as “competing victimhood.” A privileged group argues that another group shouldn’t complain or demand special attention from government because, they, the first group, had also been treated badly but had prospered nonetheless. For example, large numbers of Irish were brought to the New World as indentured servants. But claiming an “equality of suffering” between enslaved Africans and white Europeans has no other effect than to perpetuate white supremacy. Indeed, writes Liam Hogan, Trump supporters in North Carolina told a reporter for Time that “Irish slaves had it worse than African slaves.”

A trivial example, you might say. But it is not unrelated to a much more important one, the issue of electoral fraud and fake voters, which Trump raised immediately after the election, making the ludicrous claim that three-five million illegal voters had cost him the popular vote. It was, and continues to be, a smokescreen for the profoundly important reality of Republican voter suppression. But it fed directly into the bizarre condition that his supporters, despite their “victory,” still considered themselves to be victims of the deep state. By July of 2018, even ABC News was willing to report that states (mostly Republican) had purged 16 million voters in the three years prior to the election.

Some six million others, at least a third of them African-American, have been disenfranchised and banned entirely from voting, usually because they are ex-felons. This fact, along with voter suppression and hacking of voting machines (not by Russians but by Republican secretaries of state in Ohio and about 20 other states) far outweighs any other factors in the contemporary political situation. There is, of course, no evidence of millions of anti-Trump fake votes, but the repeated charges help to deflect public opinion from the actual situation, along with news of individuals caught up in the complexities of the situation: “Texas Woman Sentenced To 5 Years For Illegal Voting.”

Similarly, for a few years many centrists made a cottage industry of arguments that equated the origin, influence and popularity of the two “populist” movements: Occupy and the Tea Party. Typically, however, they ignored the vastly unequal treatment the two movements received from law enforcement, as well as the fact that the Tea Party had its own TV network that gave daily attention to its gatherings, no matter how small, and ignored much larger Occupy events. Most critically, they rarely mentioned the vast funding the Tea Party “grassroots insurgency” received from the Koch brothers and Big Tobacco. 

This type of FE has a long pedigree going back to the 1930s and 1940s, when centrist media equated the threats of fascism and communism in America in order to marginalize leftists in trade unions. It is inseparable from similar tactics the actual Nazis used in Germany, and the fake terror plots concocted by the FBI (yes, the FBI of James Comey and Robert Mueller).  When these FEs don’t have the intended fear mongering effect on the public, the next traditional step is the liberal use of agents provocateurs who, in countless examples, have converted peaceful, mass demonstrations into violent riots that justify even more violent police intervention.

And currently it centers on the issue of “free speech.” Trump doesn’t engage much in FEs, because the media – and now academia as well – do it for him, and because he plays the spokesperson for a deliberately indefinable, populist extreme that draws its energy by pretending to attack the establishment. The fact that his actual policies, like those of all his predecessors, consistently buttress that same establishment doesn’t matter. We are talking about rhetoric, not action.

He did utilize them after provoking and normalizing the violence In Charlottesville last year that left one anti-Nazi protester dead  and 19 others wounded, and then equating anti-racist demonstrators with right-wing provocateurs and Alt-right criminals.  His claim that there was both evil and “good people” on both sides was certainly an invitation to further abuses.

But to spread such nonsense, he needed help from the existence of something called the “Alt-left,” a term that progressives and leftists have never used to describe themselves. FOX created it, but the rest of the media ran with it, writes Adam Johnson:

As it turns out, there’s no way to suggest that unruly leftists are as bad as neo-Nazis without suggesting that neo-Nazis are no worse than unruly leftists…while coined by right-wing personalities such as Sean Hannity, the “alt-left” term quickly morphed into a catch-all smear employed by Clinton partisans and those charged with defending the more corporate, pro-war wing of the Democrats. It was a go-to smear online for The Nation’s Joan Walsh, Daily Beast’s Michael Weiss, Daily Kos and VoxMedia founder Markos Moulitsas, Observer and Time writer Nick Cohen, Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert, self-appointed Clinton spinmeister Tom Watson, MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid and Center for American Progress head Neera Tanden, among others. “In many ways, this alt-left matches the alt-right…in their economic populism and bullying tactics.” —Gil Troy (Time, 12/7/16) The term was similarly employed by historian Gil Troy in Time (12/6/16), Vanity Fair‘s James Wolcott (3/3/17) and Ray Suarez on NPR’s On the Media (6/12/17)…All these pundits and writers presumably thought equating leftists with Nazis (the logical implication of the “alt” prefix) was an easy way to score points and position themselves on the Reasonable Liberal Left. What they did instead was provide fodder for anyone on the right, looking to trivialize the threat of an emerging neo-Nazism, to “both sides” the problem out of existence.

Who would deny Americans the right to speak out? Certainly not the NYT. However, a study shows that its coverage of free speech on university campuses focuses on the plight of conservative students by a margin of 7-to-1.

11:00 A.M. – I leave Sebastopol in a good mood, after a wonderful poetry salon and a great breakfast with close friends. I have plenty of time to attend to today’s projects: get home, check the chickens, clean up, review the poems I might want to recite this evening during my KPFA interview about Rumi’s Caravan (www.rumiscaravan.com), meet another friend for coffee at 3:00, go to the Finnish Hall in Berkeley, park the car and leave posters for the Noah Project evening event, then walk up University Ave to the radio interview, then walk back to the Finnish Hall for singing with the Noah Project. Finally, get home to babysit the girls while Alex goes to pick Emily up at the airport. Traffic is slow, and I spend the drive going over my poems (first mistake).

12:00 P.M. – The car loses power on the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge and I drift over to the breakdown lane. I call 9-11. 

12:15 – The emergency driver shows up and pushes my car up the incline of the bridge and down to the large turn out near the East toll plaza. He tells me that now I can contact AAA and they will tow me where I need to go. It’s all good, except that now I have time to worry about what caused the engine to stop, and to observe the ominous “check engine” light.

12:30 – I call AAA. They tell me that a truck will be dispatched shortly. I marvel at the technologically enhanced privilege of possessing a smart phone with GPS and AAA membership.

12:50 – The AAA driver calls and tells me that he is not allowed to operate on the bridge! I have to call 9-11 / CHP back. I tell him that I’m not on the bridge, but on a large turnout with several parked construction vehicles and lots of room for the tow truck, next to a large, yellow storage container.  But no. Got to call 9-11.

12:55 – I call CHP and plead for help. The dispatcher relents and tells me that CHP will call AAA and give them permission to tow me from the spot. AAA sends me a text announcing that they’ve got me covered, that I can click a certain code on my phone to get more information. I do, and I hear a recording that I’ve called a wrong number. Twice, just to be sure.

It begins to occur to me that I am in neither of two jurisdictions, neither CHP nor AAA, in a parking area that is neither freeway nor not freeway, neither West Bay nor East Bay. I have been cast into a space between worlds. I’m on a bridge, for Chistsakes, a universal image of liminality. I’m ridiculously close to (yet separated by three lanes of fast traffic from) the toll plaza, the ritual entrance to the space between worlds, where one has to give three coins to the ferryman before entering the world of Hermes, god of travellers. I consider the bike accident I had a week ago. Have I been watching where I’ve been going? The metaphors are piling up like the recycled metal in the huge bin next to my car. It’s time to start writing this bizarre history down. I receive no further calls or texts. What to do? Recite more poems and gaze out at the bay.

1:45 – I call AAA for an update. Each time I do so I must endure a lengthy voice message system, followed by a recording: “We are experiencing a very busy day and your expected wait time to speak to an operator is 5-10 minutes”. When they finally answer, they know nothing about my situation and have no record of my previous call. CHP has not notified them. I have to re-start the whole conversation (and give them my 16-digit ID number yet again), telling them, once again, that I’m on the eastbound turnout, barely 100 yards from the toll plaza. They’ll call back with ETA. They send me another text with a link to a map and my position, which is described as at “Railroad Avenue” (a street somewhere near the bridge exit but not even close to where I am). What to do? Walk around, recite more poems.

2:30 – I call my friend and break our coffee date. I call AAA again, go through the whole frustrating procedure again. After another long wait they tell me that the truck is in San Rafael, heading toward me. I get a second text with another code link to another “wrong number” recording. Twice, just to be sure.

2:45 – I see a tow truck turning from the parking area between the east and west lanes (between worlds) fifty yards to the east of me and disappear eastward, away from me. I begin to wonder what other dates I might have to cancel.

3:10 – A tow driver calls me from a very noisy vehicle, asking if I’m at Railroad Avenue. The call breaks up. The web map indicates that both he and I are in the westbound lane. I return his call twice, leaving two messages but get no response. He answers my third call. I repeat all the specifics of my location. He says now he knows where I am.

3:15 – I call him again. He says he’ll be there in two minutes.

3:30 – He arrives. It’s the same tow truck that had passed fifty yards from me 45 minutes earlier. But I’m relieved. We’re making progress.

3:45 – We’re headed toward Oakland. Inbound Sunday traffic slows to a crawl immediately, even though we’re barely in Richmond. The crawl will last all the way past Berkeley. From the right-side seat, I gaze out at the bay, alternately cursing my life and giggling at the looniness of this unfolding drama.

4:00 – Someone cuts us off, forcing my driver to slam his brakes. We share stories of truck driving adventures, how all day long I used to, and he does, save other drivers from the consequences of their stupid driving. And they don’t even realize it.

4:15 – Approaching the 880 / 580 split, he’s still in the inside lane. I ask him if he knows where I need to bring the car. He says that he does. I remind him to stay on 580 East, not 880. He takes 880. We get off at Grand Ave. and go through West Oakland toward the Temescal neighborhood, where my mechanic is. No problem, except that now we’ve lost more time. I make notes about exactly what I need to accomplish when and if I get home: shower, collect Rumi’s Caravan posters, etc. And eat. I haven’t had lunch. Forget the chickens.

5:15 – We arrive. He unloads the car in my mechanic’s lot and then turns on my engine. Good news: I had run out of gas. Bad news: I’m an idiot, or at least reciting poems in my mind while driving had put me into a trance (again, between worlds), and not for the first time. He says goodbye, refusing my tip offer. Nice guy. It could have been different.

5:30 – I march double-time toward home, figuring that a Lyft ride wouldn’t save much time. I stop at a gas station looking for a fuel container, but they are out of them.

5:50 – I’m home, need to shower, etc (forget eating), borrow Alex’s car, get to the Finnish Hall and then on to KPFA (no way will I be walking) before 7:00. I drop off the posters and detour at a Mexican restaurant to pick up some pupusas to eat at the radio station. I see Kirstjen Nielsen there. Just kidding.

7:00-8:00 – I’m on the radio with 50 poems in my head. I get to do about five, but it’s a great conversation. I eat two bites of a cold pupusa, return to the Finnish Hall for the second half of the Noah Project event, sing my throat out and get home by 11:00. I’m back in my world, or at least a world that I vaguely recognize. The girls are asleep in the spare bedroom. Alex can go to the airport. I crash into my bed and sleep the sleep of those who review their whole day and all the options they could have chosen.

The good news: Indeed, my car had only been out of gas, and I got this story.

The bad news: I’m a fucking idiot.

The opportunity: Mea Culpa, I promise to do five “Hail Rumi’s” and forgive myself once again. As Yeats says,

I am content to follow to its source

Every event in action or in thought;

Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!

When such as I cast out remorse

So great a sweetness flows into the breast

We must laugh and we must sing,

We are blest by everything,

Everything we look upon is blest.

The lesson: Do I really have to say this? No poems unless someone else is driving! These things have too much power to multitask with. They, like the gods, are fickle, jealous and vindictive. Every time I tell one on stage, another asks, “Why not me?”

The invitation: Join us on July 14^th as Rumi’s Caravan returns to Oakland (http://www.rumiscaravan.com/events/), fall into your own trance, be inspired and experience the poetic conversation from the safety and comfort of your seats!

The third archetype we need to discuss is that of the Apocalypse. 

It is critical to this enquiry about rage in American life to remember that the myth of American innocence began to take form while Puritanism was still dominating all intellectual discourse and most politics in both Britain and North America. Then, the idea of “America” – and along with it, the narrative of regeneration through violence – was gestating even as religion appeared to be losing its grip on the modern mind, to be replaced by nationalism.

But from the point of indigenous people, both mass religion and nationalism are ideologies, vast systems that people construct to alleviate their alienation from the Earth and from their own souls.

Those old religious roots held fast in the underworld of modernism and put out strong “shoots” in our lifetime. Now, we are faced with the undeniable fact that Trump and the fascist police state that he threatens to enforce upon us is a direct result of the massive support he continues to receive from white, evangelical Christians. In addition to identifying with his insecurity, they support him because of their racial hatreds and fears.

Do you doubt that statement? All you need to do is check the contrasting voting patterns of black evangelical Christians.

But both groups share a fascination with the Apocalypse, and so do many of us who are attracted to the Warrior and King archetypes and their “boy psychology” versions.

A staggering percentage of Americans expect the world to end in Armageddon. In 2010, 41% of respondents said they expected Christ to return to Earth by 2050. A 2012 pollfound that over a fifth of Americans believed the end of the world will happen in their lifetime (compared to 6% in France and 8% in Great Britain).  Four years later, 15% said that since God controls the climate, people can’t be causing global warming, and 11% that since the end times are coming anyway, there’s no reason to worry about it.

Americans inherited a long and bloody tradition of apocalyptic madness from their European forebears, and, as I show in Chapter Seven of my book, made it an essential aspect of their national psyche, impacting several “Great Awakening” revivals and crusades against alcohol.  But it was also the emotional force – killing to bring on a better world – that drove the American Revolution, the genocide of the Native people and the mass slaughter of the Civil War and all our subsequent wars. Betsy Hartmann, author of The America Syndrome: Apocalypse, War, and Our Call to Greatness, writes:

Of all the intertwining reasons for our apocalyptic disposition, the one that stands out most starkly is our acceptance of the necessity and inevitability of war. In the same 2010 Pew survey, six out of ten Americans saw another world war as definite or probable by 2050. This expectation of war isn’t surprising, given that Americans’ apocalyptic images and beliefs are derived mainly from Christianity, especially the Book of Revelation at the end of the New Testament which, above all, is about the grotesque violence and crowning glories of war…This promise of a New Jerusalem for the elect, and the cataclysmic violence against people and nature necessary to achieve that goal, has made the Book of Revelation an ideological tool of conquest and empire from the Crusades onwards. You don’t have to be a Christian to be susceptible to John’s logic that the perfect end—the New Jerusalem—justifies the bloody means.

A recent article proposes that we are all living in a “United States of anxiety.” But Chapter Ten of my book, published eight years ago, argued that Americans have been twisted between the two poles of fear and denial for a very long time.

Nor do you have to be a Christian to be swept up by fantasies of the end of the world as we know it, as New Age fascination with the “Y2K” phenomena  and the 2012 “Mayan prophecies” indicates. The issue we need to fully understand is what the notions of “death” or “ending” mean in myth and to the psyche. As I wrote here:

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 literalist thinking (whether 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 potential new growth…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 celebrate 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 word “apocalypse” comes from a Greek root meaning to uncover, disclose, to lift the veil from what had been concealed. Here is the essence of the issue: “End times” is 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. And our indigenous souls understand that there is no initiation into a new state of being unless we fully accept the necessary death of what came before, what no longer serves us or our communities.

Barbara Ehrenreich recently rephrased Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward catastrophic annihilation.” She is a proud materialist and she was talking about her own inevitable death.

In our demythologized world the problem is that we no longer possess the tools to imagine inner, symbolic renewal, so we see literal images elsewhere. And we project our internal state onto the world, looking for the signs of world changes “out there.” Freud was literalizing this archetypal urge when he wrote about the “death instinct.”

It gets worse before it gets better. Several hundred years of literalization and loss of initiation rituals has limited us to a heritage in which the most psychologically damaged among us – and I would include in this population most of our mega-billionaires – can only objectify others. And they can only perceive those who deserve the symbolic death that they unconsciously desire in the Others of the world – people of color, women and gay people. For some of them, it seems to be even worse: in their mad obsession with denying climate change, do they not project their death wish upon the entire planet?

Is history cyclic? Perhaps the Paranoid and Predatory imaginations have merged once again, as they did during the crusades and the early colonial period. Or perhaps, like antibiotic-resistant bacteria, a new strain of reactionary has evolved: true believers in apocalyptic end, whose own ends justify any means. They are grandiose boy-men who subsidize murder not despite their faith but because of it. They see no ethical dilemmas in corruption and violence because their twisted mix of smug righteousness and social Darwinism assures them that their victims deserve their fate. Anyone who isn’t a hero is a victim, and all but the inner circle are now Other.

Again, I suggest: only a mythological perspective can make any sense of this. America’s rulers are not ignorant; they are fully aware of our human and environmental tragedies. The fathers no longer send only the young to be sacrificed; now they offer everything to the sky-gods. Whether or not we take their religious rhetoric literally, they are deliberately (if unconsciously) provoking both personal and global apocalypse.

Recall Pentheus, emerging from his collapsed palace, even more determined to confront (or to merge with) Dionysus. Thebes/America is a city of uninitiated men, fanatically devoted to the systematic destruction of their own children. When I was writing my book, a boy-king, who secretly longed for the symbolic death that might effect his transition to manhood, was leading this city. The entire world could almost feel it as a desperate, visceral prayer when, in June 2003, Bush, the self-appointed embodiment of American heroism, challenged the Iraqi resistance to “bring it on!”

Part Seven

We can risk psychoanalyzing the mega-wealthy. I think that on one level they really do hate themselves deeply. On another, they desperately desire renewal. And on still another level they are completely constrained by their literal thinking, their inability to think symbolically. They appear to believe that their only option is to maximize their power and privilege to call down the death of the small self upon the entire world. It could be different.

And the angry heroes who serve them? How can we re-imagine a world in which their anger is directed not at the easy targets that the right-wing presents to them, but toward the actual threats to a harmonious and sustainable future? How might we encourage the revival of the true archetype of the Warrior? Chapter Twelve of my book discusses “rituals of conflict”:

What if conflict itself had a completely different function from defending against, converting or eliminating the Other? Tribal people once believed that it existed to bring people together. We see vestiges of this in the Gaelic language. One cannot say, “I am angry at you,” but only, “There is anger between us.” This wisdom is present in the word competition (communally petitioning the gods). Engagement can refer either to martial or to marital affairs. Animosity, with its connections to animal, animate, animation andanima, derives from the Latin for “breath of life.” If we follow animosity to its archetypal source, we find the one breath we all share.

Greek myth provides a surprising image in the war god, Ares. Homer calls him “killer of men,” and he is “most hateful” To Zeus. But the Greeks saw him as an immortal god; so to us he is an image of the divine, and thus of the psyche.

Ares

This tells us first that Greek culture understood that martial values are fundamentally human, not to be demonized and certainly not to be ignored. Second, consider what it implies that Ares was taught to dance before he was taught the arts of war.

Third, he was Aphrodite’s lover. This most masculine god and this most feminine goddess birthed a daughter known as Harmonia (Harmony). Thus in pagan thinking the war god had a “harmonious” relationship with the feminine that balanced his destructiveness. There is sublime beauty in war, wrote Hillman, and there is conflict in love. Harmonia is the product of the Warrior in a balanced relationship with its complementary archetype, the Lover. Love and war beget harmony, as Psyche and Eros beget their daughter Voluptos, or voluptuousness.

Soldiers entering battle invoked Ares, asking for strength and courage. But they also called upon him to prevent unavoidable conflict from degenerating into uncontrollable violence, as in this 7th-century B.C.E. hymn:

Hear me, helper of mankind, dispenser of youth’s sweet courage, beam down…your gentle light on our lives…diminish that deceptive rush of my spirit, and restrain that shrill voice in my heart that provokes me to enter the chilling din of battle…let me linger in the safe laws of peace…

This poetry invites us to imagine a consciousness that loves conflict as a form of relationship, seeking restoration of harmony rather than domination. “Who would have imagined,” wrote Hillman, “that restraint is what Ares offers?”

An initiated warrior exhausts non-violent forms of persuasion (the realms of Athena and Hermes) before resorting to the most minimal level of violence. This is standard hero ideology, of course (the American Hero never strikes the first blow).

But here is the difference: the archetypal warrior sees violence as the failure of symbolic conflict. If he is forced into combat, he goes sadly. If he survives and returns, he grieves for all the dead, not just his compatriots, because he knows that his enemy was a part of himself. Even so, he may require deep and protracted immersion in the feminine waters of atonement before returning to normal life.

In primitive societies when violence ended, much ritual activity was intended to expiate guilt, including various kinds of ritual penance after killing. Often the returning warrior was considered sacredly polluted and had to undergo additional purification rituals. A Pima warrior withdrew from battle the moment he killed his opponent to begin his rites of purification. Any Papago man who had killed an enemy underwent a difficult, sixteen-day ordeal of purification before being readmitted to society.

Mythic Irish warriors had to be purified of their battle frenzy. After a great battle Cuchulain was still red-hot with war fury and remained extremely dangerous to his own people. The women solved the crisis by marching out naked to greet him. When the sight momentarily stunned him, men grabbed him and plunged him into a vat of icy water. His heat caused it – and a second vat – to evaporate and explode into steam. Only on the third dunking did he cool down enough; the city was saved.

The archetypal warrior stands vigilant, aware of his own dark potential and watching for external danger. In serving the Divine King of the psyche, he is charged with protecting boundaries. This doesn’t imply rigid armoring. He determines which outside elements to welcome and which are dangerous.

An example from biology is the immune system. The skin and lining of the small intestine are semi-permeable membranes that know what to allow inside (such as air and nutrients) and what to keep out (including microbes and toxins). When intruders cross the boundaries, certain white blood cells sound the alarm, others neutralize the invaders and still others curtail the immune response when the danger is over. Then the body creates anti-bodies to remember – memorialize (!) – the event and protect against future ones. The system discriminates between the two aspects of the Greek word xenos – stranger and guest. Similarly, in Irish myth the Fianna warriors  guarded the borders of the realm and asked all strangers: “Would you like a poem or a sword?”

Ares loves conflict, but he is first and foremost a protector. And remember, he comes from the Pagan world, not the Judeo-Christian tradition of the renunciate warrior-monk. He retains his amorous relationship to Aphrodite and has many consorts and children. He is comfortable in relationship.

But Christianity, despite its historic dynamism and belligerence, cast him out. Like Dionysus, he finds expression only in images of the Other. So from the pagan perspective, just as Aphrodite’s exile leads to pornography,  the absence of the war god causes literal violence that might otherwise be expressed symbolically.

Why, in the most competitive society in history, do “proper,” middle-class people avoid actual confrontation, restricting it to spectator sports? Perhaps we intuitively know that normal social interactions cannot contain conflict and prevent it from turning into literal violence; it simply isn’t safe. Our myth of redemption through violence polarizes us into one of the two most easily assumed stances: the path of denial and/or retreat, or the path of extermination. We inevitably resort to either fight or flight. And if we choose the former, we reflexively evoke our long heritage of total warfare, as we evolved it on the frontier. 

Indigenous people understood that ritual provides a third alternative: staying in relationship without being violent. It requires, however, that participants acknowledge the reality of the Other. Traditional West African Dagara married couples engage in conflict rituals every five days. Certain that there will be no physical violence, each person simultaneously vents all accumulated emotions. If necessary, the entire village witnesses and affirms this ritual. Long experience has shown them that conflict causes damage to the entire community if it is removed from a bounded ritual container and brought out into the profane openness of daily life.

A second example is the kecak dance performances of Bali that convert aggression into art. The entire male population of a village (including boys) may enact battle scenes from the Hindu epics, with neither physical harm nor easy resolution of light over dark. 

Another is the bertsolariak, the Basque poetry competitions, in which each participant improvises in accordance with a given meter, taking his cue from his rival’s poem.

Urban African-American culture abounds in the ritualized conversion of aggression into creativity. Examples include break dancing, poetry slams and “the dozens,” verbal jousting in which antagonists poetically insult each other’s mothers. Mythologist Lewis Hyde writes that the loser is “the player who breaks the form and starts a physical fight…who chooses a single side of the contradiction” between attachment and non-attachment to mother. To become a winner at this game (and remain non-violent), one learns to artfully hold the tension of the opposites.

Aphrodite’s sensual fury, said Hillman, is hardly different from that of Ares. In their union of sames rather than of opposites, passionate aesthetic engagement can restrain violence.Long-term discipline of an art – any art – tames hasty emotional expression and the urge for vengeance, but not its passion. Violence is beyond reason; what counters it must be equally unreasonable. “Imagine a civilization,” mused Hillman, “whose first line of defense is each citizen’s aesthetic investment in some cultural form.”

Mythopoetic men’s conferences have evolved effective conflict rituals that allow men to engage with each other on subjects as frightening as race and sex without either leaving or getting violent. In this context, safety means feeling secure enough within the ritual container to take risks. If men remain in this heat of confrontation long enough, they may get past anger to the underlying grief, to suffer together and to cleanse their souls.

Suffering together: Joshua Chamberlain was a general in the Union Army who recorded the awesome spectacle of Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9th, 1865:

Before us in proud humiliation stood…men whom neither toils and sufferings, nor the fact of death, nor disaster, nor hopelessness could bend from their resolve…thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us together as no other bond…On our part not a sound of trumpet more, nor roll of drum; not a cheer…but an awed stillness rather, and breath-holding, as if it were the passing of the dead!…How could we help falling on our knees, all of us together, and praying God to pity and forgive us all!

The same principle holds for both individuals and large groups. Tragic Drama could be the model for future conflict rituals, which might enact our greatest moral conflicts before the citizens and challenge them to hold the tension of the opposites without succumbing to the temptation of quick resolution. Such rituals could lead to a long-term reframing of the meaning of the hero/warrior. We might learn to value this archetype’s protective and healing capacity, including the power of non-violence. Questioning the myth of violent redemption would lead to considering that initiated masculinity has a great variety of expressions. Women might acknowledge that patriarchy is caused not by men but by the lack of initiated men. The roles of the military and the police could shift from controlling the Other to – artfully – protecting the borders of the realm. The entire military could become the Coast Guard, real Homeland Security.

Pentheus, no longer fearing his dark mirror-opposite, no longer needing to vent his self-hatred and his grief for never having been initiated, might just invite Dionysus into the city for a competition of dance and poetry, fueled by the deep wine of the Soul.

We conclude by returning to the question of the Apocalypse, so ardently desired by fundamentalist Christians, drunks, suicides and warmongers. But we recall that the word means “to lift the veil.” No one needs to die (or kill) to be reborn; one only needs to wake up, to see and to acknowledge what D. H. Lawrence saw:

…only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance
long difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.

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. As Victory Lee Schouten writes: Waking up groggy is still waking up.

Part Four

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand…Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different. – F. Scott Fitzgerald

We’ve tried to understand what motivates working-class hatred. Now when the wealthy engage in conservative politics,  they do so in a somewhat rational, if short-sighted, effort to maintain their own wealth and privilege. They do not perceive themselves as victims.

Or at least that used to be the case. For the past twenty years now, the United States has seen a relatively new phenomenon: individuals and families – the Kochs, the Mercers, the Waltons, the Uihleins, Sheldon Adelson, Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Bezos, Bernard Marcus, Paul Singer, Betsy DeVoss and other members of Donald Trump’s cabinet, among the 540 billionaires in the U.S. – who have absolutely dominated politics. These are the American olligarchs. 

The media, of course, never describe them as such, preferring to apply the term only to Russians, as if the mega-rich in America choose to remain above the fray and stay home counting their money. Here is another aspect of American myth: we really don’t hate the rich as people do in other countries, because we subscribe to bogus assumptions that we might someday join them. 

I’m not talking about your average, run-of-the-mill, arriviste, rich person with only one or two billion in assets. Some of these people have worked hard for their fortunes and remain somewhat insecure about their status in comparison with those who are much wealthier, and are still in the game of influencing politicians toward the goal of maximizing their wealth.

In the past several election cycles these people have donated inconceivably massive amounts of money to politicians. They give primarily to Republicans of course. But not always: Barack Obama collected more money from Wall Street than anyone before or since.

Certainly, some of this activity represents conventional quid pro pro investment. But at a certain point, materialist analysis fails us.

Of course, we ask cui bono – who profits?  But I’m talking about people who are so fabulously, inconceivably wealthy that simple calculations of wealth enhancement really don’t seem to be in play.

What motivates these people? Most of them are not fundamentalist Christians. They don’t seem to be angry about losing status relative to women and people of color as the rank-and-file Tea-Partiers are (even as the Kochs have sustained them financially for many years).

Ideology? The Kochs and the Mercers in particular, have been described as “libertarian purists,” who passionately hate government regulation with religious intensity, who really believe that their philosophies, if fully enacted, would transform the world and improve all our lives.

I suppose some of them are as mentally and certainly as morally unstable as Trump appears to be, since their wealth has insulated them from the consequences of their actions. I suppose it’s easy to subscribe to crazy ideologies that deny the facts of climate change – even when they have more information about it than we do – when you live on an estate, tended by a flock of servants. It’s easy – in an America that blames the poor for their own condition and reassures the wealthy that they are among the saved – to feel that you are entitled to your wealth simply because you have it, to be unaware of Balzac’s charge that “At the base of every great fortune there is a great crime.”

It may even be easy to convince yourself that you pulled yourself entirely up by your own bootstraps – that white privilege, huge inheritances, elite educations, bought politicians, massive government subsidies and tax credits had nothing to do with it. As Jim Hightower said of George Bush Sr., he was “born on third base and thought he had hit a triple.”

But psychoanalyzing such people doesn’t get us very far. We need to understand the myths that they embody. That’s easy enough with Trump supporters (sorry if you think I’m being too judgmental): the myth of innocence is collapsing as quickly as the economy, and along with it their privileged sense of masculine, productive, gun-toting, heroic, white supremacy. They are pissed, especially at you and me, whom they have been taught to perceive as having destroyed their world with our “liberal” values. And let's compartmentalize our compassion for a minute and acknowledge that large numbers of them are viciously, proudly racist (see my comparison above between white and black evangelicals). But I’m talking about the people who pay the bills for all the hate, the one percent of the one percent.

I’m trying to understand the myths that drive these people. It seems clear that they are enacting our national myths of innocence, exceptionalism and manifest destiny for us. But to go deeper we have look at three archetypes: the Warrior, the King and the Apocalypse. The Warrior serves the King, but they both have the potential of serving the Apocalypse. And we can’t really understand any of these themes without considering a fourth archetype that I’ve already been talking about: initiation.

Part Five

The racist, misogynist, rage-filled, working-class white male has long seen himself as embodying the American Hero narrative. But that hero is the toxic mimic of another, more mature archetypal figure. Jungians Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette envision a four-part masculine soul divided into the King (the image of order, blessing and fertility), Lover (relatedness and deep passion for life), Magician (awareness and insight) and Warrior (focused aggression and devotion to a cause). Each of these archetypes is divided into an immature, “boy psychology” image and a mature, initiated “man psychology.” 

In this demythologized world, we certainly should not be surprised to read that “…most men are fixated at an immature level of development.” This is what we mean by “boy psychology,” and from an indigenous perspective, it is the source of all our current problems. Simply put, America and all of its institutions have been ruled for a very long time by uninitiated boys in men’s bodies. See Chapter Five of my book for a detailed discussion of this issue.

The immature form of the Warrior in the modern world is what we know as the hero. This macho man overcompensates for his insecurities, either bragging of his potency or smoldering in silence. He is brittle and easily provoked.

At bottom, he is deeply wounded, but his grief has no outlet other than rage. And it is yet another source of that grief and rage that American culture offers him almost no way to access his natural affinity – what indigenous initiation rites might have recognized in him – for the Warrior archetype. To imagine this dilemma in somewhat positive terms: the Hero, in his soul of souls, wishes to be recognized as the Warrior.

The warrior’s courage and discipline are intended for service. He hones himself into “an efficient spiritual machine…to bear the unbearable” for the express purpose of serving a transpersonal goal, not his own ego and certainly not white supremacy, celebrities or capitalism. The hero may vanquish the beast. But if he doesn’t enact the third part of the initiation story, returning with a boon for his community, his heroism becomes pathological and he remains a boy.

And here is the connection between the immature, American Hero and the King he can only serve through rage and demonization of the Other; between the foot soldiers of the alt-right and the oligarchs who actually subsidize their hate.

In all functioning, indigenous mythologies, the archetypal Sacred King is in relationship – to the realm, and to the divine queen, who is The Earth. Together, they personify that cause or community, which is composed of the entirety of its inhabitants, human, animal, plant as well as the unseen spirits and ancestors.

But archetypes can force their way into our lives in astonishing and destructive ways. Such iconic figures as Adolf Hitler, Marilyn Monroe and David Koresh were all seized by archetypes. In Jungian terms, these historical persons became identified with the archetypes rather than being conduits for their energies. And to the extent that we lack awareness, we become possessed by the shadow of that archetype. The King has both an active and a passive shadow, his uninitiated, immature aspects.

The active pole is the Tyrant, who cannot and will not create anything or bless others. He is concerned only with power, control and self-aggrandizement. Instead of channeling or embodying the archetype of the King, he believes that he is the King, literally the center of the universe. He is inflated, narcissistic, grandiose and entitled and assumes that conventional moral restraints don’t apply to him. Curiously, since he has a scarcity mentality, he objectifies all others and exploits them for his own purposes.

Greek myth acknowledged the damage that powerful but uninitiated men could do: Grandiose King Erysichthon cut down a sacred oak. Demeter cursed him with insatiable hunger, throwing him into a frenzy of consumption. He ate everything and everyone in his kingdom, ultimately consuming himself. The king who couldn’t bless ended up destroying the realm.

The passive pole of the Shadow King – the Weakling – lies just below consciousness. In this manifestation, he is indecisive, depressed, incapable of leadership or blessing and of course, extremely insecure. Underneath every blustering Tyrant is a Weakling, and underneath every cowering Weakling is a Tyrant waiting to explode.

He must embody that transpersonal cause, or his own image, like that of Narcissus, will become that cause, and his followers will be, for a time, obsessed with his “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” Sooner or later, however, his great towers will unconsciously provoke the Dionysian Stranger who will puncture his grandiosity. And those towers will become targets, because his followers, angry at his inability to embody that Sacred King, will turn on him when he can no longer distract them with scapegoats to sacrifice. He knows this.

And this is the rage connection to his foot soldiers. Privilege is privilege, whether it derives from the illusion of racial superiority or from inconceivably massive wealth, because – like Dionysus himself – it leaks through the cracks of the ego and establishes itself in the core of one’s identity. But the shadow King is just as angry at his uninitiated condition as his followers are at theirs. Despite being at the center of the realm, emotionally he remains an outsider, and his followers, perceiving this, temporarily identify with him in their wounded state.

So any perceived threat to his authority and supremacy, his assumptions of entitlement (isn’t it curious that musicians are legally entitled to royalty payments?), no matter how minor, also threatens to puncture the bubble of his inflated grandiosity and release the grief and the rage at the core of his self, just as it does with them.

Donald Trump represents the logical extreme of uninitiated, man-boy rulers that has manifested progressively for centuries.  His charisma lies in the fact (or the brand) that he genuinely appears to be as insecure, unstable and fragile as his followers. And, except for his classless style, I see no reason to believe that he is any different in essence – in the entitled grandiosity – of those who are far wealthier than he is.

Married or not, such men are utterly disconnected from relationship with the feminine. Together, in their implied hatred for the Earth itself, they compose an entire class of shadow Kings. They embody a condition that Paul Shepard identified twenty years ago:

We may now be the possessors of the world’s flimsiest identity structure where history, masquerading as myth, authorizes men…to alter the world to match their regressive moods of omnipotence and insecurity.

We are talking about psychopaths and sociopaths, men who speak with reassuringly sincere voices yet are completely amoral. Studies indicate that many corporate CEOs are actual psychopaths, who

…have a profound lack of empathy…use other people callously and remorselessly for their own ends… pathological liars, master con artists, and heartless manipulators. Easily bored, they crave constant stimulation, so they seek thrills from real-life “games” they can win – and take pleasure from their power over other people.

We are also talking about how, beginning with Johnson, American Presidents began to take the “Commander-in-Chief” title quite literally and bypassed both Congress and their generals in deciding when to go to war. It was a new trend in which the nation has confused the two very separate archetypes of King and Warrior.

Of course, such men, well compensated as they are, merely work for the truly wealthy. But it seems natural to assume that it takes one to know one.

Perhaps we can understand men who sponsor torturers, climate deniers and drug smugglers (international drug trafficking has been controlled by the ultra-wealthy since the Opium Wars of the 19^th century) only by comparing them to the original conquistadores. These men, writes James Wilson, lived “an apparently insoluble compound” of greed, cruelty, deceit, opportunism – and an absolutely literal, legalistic, church-sanctioned piety that assured them of their own salvation.

This is the bizarre logic of the modern Calvinists, regardless of whether or not they are overtly religious. In our mythology, their (usually inherited) state of infinite entitlement indicates without doubt that they are already saved, so evil deeds are irrelevant to their salvation. Since the “chosen” are above morality, they have no morality. They have the potential to be infinitely good or infinitely evil.

But their psychology – their underlying insecurity, grief and rage – determines the moral direction in which they move, even as they convince themselves of their perfectly benign intentions. What, we might wonder, is more important: the huge donation for a new hospital or art museum, the tax write-off or the fact that it will be named for them? None of this began with Trump. What are we to make of a Supreme Court Justice – Antonin Scalia – who publicly stated that there is nothing unconstitutional about executing innocent people?

Part One

Who are the angry white males?

Sociologists tell us that the populations from which most reactionary activism arises are those who think they may be overtaken economically by groups below them in social class. Groups like the Ku Klux Klan have always been comprised mainly of lower-middle class men, not the poor. Similarly, most anti-abortion activists have been baby boomers who make less money than their parents.

But economics is only part of the picture. Myth – the narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves, and especially the stories about whom we are not – typically overrides the facts and provides the connection to the emotional energy, the rage, that often drives us. 

For their entire lives, white Americans have received mythic instruction through the gatekeepers of the media, schools and churches that regularly, daily and continuously re-affirm two main aspects of their identity:

1 – The Hero: the potency and competency of the free, lone individual (disconnected from relationship and feminine values) and his capacity for achievement, creativity, control, productivity and perpetual growth towards a future that will be better than the past.  He creates his own reality because all options are available to him as an American. I discuss the Hero at great length in Chapter Nine of my book. 

2 – The Other is the shadow of the Hero, and he has several incarnations. As the villain who is dedicated to defeating the hero, he is willing to utilize unethical and unfair means to achieve his aims. He represents evil, and he hates both the hero and his innocent community simply because of who they are. As the outsider, he is all that they are not: dirty, lazy, impulsive, impure, sexual and untrustworthy; he is dangerous because he is highly contagious and always threatens to corrupt  the community and infect it with his unchristian, even animalistic values. And as the Loser, he reminds the potential hero that – in this mythology – failure is also a choice.

This is how the sense of a solid self is formed in America. To identify in terms of what he thinks he is not is to claim the privilege of being accepted as a member of the innocent, well-meaning, Christian, masculine, upwardly-mobile, and most importantly, white citizenry. This means to know that one is not black, brown, yellow, red, gay, female or poor. Beginning in the late 17^th century, Americans uniquely confused social class with race. As I write in Chapter Seven of my book:

This new allegiance to whiteness eliminated class competition and provided a sub-class of poor whites to intimidate slaves and suppress rebellion…America’s primary model for class distinction (and class conflict) became relations between white planters and black slaves, rather than between rich and poor. The new system, writes (Theodore) Allen, insisted on “the social distinction between the poorest member of the oppressor group and any member, however propertied, of the oppressed group.”

And it provided the historical foundation for the American love affair with guns. 

Eventually, southern class discrimination merged with northern religious stereotyping. Since poverty equaled sinfulness (to the Puritan) and black equaled poor (to the Opportunist), then it became obvious that blackness equaled sin…scholars still wonder why a strong socialist movement never developed in America, as it did almost everywhere else. Characteristically, they rarely consider the overwhelming presence of the Other: no other nation combined irresistible myths of opportunity with rigid legal systems deliberately intended to divide natural allies…

No matter how impoverished a white, male American feels, he hears hundreds of subtle messages every day that divide him from the impure. Without racial privilege the concept of whiteness is meaningless. Often, Americans have had nothing to call their own except white privilege, yet they cling to it and support those whose coded rhetoric promises to maintain it.

Similarly, and despite the easy availability of guns (recall that Canadians have as many guns per capita as we do but don’t use them on each other), we cannot understand our unique willingness to go ballistic, to let loose the dogs of war, without fully contemplating why we are so angry all the time.

Most Americans have also been subject to three other subtle messages:

1 – For three to five generations, we have been bombarded with unrelenting, sexualized commercialism that has pre-determined both the nature of our goals and desires and also their essential unavailability. We feel constantly deprived because capitalism creates demand. Artificial scarcity of gratification assures the surplus energy that drives the fevers of production and conquest. To generate scarcity, it attaches sexual interest to inaccessible, nonexistent, or irrelevant objects. Thus, writes Phillip Slater, “…making his most plentiful resource scarce, (man) managed…to make most of his scarce ones plentiful.” Because of their valuation of radical individualism, Americans in particular have been tantalized by the carrot and stick temptations of the media that keep them striving for more symbols of success, at the expense of traditional social relationships.

This is part of a complex cultural experience of the sheer insanity of modern life that almost all of us share, yet rarely acknowledge. I make a much more detailed case of it here.

2 – Recently, the media has commonly speculated about the end of the American dream. But this is not anything new. Since the mid-1970s, in socio-economic terms, the efforts of most Americans, especially “millenials,” to achieve the material proof and evidence of both their potency and their membership in the in-group of the middle class have been failing.

The minority of families that have not fallen backward in the rat race have done so for two reasons. The first is two-income households. Indeed, the fact that women working in middle class service jobs now often make more money than their husbands contributes to falling male self-esteem (remember our Hero myth), which often converts into rage and substance abuse.

And, for the past forty years those same families have survived primarily by borrowing. The average household that carries credit card debt has a balance of $16,000. If we include mortgages, car payments and student loans, that household is paying up to $8,000 in interest each year.

And to make matters relatively worse for white people, the economy (not the economy sold to you by the media, but the actual world of meaningful work and satisfying consumption) has been shrinking at the same time that the Others – blacks, browns, gays, the disabled and especially women – have attempted to claim their places in the mainstream.

3 – Americans are deathly afraid of failure, because in economic terms our mythology offers only one alternative to the victorious Hero: the loser, or victim. In this world of radical individualism, those same gatekeepers have instructed us that failure – at any level – is our own fault. This is an unacknowledged but profoundly powerful aspect of our Puritan heritage. To fail economically is not simple failure but – in America – it is moral failure. Jerry Falwell, for a time, our best-known preacher, actually said, "This is America. If you're not a winner, it's your own fault." 

Surveys show that a large majority of Americans deeply believe that losers are bad and morally corrupt. We have internalized the shaming messages of many generations of white, Protestant Euro-Americans. Our mythology is intertwined with our religion, and they are both qualified by our profound ignorance. Seventy-five percent of us believe that Benjamin Franklin’s proverb “God helps those who help themselves” can be found in the Bible.

In Kindergarten everyone gets a sticker just for trying. But soon afterwards, most of us learn that under our unique form of religio-capitalism, it is a zero-sum world of very few winners and large swarms of losers, because in this mythic dead-end, one can only be a hero or a victim / loser. And the self-perceived loser will generally find only one of two ways out of this uniquely painful condition:

1 – A solution to his pain through collective, politically progressive action. But Americans, as I’ve shown, do this far less than in other nations. Union membership has fallen from 33% in 1945 to 11% now. This is a very complex story, but one factor is that trade unions in America have an extremely racist heritage. Another is the corruption of the ideals of the Democratic Party and the subsequent and severe drop in voting participation. Another is the attraction of fundamentalist religion. And we should not forget that the primary objectives of the corporate media and other mythic instructors is to distract Americans from identifying both the true spiritual and economic sources of their pain, and the actual social opportunities for addressing them.

2 – A solution to his pain through (more or less) culturally-approved individual behavior. For many of us, especially since the 1970s, such behaviors have included everything from substance abuse, consumer addictions, celebrity worship and extreme sports to the self-help movement and committed spiritual disciplines.

To be honest, however, we must admit that violence, especially righteous gun violence, has always been approved behavior when it is directed at the Other. For a minority, this has meant actual, personal violent behavior. For vastly far more, it has meant vicariously experiencing and approving violence perpetrated by the state, from a safe distance.

Part Two

The love of violence is so fundamental to the American psyche that we can easily trace it all the way back to the beginning. In 1636, a generation after landing in the New World and the same year that they founded Harvard College, New England Puritans massacred and burned 500-700 Native Americans known as the Pequots. As Bob Dylan would write 328 years later, they had “God on their side.” One of the perpetrators expressed no remorse, only praise for this God:

...It was a fearfull sight to see them (the natives) 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...

The British were not unique in their God-driven savagery. Seven years later and a bit to the south the Dutch massacred 120 Lanape Indians at Communipaw (in today's Jersey City), according to this witness:

Infants were torn from their mother's breasts, and hacked to pieces in the presence of their parents, and pieces thrown into the fire and in the water, and other sucklings, being bound to small [cradle]boards, were cut, stuck, and pierced, and miserably massacred in a manner to move a heart of stone. Some were thrown into the river, and when the fathers and mothers endeavored to save them, the soldiers would not let them come on land but made both parents and children drown...

Hatred – and joy – of this intensity expresses a privileged world view 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 enabled the My Lai massacre and dozens like it in Viet Nam. 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 in Iraq and Israeli massacres in Gaza. 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.”

We’ve all heard the statistics by now: 40% of American adults own 260 million legal and 25 million illegal firearms. We suffer 15,000 gun murders, 18,000 gun suicides and 1,500 “accidental” gun deaths per year. America’s adult murder rate is seven times higher and its teen murder rate twelve times higher than in Britain, France, Italy, Australia, Canada and Germany. These nations together have 20 million teenagers; in 1990 a total of 300 were murdered. That same year, of America’s 17 million teens, 3,000 were murdered, while thirty of Japan’s ten million teens were murdered, a rate one-fiftieth of ours. Glen Slater concludes that gun violence “keeps the national psyche in a holding pattern, preventing it from a more conscious encounter with more soul-wrenching issues.”

Some of this is about availability and the gun lobby. But we’re talking about rage, and the privilege of acting upon that rage (or ignoring it when others perpetrate it). Rage is about psychology, but belief systems are about mythology. Twenty-four percent of us – a far higher rate than in most countries – believe that “it is acceptable to use violence to get what we want.”

Of course, to maintain such complacency – and complicity – among the general population requires massive and continual government and media propaganda, which typically ensures huge support in the early stages of each foreign intervention. Eventually, our deeper impulse toward human solidarity arises, and our wars lose their popularity. The fact that the public predictably falls for the next set of lies about the next set of designated evildoers (told, as they are now, by the same pundits) seems to indicate a repetitive national pattern that we can only call addiction. 

Meanwhile, constant, massive, fictional death in film and TV reduces the emotional impact of actual death. By age eighteen, an American will have seen 18,000 virtual murders. “Harmless violence where no one gets hurt,” writes James Hillman, “breeds innocence…the innocent American is the violent American.”

And although the idea of American innocence should always bring us back to race, our mythic blinders can prevent us from seeing the obvious. Many writers have recently addressed the pathology behind the fact that men commit most murders.  But surprisingly few make the necessary leap to the deeper issue: the fact that white men commit the vast majority of mass murders, whether  on school campuses or in the 170 countries where the U.S. empire stations troops.

We can’t achieve any real insight without taking this background into account. We can’t speak of school shootings without also speaking of Rambo. We can’t speak about the money behind the NRA without speaking about depleted uranium bombs in Yemen. We can’t discuss the prisons that house – and breed – our killers without discussing the two million Palestinians housed in the outdoor prison known as Gaza.

Once we acknowledge the broader historical, religious and racial contexts, then we can bring in issues such as the firearms industry, the police (who actually do a shockingly large percentage the killing), the question of mental health, and the collapsing economy, with its parallel collapse of possibilities for the white, male working class.

Studies indicate that the likelihood of advancing in social class – the core fantasy of the American Dream – has decreased significantly since the 1980s. But to understand the mythic roots of the current epidemic of rage, it’s really useful to look back to 2003 and note that 56 % of those blue-collar men who correctly perceived George W. Bush’s tax cuts as favoring the rich still supported them.

The myth of the self-made man – the hero who succeeds without any community support, or who violently saves the innocent community and then leaves it – is as deeply engrained as our wild, naïve optimism and our ignorance of the facts. As late as the year 2000, 19 % of Americans believed they would “soon” be in the top one percent income bracket, and another 19 % thought they already were. Two-thirds expected to have to pay the estate tax one day (only two percent did, even before the recent tax bill that has drastically reduced even that tiny number). 

Sooner or later, the individual, non-political behaviors prove to be either unavailable or (though addictive) ultimately unsatisfying. And when our assumptions of social mobility are revealed as fiction, the hero encounters his opposite – the victim / loser – within himself, and we become what we really are (except for Nazi Germany), the most violent people in history. American crime is a natural by-product of our values, an alternative means of social mobility in a society where “anything goes” in the pursuit of success.

“America,” says Glen Slater, “has little imagination for loss and failure. It only knows how to move forward.” When we realize that such movement is blocked, we go ballistic. Then guns become the purest expression of controlling one’s fate. As such, they are “the dark epitome of the self-made way of life.”

White people in America may well have had permission to dream bigger dreams than other peoples. With great possibilities, however, come great risks. The gap between aspiration and reality – the lost dream – is also far higher here than anywhere else. When we don’t meet our expectations of success, when that 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, white, mass killer is an expression of social mobility gone bad.

Students of myth do not look at motivation – we don’t really care why Oedipus killed his father and married his mother. We look first at the facts of the story itself: this is what happened. Only after accepting the facts themselves do we ask why. So we ask, is mass violence culturally approved? And we have to answer, yes, it must be, since in this story, society insists on doing nothing to prevent it.

Or at least when whites, especially the police, are doing it.  But when armed Black Panthers  marched on Sacramento in 1967, it took only a few weeks for Governor Ronald Reagan to enact a strong gun control law.

As I wrote above, there is something about the hatred – and joy – of this intensity of violence that is characteristically American. Here is something like a corollary, a sub-rule of the myth of innocence: in this story, only white people are allowed to enact their rage without consequences.

All Others are forewarned: the display of your anger at anyone other than your own people will be severely punished. Senator Orrin Hatch explains, apparently without irony, how we perpetuate our sense of innocence: “Capital punishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life.”

Part Three 

In countless Hollywood versions of the “good war,” the American Hero, dedicated to his democratic ideals, dies fighting to the last man.  Isn’t he always the last one to die – just as one of his mirror opposites, the evil genius, equally dedicated to his criminal goals, also dies at the very end?  Don’t they each choose death over the alternative of being captured?

And what about the gunman (whether in old gangster films or on school campuses) dying in a blaze of police gunfire after he has committed his crimes, or the mass killer in Toronto in April, 2018 who dared the police to “Shoot me in the head”? This phenomenon is so widespread that analysts have called it “suicide by police.”

The broader subject of suicide brings us back to the “mental illness” issue that gun rights supporters use to deflect the question away from gun availability.

I am no psychologist, but any plumber can see that the rage, like leaking water, must go somewhere – either outwards, often as literal violence directed at others, or inwards, as depression or suicide. Or as rape.

Although we can never tell how much happens through suicide by cop or through deliberately unsafe driving, or deliberate but unconscious substance and medication abuse (especially among white, middle-aged men), at least 45,000 Americans commit suicide annually.  Half are by firearms. Men kill themselves 3 ½ times more often than women, and white males account for 7 of 10 suicides. Suicidal thoughts and attempts at suicide by teenagers are reported to have doubled between 2008 and 2015.  

Our characteristic American expectation of positive emotions and life-experiences makes feelings of sadness and despair more pathological in this culture than elsewhere. Christina Kotchemidova writes, “Since ‘cheerfulness’ and ‘depression’ are bound by opposition, the more one is normalized, the more negative the other will appear.”  

Depression is the shadow of our heroic, successful, progressive, American stance.  It has doubled since World War Two, with each generation showing higher rates than the last. Indeed, major depression diagnoses increased 33% between 2013 and 2016.Ten percent of us (6% of children) take antidepressants. Forty-one percent of young adults experience major depression, and nearly a third of them exhibit alcohol dependence by age thirty-two. Eighteen percent of college students take prescription psychological medications, and suicide is their second leading cause of death.

Most suicides, we can assume, take their own lives out of depression, despair, loneliness or internalized rage. But this is not an “either-or” world but a “both-and.” When we bring the mythological into the conversation, we have to acknowledge the broad topic of initiation and our demythologized world in which traditional communities and rituals, especially those of initiation, have long been lost.

At some level, we all really do know that the Hero must die so that an elder may be born. In some African tribes, adolescents were expected to demonstrate their sincerity by dancing at great length before the hut of the elders, pleading for initiation. They knew the consequences of not being admitted: remaining boys in the eyes of the community.

In a post-modern world that has elevated the productive, achieving, radically individualistic male to the status of demi-god who lords it over all the “losers,” such consequences, if inchoate, are even greater. Twenty-first century capitalism produces a vast surplus of un- and under-employable people, especially men, who understand very well that they have been permanently excluded from the initiatory group of the upwardly-mobile.

In 2004, four million American eighteen to thirty-four-year old men were unemployed, were not in school and lacked a degree beyond high school. Fourteen years later, in a culture that identifies boys as men only when they have disengaged from family and established independent households, fully one-third of them still live with their parents.

Not only are these young and not-so-young men unable to function productively anymore, they can also see that most job growth is now in areas (health care, food services, housekeeping, etc.) that either have been served traditionally by women or require high-tech educations.

Politically, it gets much worse: for at least two generations they have been deluged with right-wing talk radio and internet noise telling them that the source of their joblessness – and their pain – is affirmative action programs instituted by those same bi-coastal elites. It’s a very old story, and the personae have changed over the years. But its essence remains: you have been victimized by the Other.

Chapter Five of my book discusses the vast array of means by which we try to achieve the initiation into manhood that we desperately, if often unconsciously, desire:

As initiation rites have disappeared, so have the clear distinctions between life’s developmental stages. Consequently, adolescence in America seems to continue indefinitely. This is not to say that there are no initiations in modern life. The dizzying pace of change evokes liminality in everyone, and the psyche reacts to separation and loss as if initiations were underway. But we endure these transitions alone and unprotected by ritual and community. From childhood trauma to divorce and war, no one puts our suffering into a larger context or welcomes us home. This drains our capacity to express our purpose, and we live lifetimes of incomplete initiations.

Those unconscious means include fraternity initiations, substance abuse, tattooing and body piercing, midlife crises, fast cars, extreme sports and the pseudo-initiations of fundamentalism, hate groups, gangs and the military. What they all have in common is the desire to die to an old, no-longer-satisfying identity and be reborn into a new one.

Below the incapacitation of the alienated, depressed and increasingly angry white male lies that same desire. But with no real community of elders and no ability to experience his plight in symbolic terms, his only way out may be the literal, internalized expression of that rage as suicide.

Otherwise, the victim who cannot be a hero will search for villains or scapegoats. Some will do so with energy derived from their thwarted desire to play the hero, so they will organize collectively as victims, but with truly “heroic” enthusiasm.

This is right-wing activism: deeply committed, emotionally intense, sustained effort under the identification as victim – despite their unacknowledged white privilege – with their targets being precisely those categories (race, gender, immigration) whom they have been educated to perceive as questioning or contesting that privilege.

Hence, we have, and certainly not for the first time in our history, groups of relatively well-off people who actually perceive themselves to be the victims of people who have far less than they do. Only in America do millions of economically insecure white people serve the interests of the rich because to do so is to feel accepted among the elect and not "the Other."

This is the history of American politics, from Bacon’s Rebellion in the late 17^th century to the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and Populism, all the way to Ronald Reagan and Trump. As Lyndon Johnson said:

If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.

Part Four

Some very fine people on both sides. – D. Trump

The Parkland, Florida shootings have kindled a long-awaited national movement for gun control. USA Today asked: “What has been so different from all the other mass shootings over the years?” That phrase – all the other mass shootings – indicates another kind of normalization. But many Black, Red and Brown Americans have asked whether it took a massacre of primarily white students to promote the issue to permanent awareness. Violence perpetrated by agents of the State against people of color, they point out, is hundreds of years old. Enter any room with several African Americans, mention this new normal and watch them role their eyeballs.

Lately we’ve seen countless attempts to understand Trump supporters (those who first normalized him) as being motivated primarily by economic insecurity. There’s plenty of evidence, however, that the real issue, as always, was and is race. These may be honest attempts to see things from all angles. But they are subtle indications of white privilege, and they slide easily into more false equivalencies, yet another way in which the gatekeepers do their normalization work. Hsu writes:

…in the rush to be radically empathetic, and reckon with another’s disaffection, a different kind of normalization occurs: We validate an identity politics that is often rooted in denying other people’s right to the same…What we think of as normal shapes our field of vision; it tells a story of the world and its possibilities. Racism, sexism, and the other hatreds and phobias lately on display didn’t become normalized this year. They’ve always been normal—for some of us.

As I wrote in Chapter Seven of my book,

Freedom became a holy term that meant all things to all people. Liberty (from a Roman epithet for Dionysus, Liber) implies release – the return of the repressed – and liberation, in both its Marxist and Buddhist meanings. Americans struggled for a while with the difference between positive liberty (the power and resources to act to fulfill one’s own potential), and negative liberty (freedom from restraint, what one didn’thave to do). Eventually, the two forms of liberty birthed a monster: freedom became entitlement to do what one wants, regardless of the needs of the community, the power to achieve it and the privilege to take liberties with others (“to liberate” is military slang for looting). This interpretation of the pursuit of happiness led eventually to the liberties extended to non-human entities – corporations…The Enlightenment and the commercial revolution offered freedom without responsibility, but it had unexpected results, writes Historian John Hope Franklin. The passionate pursuit of liberty by some resulted in the “destruction of the rights of others to pursue the same ends…the freedom to destroy freedom.”

Domestic normalization of violence exactly mirrors the public’s acceptance of a permanent war economy and permanent war in the Middle East. There is a direct relationship between Parkland and Palestine. Only those of us who are still swimming in the pool of American innocence can think of this as new.

From the point of view of Black, Red and Brown Americans – the Others – the whole subject of the normalization of Trump is a small part of a much larger picture: the denial – by politicians, theologians, journalists, pundits and even psychologists – of our mad culture. But three years after the attacks on 9/11 that changed everything, at least for white people, the Black novelist Walter Mosely wrote, “I have never met an African-American who was surprised by the attack on the World Trade Center.”

Liberals, fondly (and innocently) remembering Barack Obama, have endured a year and a half quite justifiably horrified at the idea of Trump as president. This reaction, however, has birthed several other narratives, including the one claiming that “the Russians” hacked the election. Regardless of whether it is true or not,it has revived the oldest and nastiest of American traditions – the witch hunt, and this time from the “left.”

And it has served to distract millions from several much more influential factors in Hillary Clinton’s defeat. It has normalized her, her incompetent campaign, her warmongering history and (in case you haven’t noticed), the Democratic Party’s increased marginalization of its progressive wing. That marginalization has effectively supported the normalization of international violence. Daniel Lazare writes:

Rarely has war fever in Washington been deeper and more broad-based.  Everybody’s jumping on board – liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, human-rights advocates and neoconservatives. With the 2018 midterms fast approaching, it seems that the only choice voters will have is between a military conflict from column A and one from column B.  Which will it be – the clash with Putin that liberals are talking themselves into? Or the showdown with Iran that (John) Bolton has long advocated?…It’s a choice between cyanide and arsenic. One moment, Trump is threatening “Little Rocket Man” Kim Jong Un with “fire and fury” while, in the next, the New York Times is demanding that he take off the gloves with regard to the Kremlin. The title of a Times editorial on Friday, March 15, said it all: “Finally, Trump Has Something Bad to Say About Russia.”

Here, gatekeeping is inseparable from normalization. The voice of the calm, reasonable, liberal center is literally taunting a man who is almost universally acknowledged as unstable and insecure about his masculinity with not being aggressive enough against a nuclear power! And yet even the NYT, in a rare 2008 moment of actual objectivity,acknowledged the constant presence of war hawks in the media:

…a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the (G. W. Bush) administration’s wartime performance…members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times (my italics) on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues…

So: why normalize the abnormal? Clearly, many players, from the Kochs and Mercers to Big Finance and Big Pharma to the NRA and the military, were highly motivated to support Trump and have done quite well under his administration. But all of them had prospered under Obama, and they all would have done so under Hillary Clinton.

Perhaps those who had the most to gain, however, were the fundamentalists. Chancey De Vega writes:

In all, it is increasingly clear that with Trump as the figurehead and Vice President Mike Pence as the puppet-master, Christian evangelicals have successfully completed a soft coup in America.

Andrew Whitehead, co-author of a new study of this issue,writes that Trump is

…a tool used by the Christian God to make America Christian again. He can be dispensed with when he is no longer useful.

“Useful tool” is a another euphemism, this time for “useful idiot,” a term first allegedly coined by Lenin, who said in a very different context that capitalist dupes “will sell us the rope with which to hang them.” Such luminaries as Madeleine Albright, former CIA Directors Michael Morell and Michael Hayden and Steve Bannon have all applied the term to Trump. https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/trump-prayers.jpg?w=530&h=354 530w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/trump-prayers.jpg?w=150&h=100 150w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/trump-prayers.jpg?w=300&h=200 300w" sizes="(max-width: 265px) 100vw, 265px" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 4px 24px 12px 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline; float: left; background-xg-p: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;" height="177" width="265" /> But, to repeat, he has served all their agendas well. Only the fundamentalists would have failed to prosper under Clinton, so they win the prize for now.

But I must remind you that this essay is not really about politics, except to the extent that politics reflects mythology. Ultimately, the reason why the mainstream media have and will continue to normalize Trump is the same as why – eventually – they normalize every president.

Regardless of his documented crimes and personal failings, any man who assumes the presidency automatically takes on the public’s projection of the Sacred King (whether positive or negative), regardless of whether large numbers of us consider their elections to have been fraudulent. At the level of image, metaphor and deep narrative, these men are the nation because they embody it, and the nation must endure.

Why must the nation endure? In a demythologized world in which myth and ritual have declined, they are replaced by consumerism, fundamentalism, substance abuse – and nationalism, in which the individual identifies completely with the state, and is willing to sacrifice its young to its aims. No nation, no sacrifice, no individual.

For the sense of “nation,” with all its white privilege, economic disparities, imperial influence and permanent warfare, to endure, the media must continually try to shore up each new crack in the veneer of American innocence. So rehabilitating really terrible people is another function of the gatekeepers. Rebecca Gordon writes:

George W. Bush is hardly the first disgraced Republican president and war criminal to worm his way back into American esteem. Richard Nixon remains the leader in that department. He spent his later years being celebrated as an elder statesman…few even remembered that his was the first administration in which both the president and vice president resigned.

Ronald Reagan is now remembered by friend and foe alike as a kind, folksy president…When he died in June 2004, the New York Times was typical in the largely fawning obituary it ran, describing him as “the man who restored popular faith in the presidency and the American government.”

We respond to images, metaphors and narratives more than to logic. George Lakoff recallsReagan being interviewed by that same Lesley Stahl, who was attacking everything he was doing as President.

The next day, she got a call from Reagan’s chief of staff, saying, thank you for this wonderful interview. And she said, but I was attacking Reagan. He said, it didn’t matter, if you turned off the sound he looked wonderful…And this is the same thing with Trump. So if you have a station where people are constantly sitting around analyzing Trump, some attacking him, some defending him, etc., that’s normalization. When you negate something, you’re activating it.

Gordon continues:

Nixon had to wait many years for his rehabilitation and Reagan’s was largely posthumous. At a vigorous 71, however, Bush seems to be slipping effortlessly back onto the national stage only nine years after leaving office essentially in disgrace…Articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and even the Guardian eagerly reported Bush’s implicit criticisms of the president as a hopeful sign of resistance to Trumpism from the “responsible” Republican right.

The New Narrative: If the contrast with Trump now informs us that these men were not so evil, then it becomes easier for the whole nation to sink back into its default mode of innocence. Maybe, we tell ourselves, maybe we aren’t so terrible. And Trump in turn has normalized – given permission to – some of the darkest aspects of human nature to show themselves to us.

In a March 2018 poll, Trump’s popularity increased by seven points, even before attacking Syria. To paraphrase Franklin D. Roosevelt, he may be an SOB, but now he’s our SOB.

Part Three

A Partial Timeline of Normalization

I really did have the feeling that the sense of gravity, and how big the problems are — it was sinking in, washing over him…I think he wanted the public to know that he understood that he had to shift gears and pay attention to the responsibilities now. – Leslie Stahl, 11/13/16

– 9/23/15: Trump appeared on Stephen Colbert’s very first CBS show. Colbert had cruelly satirized Trump long before the interview and has made a living doing so five nights a week ever since. https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/ewerqfno9ngkksodsejo.jpg?w=596&h=336 596w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/ewerqfno9ngkksodsejo.jpg?w=150&h=84 150w" sizes="(max-width: 298px) 100vw, 298px" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 4px 24px 12px 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline; float: left; background-xg-p: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;" height="168" width="298" /> In taking a time out to engage in friendly banter with him, he was showing us that Trump was not so scary after all. In behaving well, Trump reinforced the new message.

– 11/07/2015: One year before the election, Trump (not for the first time) hosted Saturday Night Live.  The opening monologue featured him making fun of his own clownish persona as he stood between two Trump impersonators. The implication was that “it’s all in good fun.” More importantly, it reminded everyone that in this new world politics is actually indistinguishable from entertainment.

– 2/29/16: Cui Bono? Follow the money. Well into the primary season, CBS President Les Moonves predicted that Trump would be receiving literally billions in free publicity and acknowledged a grosser form of normalization:

Moonves called the campaign for president a “circus” full of “bomb throwing,” and he hopes it continues…”Most of the ads are not about issues. They’re sort of like the debates…Man, who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now?…The money’s rolling in and this is fun…I’ve never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.”

We can read his statement as an opening into mystery. I use this word deliberately because Moonves was acknowledging one half of something quite extraordinary. He was admitting – bragging, even – that the news media are first and foremost a business. And in selling its consumers – you and I – to its advertisers, it generates huge profits for its stockholders. This is the main reason why it exists.

His statement appeared at the beginning of the primary season, so we have no idea if he knew that Trump would win the nomination, let alone the general election. But from the perspective of this business function of media, and from his fiduciary duty to those stockholders, he certainly would have wanted Trump to win. Indeed, for over two years since his statement, CBS and all other major media (except for Fox of course) have feasted on the 24/7 tweet storms, insults, lies and staff scandals that define this president. It’s been a perfect revenue storm.

But “mystery” requires two sides that invite the possibility of a third. The second half of this mystery is the normalization process that had begun a year before his statement and has continued into the present. Even as the media have been nearly unanimous in demonizing Trump, especially with the unending Russiagate accusations (a new Cold War has also been great for ratings), it has gradually welcomed this nouveau riche poseur into the pale.

Around this time, Alec Baldwin began impersonating Trump on Saturday Night Live.

– 9/9/16: The second presidential debate. Republicans had begun to back away from Trump after news broke of the “Access Hollywood” tape. But Trump placed women in the audience who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault. Liberal critics pointed out that this was pure political theater, but many of them had ignored the accusations against Clinton back in the 1990s, and Trump’s people knew this. These complaints, writes Spiliakos, “were furious and self-righteous, but they were also a confession. Liberals didn’t say that Bill Clinton was innocent, whereas Trump was guilty.”

Later, Michael Wolff would write, “A close Trump friend who was also a good Bill Clinton friend https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/download.jpg?w=150&h=81 150w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/download.jpg?w=300&h=163 300w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/download.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 386px) 100vw, 386px" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 4px 0px 12px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline; float: right; background-xg-p: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;" height="209" width="386" /> found them eerily similar—except that Clinton had a respectable front and Trump did not.” Matthew Yglesiasdescribed this attitude:

We normalized Trump when we overlooked the accusations against Bill Clinton. We didn’t normalize lying when we elected a president who fibbed about whether his steak company was still in business. We normalized lying when we decided that perjury and obstruction of justice were not high crimes when committed by a popular president.

This writer was being too kind to journalists, who, decades before during the Watergate scandal, had said nothing when Richard Nixon denied being a “crook.”

– 9/15/16: NPR editorial director Michael Oreskes defended his news organization’s refusal to use the word “liar,” asserting that it constituted “an angry tone” of “editorializing” that “confirms opinions.”

– 11/08/16: Hillary Clinton’s concession speech could have been a warning about an ugly future and a call to immediate resistance, as such speeches often are in Latin America. Instead, she hoped that Trump would “be a successful president for all Americans” who would defend “the rule of law…We owe him an open mind and a chance to lead.” To not complain about voter suppression, computer fraud or FBI meddling, to take the high road and be a good loser to one who’d promised to contest the results if he lost, who’d called her a liar, stalked her onstage and threatened to jail her was to normalize, to give the Establishment’s initial stamp of approval.

– 11/13/16: Five days later, Trump appeared for a TV interview on the venerable 60 Minutes show. Carlos Maza writes that this was

…a master class in normalizing a dangerous demagogue – inviting…Trump to reintroduce himself as a reasonable politician…asking softball questions, fixating on Trump’s personal feelings about becoming president, and repeatedly minimizing Trump’s most dangerous promises as mere campaign talk…at the expense of more serious questions about what he actually plans to do as president…They also came at the expense of questions about ongoing controversies, lawsuits, and conflicts of interest surrounding the president-elect…

– 3/1/17: Less than an hour after Trump addressed a joint session of Congress and honored the widow of a slain NAVY Seal, Van Jones claimed on CNN that “He became President of the United States in that moment, period.”

I once had great respect for Van Jones. He made his reputation as a social progressive. But he is now a member, even if the most liberal, of the punditry. And, let’s be clear about this, one of the duties of every pundit is to normalize Trump even as he appears to be criticizing him. Hundreds of thousands of innocent liberals watched their main man on TV (outside of Stephen Colbert), a black activist, describe a schmaltzy, nationalistic, made-for-TV ceremony as “one of the most extraordinary moments you have ever seen in American politics.”

– 4/6/17: Trump reassured the Deep State, and the media responded in kind. The Syrians had allegedly used chemical weapons on a rebel neighborhood. After viewing the photos of those “beautiful babies, ” Trump directed the military to obliterate an empty Syrian airstrip with some sixty cruise missiles (cost: $1.41 million apiece) and then drop a $300 million bomb on some caves in Afghanistan. Out of 47 major editorials, only one opposedthis wasteful and pointless gesture.

MSNBC’s Brian Williams quoted Leonard Cohen and raved about “the beauty of our fearsome armaments.” Fareed Zakaria offered an eloquent and predictable summation of the myth of American innocence:

I think Donald Trump became president of the United States last night…for the first time really as president, he talked about international norms, international rules, about America’s role in enforcing justice in the world.

We note that this endorsement of the new guy was strictly in terms of Trump’s willingness to (safely, from a long distance) project the phallic symbols of American machismo, to use force. The draft-dodger was now a real man. Cheap (if not inexpensive) as the act was, Zakaria’s statement was situated in an immensely old tradition of pseudo-initiations through violence.

Twenty-eight years before, the NYT had praised George H. W. Bush for attacking Panama (killing 5,000 people in the process). Bush had succeeded in a “Presidential Rite of Passage” by being willing to shed blood.

And it wasn’t just the US press and the corporate-owned US political establishment, writes C. J. Hopkins:

The rest of the global capitalist empire (Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the European Council, Spain, Italy, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, et al.) were quick to cheer Trump’s transformation into a grown-up, moderate, more or less rational, or at least obedient, globalist puppet.

Any lingering fantasies held by either the military-industrial complex or certain anti-war types that Trump might actually be a loose cannon (in the good way) and change any long-term American imperial patterns were put to rest. And it was great for ratings.

– 4/27/17: The Comedy Central network premiered The President Show, which featured Anthony Atamanuik as a bumbling, bragging, lying, insulting, sex-obsessed, incompetent, childlike – and ultimately adorable – Trump.

– 5/3/17: The NYT employed classic false equivalencies to downplay the public’s growing sense that this man is deranged at best and dangerous at worst. This typical puff piece never mentioned climate change, immigration, deportation, Muslims, Latinos, African-Americans, racism, abortion, LGBTs, Yemen or the Mueller investigation and ended with the implication that Trump could still yet become a “near great president.”

– 2/11/18: The Showtime network debuted Our Cartoon President, which joined SNLand The President Show to make a troika of well-meaning satires which inevitably degenerated into situation comedies with Trump as an unlikable yet harmless protagonist.

https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/lw9o64im_400x400.jpg?w=312&h=312 312w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/lw9o64im_400x400.jpg?w=150&h=150 150w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/lw9o64im_400x400.jpg?w=300&h=300 300w" sizes="(max-width: 156px) 100vw, 156px" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background-xg-p: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;" height="156" width="156" /> https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/the-president-show-s1-seamless_0015_silo_flat-8x10-_photo_by_gavin_bond-square.jpg?w=312&h=312 312w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/the-president-show-s1-seamless_0015_silo_flat-8x10-_photo_by_gavin_bond-square.jpg?w=150&h=150 150w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/the-president-show-s1-seamless_0015_silo_flat-8x10-_photo_by_gavin_bond-square.jpg?w=300&h=300 300w" sizes="(max-width: 156px) 100vw, 156px" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background-xg-p: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;" height="156" width="156" /> https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/alec-baldwin-pay-for-snl-trump-impression-is-very-low.jpg?w=150&h=150 150w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/alec-baldwin-pay-for-snl-trump-impression-is-very-low.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 157px) 100vw, 157px" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background-xg-p: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;" height="157" width="157" />

All was in good fun, and the TV public, especially teenagers, received the unavoidable message, three times a week, that Trump was not particularly scary, Archie Bunker in a suit.

– 2/19/18: Two weeks before the ritual of the Gridiron Club dinner, the NYT informed the nation that the new tax overhaul

…now has more supporters than opponents…The growing public support for the law coincides with an eroding Democratic lead when voters are asked which party they would like to see control Congress. And it follows an aggressive effort by Republicans, backed by millions of dollars of advertising from conservative groups, to persuade voters of the law’s benefits…Lori Weigel, a partner with Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican polling firm (said) “That is certainly in part due to consistent communications about the tax plan and the news coverage of prominent companies investing in workers.”… Just under one in five respondents expect to see either a raise or a bonus thanks to the law’s business tax cuts. Early returns from public companies indicate that’s an overshot.

Note the euphemism: “that’s an overshot.” The Times, of course, had been the major source of that “news coverage.” And, characteristically, the article had little to say about how the new law would create truly massive shifts of wealth from the workers to the bosses.

By the way, I encourage you to subscribe to the email newsletter of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, publishers of Counterspin, an outstanding critic of the mainstream media that regularly decodes the normalization process in the NYT and the WaPo. As I write this, their lead article is: Why Are Progressives Cheering Cable News’ Parade of Hawks and Liars?

— 4/12/18: In a cruel and pathetic attempt to distract attention from the Mueller investigation, Trump bombed Syria again to punish it for alleged chemical attacks, as if such weapons were any more lethal or immoral than those that at least seven nations and many rebel groups had been using there for years. He ordered the attacks with the full support of the NYT, Wapo, etc, which had been egging him on all week, even as they continued accusing him of corruption and collusion. They were now situating themselves to his right on foreign policy. The new normal.

Part One

At some point I’m gonna be so presidential that you people will be so bored…I’ll come back as a presidential person, and instead of 10,000 people, I’ll have about 150 people. And they’ll say: ‘But, boy, he really looks presidential!’ – Donald Trump, spring 2016.

“I’m very excited to come here and ruin your evening in person.” On March 3rd, 2018, over a year after assuming the Presidency – a year, which by any standards was one of the most bizarre in American history – Donald Trump donned white tie and tuxedo and, reported the New York Times,

…joined the very journalists he loves to malign for an evening of humorous — and sometimes uncomfortable — verbal sparring at the 133rd annual Gridiron Club Dinner.

The club is “the Washington embodiment of political correctness.” The audience of 660 included Mike Pence (last year’s headliner), Madeleine Albright, Jeff Sessions, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, most of the Cabinet, six senators, four House members, media executives and military officers.

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10/20/16: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump at the 71st annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in New York.

It also included dozens of journalists who make their livings attacking Trump. Each year, the dinner, wrote the Times,

…features speeches, skits and songs performed by the club’s members and invited political guests. But the highlight of the night always comes when the journalists offer the stage to the president for some self-deprecating jokes and good-natured roasting.

Trump joked about Sessions (“I offered Jeff a ride to the event, but he recused himself”), Kushner (“We were late tonight because Jared could not get through security”), Steve Bannon (who “leaked more than the Titanic”) and chaos in the White House (“Who is going to be the next to leave? Steve Miller or Melania?”). Everyone enjoyed the schtick – and everyone understood that Trump’s appearance was especially meaningful.

Toward the end of his remarks on Saturday, Mr. Trump apologized that he had to be “up early tomorrow morning” to watch “Fox and Friends…This might be the most fun,” he added, “since watching your faces on election night.”

This a ritual that lets off the steam created in the daily battles of partisan politics. It also makes fun of those battles, and in doing so, subtly acknowledges that the people in the room – and there were plenty of Democrats – agree on probably 90 % of the issues, because most of them are rooted in the same social classes, attended the same elite universities and share a common sense of privilege and well-being.

We intuitively understand that the most powerful political and media leaders display their utter confidence when they are willing to made fun of. This was one of the functions of the Jester in medieval courts, and of Carnival tradition. The brief inversion of social roles actually re-enforces the validity of those roles.

But why was Trump’s appearance so significant (and did you notice the NYT’s use of the prefix Mr. before “Trump”)? Prior to that event, the NYT had often seen Trump, according to Michael Wolff, as “aberrant…a figure of ridicule.”

Since Trump had entered politics from the world of business hucksterism, reality TV and – yes – professional wrestling, the media had long seen him as a con man and a joke. During the campaign, however, The Atlantic observed that “ . . . the press takes [Trump] literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” Soon after the election, writes Wolff,

…a theory emerged among Trump’s friends that he was not acting presidential, or, really, in any way taking into account his new status or restraining his behavior…because  he hadn’t taken the leap that others before him had taken. Most presidents arrived in the White House from more or less ordinary political life, and could not help but be awed and reminded of their transformed circumstances by their sudden elevation to a mansion with palacelike servants and security, a plane at constant readiness, and downstairs a retinue of courtiers and advisers. But this would not have been that different from Trump’s former life in Trump Tower…The big deal of being president was not so apparent to him.

Formality and convention—before he became president, almost everybody without high celebrity or a billion dollars called him “Mr. Trump”—are a central part of his identity. Casualness is the enemy of pretense. And his pretense was that the Trump brand stood for power, wealth, arrival.

A year before, the newly arrived – yet obviously insecure – Trump refused to attend this dinner, as well as the White House Correspondents Association’s annual dinner. It was the first time a president had skipped such events in decades. Despite inheriting great wealth, his decades of constant bragging, tacky taste, reality-show celebrity, Mafia rumors, bankruptcies and nasty business deals had long marked him as nouveau riche. To the Washington and New York aristocracies, he had never been “our kind of people.” And he had not fared well among such company in the past. Indeed, said the Times,

In 2011, when Mr. Obama savaged him at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, Mr. Trump appeared to take it badly, and some say his decision to run for president was a result in part of his anger at Mr. Obama for the jokes.

But that had all been then. So yes, this was an opportunity for self-identified representatives of the ruling class to party well, to do a little networking, to congratulate themselves on their increased wealth and, in welcoming Trump, to ratify their authority as gatekeepers. It was a ritual of normalization.

This year – despite the saber rattling; despite the eviscerations of environmental regulations and health care; despite the transfer of billions to the mega-rich; despite the horrific attacks on Blacks, Latinos, immigrants and the disabled; despite empowering right-wing violence; despite all the corrupt cronies nominated to destroy entire federal departments; despite the nasty tweets, the insults, the investigations, the chaos, the scandals, the corruption, the firings; despite the unrelenting attacks on the media (the people in this room!); despite the sleazy adulteries, divorces and lawsuits; despite the preposterous displays of piety before evangelical groups; despite a hundred days at his golf resorts; despite all the petty, juvenile infighting; despite the possibility that he might not even survive his first term; and perhaps most of all, the daily, brazen, pathological, unashamed stench of lies – the gatekeepers were opening the gates, and Trump was confidant enough to enter in triumph, like a Roman Emperor.

After all his promises to the angry white working class that he would drain the swamp and destroy politics as usual, it was now clear to everyone present at this formal dinner that Trump was now an honored member of that same Deep State. https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/d6a3fdfe818d3d430b1c270d52bdcb23.jpg?w=548&h=548 548w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/d6a3fdfe818d3d430b1c270d52bdcb23.jpg?w=150&h=150 150w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/d6a3fdfe818d3d430b1c270d52bdcb23.jpg?w=300&h=300 300w" sizes="(max-width: 274px) 100vw, 274px" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 4px 24px 12px 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline; float: left; background-xg-p: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;" height="274" width="274" />Despite the fact that he had no class, he was the New Normal. And, after a year of his presidency it was clear that he, in turn, had normalized (that is, given permission) racist, misogynist and violent behavior that had previously been considered unacceptable.

Next: What is normalization? Why does it matter?

The Myth of Israeli Innocence

Part One

There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population – Moshe Dayan

This essay is not really about politics; it’s about how politics reflects mythology, and together they create history.

When 15th-Century European explorers “discovered” (a phrase used until only a few years ago) the “new world,” the power of myth enveloped their images of its indigenous inhabitants.  Christopher Columbus initially wavered between the “noble savage” projection (innocent, generous children) and its opposite (sub-human, treacherous savages). Quickly, the latter won out. “Indians” were shameless, naked fornicators and idolaters.

Perhaps more importantly, their notions of ownership condemned them in the eyes of the whites. They had no respect for or even any concept of private property. In maintaining the land collectively, they were the original red communists. “They are fit to be ruled,” wrote Columbus; they could be trained to be industrious slaves.  When this prediction proved unrealistic, the Spaniards responded with genocide and eventually with the mass importation of Africans.

The Europeans were generating a new mythology (actually, not so new, as we’ll see). And this story was based on an idea about land: empty land. The land itself was full of potential. However, wrote John Locke, “…land that is left wholly to nature is…waste.” And as early as the 1570s, allegorical personifications of “America” as a female nude appeared in European art.  “Virgin” land evokes fantasies of defloration. Sir Walter Raleigh was quite clear about that: Guiana “…hath yet her maydenhead.”

This is deliberately constructed mythic language. The indigenous people had, of course, worked the land for eons. They were farmers, not pony-riding Sioux warriors, as later stories would portray them. And the land was hardly empty. The pre-1492 population of the Western Hemisphere was over 100 million.

To justify what were essentially unprovoked military invasions, Christians (they were not calling themselves “white” yet) needed to differentiate themselves from these people. The way to do this was to merge sexual and racial ideology.

Although observers noted that Native Americans had never known prostitution or venereal disease, the process of “othering” required that they be perceived as unable to control their bodily impulses. Intellectuals debated whether they even had souls. Some argued that they were children, to be protected and civilized, while others claimed they were “natural slaves” (Aristotle’s term), set apart by God to serve those born for more lofty pursuits.

This is an essential component of America’s creation myth. It sings of people who came seeking freedom from religious persecution, charged with a holy mission to destroy evil, save souls, carve civilization out of darkness – and get rich. R.W.B. Lewis wrote that this story saw “…a divinely granted second chance for the human race…emancipated from history…Adam before the Fall.”

The story was a hopeful one, and it evoked the oldest of mythic themes: the New Start. But it was so moving to the white invaders because they imagined the entire adventure in Biblical images.  Columbus called his voyages the “enterprise of Jerusalem” and the Pilgrims saw themselves as Israelites, leaving Egypt/England for the “New Jerusalem.” They were living out, in real time, the mythic stories that had fed their imaginations for centuries.

Unfortunately, however, to the extent that it bears any relationship to the archeological evidence, an unbiased reading of the Old Testament reveals that the Exodus story is intertwined with the original invasion – and genocide – of Palestine, which like now, had an indigenous population that the invaders were intent on replacing through holy warfare. What do you suppose happened to the population of Jericho once the “walls came tumbling down?” Joshua 5:20-21 lays it out clearly:

…at the sound of the trumpet, when the men gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed; so everyone charged straight in, and they took the city. They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.

Later, we recall, King David defeated the Philistines. It is more than a linguistic/historical oddity that the word for “Palestine” in Arabic is “Philistina.”

Three thousand years later, the English Puritans reasoned that since God had guided them in their crossing of the waters (another Biblical image), they now had the sacred responsibility – or, from the native’s perspective, license – to seize and utilize the land.

Here is the most essential point: from the start, our American stories of domination came packaged in the language of liberation. Is it any surprise that even now, we still tell ourselves that we invade other nations to make them free? Everyone had a role to play: whites were the Chosen People, America was the Promised Land and Native Americans were the Philistines. This is the foundation of the Myth of American Innocence.

It is also the foundation for what I’m calling the Myth of Israeli Innocence. Ironically, the 19th Century Europeans who created the philosophy of Zionism were partially inspired by the American myth, which in turn had been inspired by the Hebrew story.

The Israeli historian Shlomo Sand’s book The Invention of the Jewish People argues in part that a small group of European intellectuals essentially invented the story of ancestors who been expelled from their homeland centuries before in order to create the emotional climate for Jewish nationalism. 

Another Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, explains how the story of a people needing to return to their ancestral land coincided with the agendas of two powerful interest groups. The first was Protestant Evangelism, which advocated for “Christian Restorationism.”

The Christian world, in its own interest, adopted the idea of the Jews as a nation that must one day return to the holy land. This return, in their view, would be part of the divine scheme for the end of the world, along with the resurrection of the dead and the second coming of the Messiah…The theological upheavals of the Reformation beginning in the 16th century produced a clear association, particularly among Protestants, between the idea of the end of the millennium and the conversion of the Jews and their return to Palestine. 

Zionism was therefore a Christian project of colonization before it became a Jewish one…A powerful theological and imperial movement emerged that would put the return of the Jews to Palestine at the heart of a strategic plan to take over Palestine and turn it into a Christian entity…

Christian restorationism is a perfect example of what Joseph Campbell called a “de-mythologized world” because it literalizes Biblical mythology, and secular persons find it comically fraudulent. But any observer of the bizarre relationship between Benjamin Netanyahu and such contemporary right-wing televangelists as John Hagee, a man who is absolutely dedicated  to the eventual conversion (or, failing that, the destruction) of all Jews prior to the Apocalypse, can see how influential this view remains.

The second interest group was British (and later, American) imperialism. In making the case that Jews were a nation belonging to Palestine, and therefore should be helped to return to it, Pappe notes,

They had to rely on British officials and, later, military power… (Lords) Shaftesbury, Finn, Balfour, and Lloyd George liked the idea because it helped Britain gain a foothold in Palestine. This became immaterial after the British took Palestine by force and then had to decide from a new starting point whether the land was Jewish or Palestinian—a question it could never properly answer, and therefore had to leave to others to resolve after 30 years of frustrating rule.

Now, our American responses to news of the latest Israeli crimes in Gaza or the West Bank are crafted by several factors:

1 – An American political establishment (both Republican and Democratic) and corporate media that have favored the Israelis in such a one-sided manner for over sixty years that we can only conclude that Israel has functioned during that time as a surrogate for American foreign policy. As always, we ask Cui bono? Who profits?

2 – An immensely well-funded, fundamentalist-Protestant establishment – the contemporary inheritors of the Christian Restorationists – whose expectations of Armageddon and fulfillment of “prophecy” require this violence to hasten the coming of the “End Times.”

3 – Residual guilt, perhaps, for the Holocaust.

4 – Generations of unrelenting, racist demonization of Arabs.

As a result, most Americans over a certain age still tend to see Israel as the innocent victim of crazed, Muslim terrorists. This is a generation that was raised on movie and TV Westerns. But this essay is not really about politics. As always, I’m interested in the myths that we unconsciously enact.

All of the above factors rest upon and help sustain the most recent expression of the mythic framework I’ve been describing: “empty,” un-utilized land; victimized people in search of a homeland; a city on a hill; the highest of ideals; the best of intentions – and significantly – ferocious savages – Others – who attack the good, innocent people of Eden for no reason whatsoever.

We’ve seen this all before. It seems so familiar at the gut level because it is one of the foundation myths of Western culture, of America, and with curious circularity, of Israel.

Part Two

The crazy course of the 20^th century produced a population of genocide survivors, the truly innocent victims of the Holocaust. In most cases these people could not return to their home countries. Many who attempted to do so suffered further violence and persecution. Without a doubt, the Jews of Eastern Europe required an innovative resolution to a thousand years of scapegoating and massacres.

For history to offer them justice and hope, however, it was necessary to revive the old narrative, the simplistic, Hollywood version popularized by the movie Exodus – and to scapegoat a second group, the indigenous population of Palestine. This required elaborating several myths. The first two were the familiar narratives of Jewish victimization and chosen people which together had always seemed to cancel each other out. Jews were both the winners and losers of history.

The third myth was that of the Promised Land, which we have seen had already been enshrined in American mythology. The fourth is closely related to the third, and is crucial to the Zionist project: the “wandering Jews” who had been expelled from the Holy Land 2,000 years before and had been yearning to return to Eretz Yisrael ever since.

The fifth myth was the idea of “empty land.” As we have seen, it originated in the Mosaic story. However, like any narrative that does not arise organically from people indigenous to the land, it is rife with contradictions, and they relate directly to our American story.

Since neither the Hebrews nor the Europeans found unpopulated lands, the settler colonization project required that they develop rationalizations of how those people did not deserve their lands, the Philistines because they were pagan idolaters and the Native Americans because they did not practice private land ownership. Both groups were savages, barbarians, barely human. They were, in fact, dangerous because they might infect the innocent newcomers with their evil ways.

If the land was empty of anyone of value, it was easy to slide into the next fiction: perhaps there really were no people there at all. Or if they were there, human progress demanded that they be removed. Once the invaders internalized these notions, anything – including genocide – was possible, acceptable, inevitable and eventually logical.

Both groups of invaders could now perceive the indigenous people as lacking merit. In Protestant terms, they were guilty of original sin and therefore deserving to be mistreated. And they could resolve the contradiction of victim/chosen by seeing themselves as the innocent targets of unprovoked military attack (otherwise known as popular resistance), yet selected by God to multiply and be fruitful. In Protestant terms, they were among the elect.

Here, the American and Israeli myths almost seem to merge on the question of “A land without people for a people without land.”

This was a phrase first used in 1843 by the Christian Restorationist clergyman Alexander Keith, a Scott. And he had a distinct agenda. American evangelists soon used it it in their campaigns to return the Jews to the Holy Land – to hasten the Second Coming of Jesus. But it certainly was no surprise that Americans would be so excited about this idea; it was a fundamental aspect of their own mythology, which itself had been born in Old Testament language. All they had to do was substitute the phrase “deserving Jews” for “deserving Christians.” In a further political irony, their ideology continues to motivate millions of American Protestants in their political and financial support of American Mid-East policy.

Ten years later, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, President of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, wrote to Prime Minister Aberdeen that Greater Syria was

"a country without a nation" in need of "a nation without a country...Is there such a thing? To be sure there is, the ancient and rightful lords of the soil, the Jews!"

Some intellectuals argued that the phrase meant “a people” – a self-determined national entity. If the Holy Land was populated by “Ottomans” or “Arabs” whose loyalties were primarily to Islam or some pan-Arabic identity, then it was open to be inhabited by a more deserving “people.” See Diana Muir’s essay to see how complex this debate has actually been.

In 1878 some 460,000 people resided in Palestine, three percent of whom were Jewish.  The first Zionist settlers arrived four years later, and they soon learned that Palestine was not “empty.” They reported back to their colleagues in Europe: “The bride is beautiful, but married to another man.”

Granted, people were living there, quite a lot of them in fact. However, as in the 16^th century American myth, the Zionists used their own standards to determine that the inhabitants (Muslims and quite a few Christians) were not making full and efficient utilization of the land. Once again, we see a crudely drawn distinction between European settler colonialism, motivated by the highest and most sacred of ideals, and lazy, undeserving (and eventually violent) “others,” barely surviving because they had no work ethic.

But we are not talking about the pronouncements of a few academics. We’re talking about the growth and acceptance of a myth, even if this was a new one. And the horrors of World War Two invested it with further meaning. By the mid-1950s, most American children were learning that the early Jewish settlers – the Kibbutzniks – had found a useless, baking desert and turned it into an agricultural Eden of well-tended farms and orchards. Although the popular narrative never mentioned that most of these people were socialists, their image still fit perfectly into the mythic narrative. However, Pappe argues that Palestine

…was not a desert waiting to come into bloom; it was a pastoral country on the verge of entering the 20th century as a modern society, with all the benefits and ills of such a transformation.

Zionism was a settler colonial movement, similar to the movements of Europeans who had colonized the two Americas, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand…The problem was that the new ‘homelands’ were already inhabited by other people. In response, the settler communities argued that the new land was theirs by divine or moral right, even if, in cases other than Zionism, they did not claim to have lived there thousands of years ago. In many cases, the accepted method for overcoming such obstacles was the genocide of the indigenous locals.

Part Three

Historians are gatekeepers of the cultural consensus, and few are truly objective. In this case, it’s clear that many are conflicted about what happened and who was to blame over the next sixty years. Depending on their personal agendas, they blame the Jews, the Arabs or the British. But one of the key players, Major-General Orde Charles Wingate, an admitted Christian restorationist, trained and led the “special night squads” of Jewish guerillas (or death squads, from the Arab perspective) that engaged in collective punishment of Palestinian villages. Jewish leaders such as Zvi Brenner and Moshe Dayan claimed that Wingate had “taught us everything we know.”

And most historians agree that in 1947-1949 the Israeli army perpetrated over thirty massacres, destroyed over 530 Palestinian towns and villages and forcibly expelled some 750,000 Palestinians (whose numbers have since grown to over seven million refugees). American Professor Norman Finkelstein states:

According to the former director of the Israeli army archives, ‘in almost every village occupied by us during the War...acts were committed which are defined as war crimes, such as murders, massacres, and rapes’...Uri Milstein, the authoritative Israeli military historian of the 1948 war, goes one step further, maintaining that ‘every skirmish ended in a massacre of Arabs.’

From the first Zionist settlements in the 1880s (when the U.S. Army was completing its forced removal of the Native Americans to concentration camps, otherwise known as “reservations) all the way through to the current (U.S.- subsidized) impasse, we have the same historic contradiction: In a place where the land was already occupied, the revival and prosperity of one population meant the violent exile of another one, or what we now refer to as “ethnic cleansing.”

In one case – the ancient city of Lydda – they forced between 50,000 and 70,000 Palestinians out into the desert. The world has erased the memory of this event, but the Palestinians remember it as the Lydda Death March. Think “Trail of Tears.”

(A historical side note: I have heard that some descendants of the Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492 still hold the keys to their former front doors, just as many Palestinians hold the keys to their pre-1948 homes.)

But why was it so easy to convince the world, and especially Americans, that, despite the Holocaust, these people should not remain in the land of their ancestors? Because this story was sold to a willing public as merely a variant of our American origin myth.

Even so, it was necessary – the myth required it – to so demonize the Palestinians as to imply that they were somehow less than human, as countless Israeli politicians have implied:

There was no such thing as Palestinians; they never existed. – Golda Meir

The Palestinians are like crocodiles... – Ehud Barak

(The Palestinians are) beasts walking on two legs. – Menahim Begin

But another Israeli leader, David Ben Gurion, understood the reality behind the myth quite well, and felt secure enough (due to American support) to spell it out:

If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?

Myths, especially origin myths, are messy. They are not logical or consistent. And they borrow liberally from each other, as I have shown. But it gets even messier in this case. Consider how these iconic phrases of the 20^th century flow almost interchangeably into each other in our imagination: Indian reservations. Palestinian refugee camps. Vietnamese strategic hamlets. Ghetto. In each case, a population is segregated from the dominant society, and always (originally a Christian conceit) for their own good. Eventually that population becomes less than human.

And don’t forget ethnic cleansing and concentration camps. Consider that Adolf Hitler, architect of the phrase “master race,” openly admitted that he learned his genocidal ideas from studying American history:

…twenty-seven (American) states passed eugenics laws to sterilize “undesirables.” A 1911 Carnegie Foundation “Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population” recommended euthanasia of the mentally retarded through the use of gas chambers. The solution was too controversial, but in 1927 the Supreme Court, in a ruling written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, allowed coercive sterilization, ultimately of 60,000 Americans. The last of these laws were not struck down until the 1970s…Meanwhile, in Mein Kampf, Hitler praised American eugenic ideology, and in the 1930s, Germany copied American racial and sterilization laws. Years later, at the Nuremberg trials, the Nazis would quote Holmes’s words in their own defense. (from my book, Chapter Eight).

Master race? Consider Menachem Begin again:

Our race is the Master Race…We are as different from the inferior races as they are from insects. In fact, compared to our race, other races are beasts and animals, cattle at best…human excrement. Our destiny is to rule over the inferior races. Our earthly kingdom will be ruled by our leader with a rod of iron. The masses will lick our feet and serve us as our slaves.

The idea of ethnic cleansing is so indefensible, so morally repulsive, so evocative of what Germany had done to these same Jews, that it requires still more mythologizing. In this case, it requires the common narrative that the Palestinians chose to leave. Pappe, however, reveals that there has always been a master plan for the expulsion on the Palestinians. The Israeli government still insists that Palestinians – even those beleaguered residents of Lydda – became refugees because their leaders told them to leave. But

…there was no such call—it is a myth created by the Israeli foreign ministry…What is clear is that the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians can in no way be justified as a ‘punishment’ for their rejecting a U.N. peace plan that was devised without any consultation with the Palestinians themselves.

(Here, Pappe is using the common meaning of myth as “untrue.” But we need to remember that the “myths” we are talking about are the stories that people tell themselves about other people but which are in fact stories about themselves.)

In order to justify these crimes, it has been necessary to demonize the actual victims, just as Americans demonized the “wild Indians,” or to forget them entirely, as Israel attempts to do with its barrier wall in the West Bank.

It has been easy to do this partially because the Jews really had suffered like few others, but also because the Western World in general and the American public in particular have long been steeped in mythic narratives that told only the colonizers’ versions of history. And this has resulted in two generations of liberal and even leftist Americans (PEPs – “Progressive Except for Palestine”) who regularly criticize the crimes of U.S. foreign policy yet innocently defend similar behavior when Israel perpetrates them.

The common justification is that Jews must have a place where they can be safe. There’s nothing wrong with that statement – it should of course be true for everyone – unless we remember how it implies the idea of a divinely Promised Land, and the fact that only Antarctica has no indigenous people.

So this notion requires the pseudo-innocence that is generated in the context of literalized religion and black-and-white, “us-or-them” thinking. This form of innocence – undiluted goodness and purity – requires an equally undiluted evil Other to be measured against, so that, once again, “we” can know who we are because we are not them. As the title tune to Exodus proclaims, This land is mine. God gave this land to me. The only other option, the honest one, would be: we know who we are because we are the ones who stole this land.

So in order to construct a mythology that (at best) ignored and (and worst) terrorized the Palestinians, it was necessary to expand and elaborate the narrative of Jewish victimization. The story, of course, is a thousand years old. But it took its real energy from twenty years of the twentieth century – the Holocaust and American Westerns – and from the relentless media propaganda that followed.

Of course Palestinians have committed terrible atrocities. But there simply is no equivalency between their actions and the long-term, collective punishment in Gaza and the West Bank, or in the mass deportations of 1948.

The Israeli stance was not always so monolithic. But as a million citizens (many of them fed up with the nation’s contradictions) have emigrated in the past twenty years and right-wing fundamentalists have proliferated, the haters and their myths have won out. Uri Avnery, the Israeli writer and peace activist, writes that the Israeli army is filled with “teenagers who are indoctrinated from the age of three in the spirit of Jewish victimhood and superiority.” 

Victimhood and superiority, of course, are contradictory terms that can only be resolved by recourse to mythic thinking.

Now, the longest colonial occupation in modern history is impossible without the $8 billion in unconditional U.S. aid that flows annually to Israel. Yet despite having the fourth largest army in the world, and despite the obscene disparity of casualties between Israelis and Palestinians, most Israelis believe their own propaganda. They are racist, violent and fascist, and they are deathly afraid of the Other.

This is why the political expression of this myth is so hard to disentangle. We all remain stuck in this endlessly repeating tragedy not for the lack of political solutions. Israel’s economy is absolutely dependent on American aid. Any American president – at any single moment in the last fifty years – could have immediately brought peace to Israel/Palestine by simply threatening to plug this financial pipeline.

But this will never happen until American public opinion (perhaps the politicians will follow) finally rejects the necessity of an American empire and the corollary that Israel is its indispensible surrogate.

And if you are not aware of the extent to which both the political class and the religious leadership are willing to go to maintain what Noam Chomsky calls “manufacturing consent,” consider that 36 states are debating or have already enacted anti-BDS legislation.

We’re stuck because we can’t perceive the myths that invisibly determine our responses to history. And when we can’t identify the emotional ties generated by mythic narratives, we can’t perceive how politicians manipulate us. A fundamental aspect of this ongoing tragedy is that the Israeli myth of innocence is so bound up with our own, and with our own imperial project. No American politician on the national stage – not Bernie Sanders, not Elizabeth Warren – has the courage to challenge this story.

And we must eventually admit – it will have to begin here – that one of the most appealing – and appalling – of those narratives took its modern appearance in this land in the seventeenth century. We will have to admit that this crazy idea of racial purity generated a holocaust in the twentieth century, and that the victims of Nazism have continued to apply that same ideology in Palestine, making themselves into God’s chosen race and the Palestinians into a disposable population.

Or perhaps not completely disposable. Consider the stereotyped image of African-Americans in our own myth. Any society built upon lies needs to keep at least some of the evil Others in constant view as potential scapegoats and to remind the good citizens of just how good they are.

As long as we insist on our own purity and innocence, we must have an Other to project our darkness upon. And the longer we require the Other to do this, to dwell in our own underworld, the angrier he/she will get. So we apply one of the basic insights of Depth Psychology to politics. The Other who is actually ourselves, but whom we refuse to acknowledge, will turn deadly, because he will feel like he has nothing to lose.

Update: This essay dates from January 2013. I wrote the final sentence in a poetic mode, referring back to the mistreated god of The Bacchae, and toward the simple psychological truths of repression, projection and the inevitable, angry return of the repressed.

Gaza, with two million residents in 141 square miles, is the third most densely populated political unit in the world, following only Hong Kong and Singapore. Due to the Israeli and Egyptian border closures and the Israeli sea and air blockade, the population is not free to leave or enter, nor allowed to freely import or export goods. 

Gaza is a concentration camp, no more, no less. And now, Gaza is running out of water.

In July of 2014, in the midst of “Operation Protective Edge,” Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri lamented:

Our backs are to the wall and we have nothing to lose…In Gaza we have nothing, and we have nothing to lose…Let us live in dignity, and you will receive quiet and love in return.

After the cease fire, another Hamas leader spoke:

If we don’t witness a change for the good in our lives over the next few weeks, another war will erupt soon…It’s impossible to live this way any longer. We have nothing to lose any more. People hoped that after the war, something would happen. We’d feel change in the offing, we’d finally breathe, but nothing has changed.

THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT In AMERICAN MYTH

Part One: The Mythological and Psychological Background

Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees…

  - Abel Meeropol

Myths are the stories people tell about themselves about themselves that help them to make sense of the great contradictions in life. Often, even stories that seem to be about other people turn out to be really about those people (or nations) who are privileged to tell the stories. The story of America is, to a great extent, one of idealistic people, innocent of all sin, who sought out new land to live in freedom and opportunity, and of how they gradually extended those blessings to the world. It’s a story about white people, and it has a large shadow. 

The great majority of African Americans, those who have been forced to bear the projection of the white unconscious, understand that the subtext of almost all of our domestic issues – and much of our foreign policies – is America’s original sin, its fatal flaw, race. For sixty years, polls have consistently shown that most white people do not share this view. 

As a writer on social issues, let me state my opinion as clearly as I can: from the perspective of the myth of American innocence, any social, economic or political commentary that does not begin by acknowledging this fact is either hopelessly ignorant or deliberately complicit with the aims of the empire and with assumptions of white supremacy.

When we speak of American exceptionalism, we have to understand that America remains at heart a puritan nation, and that the worst of all sins to the Puritan is lack of self-control. Even though studies consistently show that similar percentages of whites and blacks engage in sex, drugs and violence, large numbers of whites still believe the old stereotypes that blacks are more susceptible to such “vices.” This allows whites, wrote Ralph Ellison, “…to be at home in the vast unknown world of America.”

America has had countless scapegoats, but why are we periodically compelled to lynch only one of them?  After 350 years of mythic instruction, popular thinking among white people remains polarized along racial lines: civilized vs. primitive, abstinence vs. promiscuity and sobriety vs. intoxication. These pairs of opposites are all forms of a more fundamental opposition between composure and impulsivity (or in mythic imagery, between the ancient Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus). Whiteness, as the civilized, the abstinent, the sober and the composed, is the baseline definition of the innocent community, and blackness, as all those opposites, is the Other. 

Othering is not logical. As with archetypes, when one pole of a stereotype is activated, so is its opposite. Even as they perceive blacks as unable to control their desires, large majorities of whites still accuse them of the Puritan’s second worst sin, laziness. Two thirds of white people still tell pollsters that the problems suffered by blacks are due to their preference for welfare over work. This is an odd claim, writes Tim Wise, “…seeing as how five out of six blacks don’t receive any.” 

When mythic narratives collapse, when large numbers of people stop believing, they can replace archetypes with stereotypes in their search for something new to believe in. The next step in scapegoating is to manipulate the fear that those who can’t control their desires – or are too lazy to be productive – will entice everyone else to emulate them, that middle-class whites might not be able to resist temptation.

What does this fear of temptation say about white people? It implies that their carefully constructed veneers of innocence, progress, racial superiority, masculinity and self-control are eggshell-thin. At a deeper level, however, it implies envy of those whom the dominant culture, for its own purposes, has designated as more childlike and more in touch with the needs of their bodies.

And envy points toward something even deeper, the unconscious desire for healing. But healing, as something beyond simplistic notions of regeneration, as initiation into self-knowledge, implies the death of what no longer works. The soul desires this more than anything, and the ego fears this more than anything. As James Baldwin wrote,

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.

And this is precisely why, all across the world, the indigenous imagination has given us stories about mythic figures such as Dionysus, the god of wine and madness, the god who called all those values of respectability, sobriety and decorum into question. And the more a culture holds to those values, the more it is likely to call up a Dionysian figure from its own national unconscious as compensation.

The Black man is America’s modern Dionysus. Like the enigmatic outsider of Euripides’ 4^th-century B.C. play The Bacchae, he comes from beyond the gates to liberate the women, to lead them to the mountains to dance among themselves, free of patriarchal control. And in the fever dreams of the white supremacist, he threatens to lead the children away like another outsider, the Pied Piper.

Whites project the stereotyped characteristics of American Dionysus upon blacks because the heritage of Puritanism does not allow them to fully embody those characteristics themselves. But – we must say this repeatedly – just below the negative judgments and hatred of the Other lies envy of those who appear to be comfortable in their bodies and unrestrained in their desires. In a culture that elevates the dry, masculine, Apollonian virtues of spirit over the wet, feminine and Dionysian, African Americans proudly use the word soul to define their music and culture in contrast to the dominant religious and cultural values.

Part Two: Red, White and Black

It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o’clock on Sunday morning. – Martin Luther King, Jr.

The genocide of the Native Americans (“the outer Other”) created two problems for the white imagination, for its politicians and for its businessmen. First, it literally didn’t leave enough survivors for them to identify as a threat that could motivate white fear. Second, it didn’t leave enough laborers for their plantations. Colonial whites required someone to act both roles. So they uprooted millions of Africans to form the foundation of the Southern economy, and eventually of the Northern economy as well. Much later, despite a long tradition of anti-immigrant hostility, they also imported millions of Latinos to work the jobs that whites would not accept.

As I have written in Chapter Eight of my book Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence, neither “blackness” nor “whiteness” firmly established themselves in the American mind until the defeat of Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676 in Virginia, when indentured servants of both races challenged the landowners. This was a watershed moment, as historian Theodore Allen wrote:

…laboring-class African-Americans and European-Americans fought side by side for the abolition of slavery…If the plan had succeeded, the history of…America might have taken a much different path.

Previously, there had been little distinction between dark- and light-skinned laborers. Afterwards, Virginia codified its bondage system. In the first of what would be many examples of affirmative action for whites, it replaced the terms “Christian” or “free” with “white,” gave new privileges to Caucasians, removed rights from free blacks and banned interracial marriage. Other laws contributed to what Allen calls the “absolutely unique American form of male supremacism” – the right of any Euro-American to rape any African American without fear of reprisal.

The new allegiance to a narrative of whiteness eliminated most class competition and provided a sub-class of poor whites to intimidate slaves and suppress rebellion. This is how the first American police forces developed – as slave patrols. Copied everywhere, the pattern merged with the myth of racial war: America’s primary model for class distinction (and class conflict) became relations between white planters and black slaves, rather than between rich and poor.

The new system, wrote Allen, insisted on “the social distinction between the poorest member of the oppressor group and any member, however propertied, of the oppressed group.” Eventually, southern class discrimination merged with northern religious stereotyping. Since poverty equaled sinfulness (to Northern Puritans) and black equaled poor (to Southern opportunists), then it became obvious that blackness itself equaled sin.

By 1700, white Americans had a story that evolved into a neo-Calvinistic myth, and the myth told them that their affluence and their privileges were no accident. It told them that their work ethic, enterprising spirit and ability to defer gratification brought them the good things in life, and that the brutal conditions that both black slaves and poor whites lived under were proof of exactly the opposite.

But there was always that shadow, that dark side of the myth of innocence. Regardless of their economic status, whites were motivated to pledge their allegiance to a state that was defined by the perpetual threat of what Freud would later call the “return of the repressed.” In social terms this took the form of slave rebellions and Indian attacks. At the psychological level, it appeared as that constant temptation to reject the Protestant Ethic and dance.  

The predatory imagination found the secret to perpetuating itself – as it would in the1870s, 1890s, 1930s, 1950s, 1980s and today – by manipulating the paranoid imagination. There was always the red shadow of the native warrior (later, the red communist) who might swoop down upon the innocent community with no warning, and for no apparent reason. And the black shadow of the hateful slave lurked within that same community.

The ideas of Red, White and Black were born together in the American soul.

Three and a half centuries after Bacon’s Rebellion, scholars still wonder why a strong socialist movement never developed here, as it did in almost every other developed country. One reason is the profoundly influential ideology (again rooted ultimately in Puritanism) of radical individualism. This created, for whites at least, the expectation of perpetual growth, in both spiritual and material terms. As John Steinbeck wrote,

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

A second factor is the overwhelming presence of the Other. Only Americans combined irresistible myths of opportunity and universal freedom – stories that spoke deeply to the soul – with rigid legal systems deliberately intended to divide natural allies. Every time those allies made common cause, opportunistic politicians played the race card. “No other democratic nation,” writes Cornell West, “revels so blatantly in such self-deceptive innocence, such self-paralyzing reluctance to confront the night-side of its own history.

In this thinking, whiteness implies both purity (which demands removal of impurities) and privilege. From 1680 to 2020, no matter how impoverished a white, male American may have felt, he has still heard dozens of subtle messages every day of his life that divide him from the impure. Without racial privilege the concept of whiteness is meaningless. With it, so is working class unity. Throughout American history, white men often have had nothing to call their own except their privilege, yet they have clung to it and supported those whose coded rhetoric has promised to maintain it. The only new addition that Donald Trump (hereafter referred to as “Trumpus”) brought to this story has been to drop the codes. 

The process of exclusion and subordination required a massive lie about black inferiority that has been enshrined in our national narrative. “After all,” writes Tim Wise,

…to accept that all men and women were truly equal, while still mightily oppressing large segments of that same national population on the basis of skin color, would be to lay bare the falsity of the American creed.

Three hundred years earlier, the French philosopher Montesquieu wrote,

It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures to be men, because, allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christian.

So we have to address the question of religion again. White Southern evangelicals are Trumpus’ essential base, the only sizable group in the country who supported him to the end. In Chapter Eight of my book I wrote:

How did Puritanism continue to grow there long after it had been greatly transformed into the capitalist impulse in the North? As free land became scarce in the east, most immigrants (including thousands of Scots-Irish Presbyterians) headed toward southern and western frontier areas. There, they fought savage wars with the Indians long after New England’s indigenous population had been decimated.

In the Deep South in particular they lived side-by-side with millions of blacks and the constant fear of both race war and sexual predation. In addition, one can imagine that they felt guilt, conscious or not, for participating directly in the systematic dehumanization of the slaves. This meant that rural Southerners, far more than Northerners, were obsessed with evil in their daily lives.

The Bible occupied a prominent place on the frontier. With few educated clergy around, people were often unaware of its symbolic context. It was venerated more than it was read and read more than it was understood. The Bible was often the only book in the house (this situation still prevails in many American homes). The result was a dogmatism and anti-intellectual literalism that became characteristic of this part of the country.

So, while urban Northerners transmuted their self-abnegation into the sense of deferred gratification required to amass wealth, rural Southerners built up their fear of the Other to such a fever pitch that the Devil – and their own sense of sinfulness – remained as constant presences. Belief in predestination died out, but assumptions about Original Sin remained. This meant fear of judgment, repressed sexuality, longing for Apocalypse and an older sense of deferred gratification, not to wealth but to the next life. Obsession with the other world meant dismissal of this one and contempt for political participation. As a result, most fundamentalists didn’t vote until the 1970s.

That situation would not change until Republicans, realizing that they had no real future without bringing in new voters, deliberately motivated evangelicals with the old tactics of racial fear. And fear, we have learned over and over, trumps moral concerns. Since then, the “Solid South” has simply changed its allegiance from Democrat to Republican, with enough electoral votes to prevent or water down any progressive legislation, but now with the addition of millions of fundamentalists who had previously never voted.

Yes, recent demographic changes in Virginia and Georgia have brought political change, but for the most part we can still ask ourselves if the South actually won the Civil War. 

Consider the intersection of narratives centering on southern plantations before the 150 years before 1860: the myth of free markets; the myth of the pastoral plantation, with everyone cheerfully playing their role, protected by benevolent masters and Protestant ministers; the myth of pure Southern Womanhood; and the complex images of the slaves, gratefully serving the planters. These stories about the essential goodness of southern culture would go on to provide the background for a post-war myth that has survived for over another 150 years. The myth of the “Lost Cause” warns us that the South will rise again, because it was a tragic mistake of history that it was defeated.

The North itself long held to yet another story, that racial discrimination occurred only in the South. In reality, Northern mobs attacked abolitionists on over two hundred occasions prior to the outbreak of the War.

Psychologist Joel Kovel asserts that there are two kinds of racism. One is the obvious dominative racism that developed in close contact (including the privilege of rape) between master and slave. The second – aversive racism – arose from Puritan associations of blackness with filth and sin. By 1825 Alexis De Tocquevile wrote that prejudice “appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known.”

Indeed, New England had about 13,000 slaves in 1750. In 1720, New York City’s population of seven thousand included 1,600 blacks, most of them slaves. Not until 1664 (22 years after Massachusetts) did Maryland declare that all blacks held in the colony and all those imported in the future would serve for life, as would their offspring. And the two colonies with the strongest religious foundations – Massachusetts and Pennsylvania – were the ones that first outlawed “miscegenation.”

When northern states expanded the voting franchise for whites in the 1830s, most of them explicitly abolished it for blacks. Later, several states including Indiana and Illinois literally banned all blacks from entering. Oregon (1859), however, was the only free state admitted to the Union with a racial exclusion clause in its constitution. The ban remained in place until 1927. Well into the 1950s (as any black entertainer, athlete or travelling businessman could attest), thousands of “sundown towns” in thirty states prevented blacks from residing overnight on pain of arrest or worse.

But let’s return our focus to the South. As whiteness took on increasing significance, so did the fear of “mongrelization.” Below the fear, however, was envy. And below that was the desire to achieve real healing and authentic psychological integration. To cover up such unacceptable fantasies, whites projected their desires onto blacks. Even the great humanist (and, we have learned, willing race mongrelizer) Thomas Jefferson apparently felt that black men had a preference for white women over black women “as uniformly…as the preference of the Oran-utan for the black woman over those of his own species.” Indeed.

As the Native American population (the Outer Other) east of the Appalachian Mountains shrunk into relative insignificance, due to genocide and ethnic cleansing, African Americans assumed the role of the Inner Other. What (in the white mind) were their characteristics? First, they were childish, lazy and unreliable – the shadow of the Protestant Ethic. It was necessary to force them to be productive. White performers began to wear blackface in the 1840s. LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka) wrote,

… the only consistent way of justifying what had been done to him – now that he had reached what can be called a post-bestial stage – was to demonstrate the ridiculousness of his inability to act as a “normal” human being.

Whites needed to believe that blacks were slow, dumb and happy, so many blacks assumed the persona and acted that way. Whites created fictional characters – from Jim Crow to Gone With the Wind’s Mammy: loveable and loyal, yet lacking any concern for intellect or freedom. Blackface minstrelsy was America’s primary form of entertainment throughout the nineteenth century. Forms of it (Amos ‘n Andy) survived into the 1950s, tutoring millions in racist stereotyping. But it provided something else. By vicariously impersonating blacks, as Michael Ventura has written, “white Americans could briefly inhabit their own bodies.” 

A second aspect of the story contradicted the first, but no one noticed, since othering is not logical. This Other was intensely sexual and aggressive. Like Dionysus, he might sneak in and corrupt the children. Class society assigns the mind to the masters and the body to the servants. In racially homogeneous societies, where the leaders racially resemble the followers, these images are not mutually exclusive. The poor can potentially join the elite. But in racial caste systems masters are physically different from servants, and the images are mutually exclusive. In America the old mind/body division coincided with the racial gulf, and this distinction became sacred.

It took abstraction to new levels. Countless whites, inheritors of the Puritan imagination, hated the body’s needs and feared that they might be judged by how well they controlled them. Here is a clue to slavery’s appeal that goes beyond economics and questions of privilege. This terror, writes Ventura, “…was compacted into a tension that gave Western man the need to control every body he found.” In slavery, “the body could be both reviled and controlled.” 

Third, it was necessary to confine this Black Other of the South, unlike the external, Red Other (now exiled primarily west of the Mississippi River), within the gates of the innocent community. Whites could savagely defend their women from him, but they couldn’t afford to exterminate or isolate him in concentration camps (otherwise known as reservations), because he was critical to economic prosperity. Slavery fit the model of an internal Other that had appeared earlier in the Witch craze. White Europeans had long been used to these stereotypes: for hundreds of years before the discovery of the New World, they had seen Jews as the internal Other and Muslims as the external Other.

After emancipation, racism remained the foundation of a political economy predicated upon fear, the constant threat (and temptation) of violence, division of the working class and further refinements of whiteness. The law long assumed that blacks were persons with any African ancestry. The “one-drop rule,” used by no other nation, made one a black person. “Octoroons,” who had seven white great-grandparents out of eight, were considered to be black.

Curiously, in the case of Native American admixture with whites, courts enforced the one-drop rule more selectively. They recognized the “Pocahontas exception” because many influential Virginia families claimed descent from Pocahontas, a fundamental and positive character in America’s origin myth. To avoid classifying them as non-white the Assembly declared that a person could be considered white as long as they had no more than one-sixteenth Indian blood.

For decades, despite many exceptions, one of the primary characteristics of whiteness across large swaths of the country was the simple fact of legal freedom. This changed quickly after 1865. So new laws were enacted that prevented most blacks from acquiring western land, thus keeping them as de facto slaves in the south. Homesteading became a privilege reserved for white people, another example of affirmative action. In the southwest, similar systems targeted Latinos. No wonder our picture of the hardy “pioneers” who settled the west is lily-white.

When poor whites and blacks again threatened to unite, the Jim Crow system arose, held in place by the threat of large-scale, domestic terrorism. Between 1868 and 1871, the Ku Klux Klan murdered over two thousand Americans and intimidated countless others. In the 1890s, when workers and farmers organized the Populist Movement, there were 200 lynchings per year. The dream of unity collapsed (as it would again in the 1970s) under the fear and the temptation to identify as white. This systemic violence might have provoked more outrage but for a rationale that silenced criticism. Sexuality was a means of reasserting both white control over blacks and male domination of women, even though fewer than a quarter of lynchings resulted from allegations of sexual assault.

When agriculture mechanized and the South no longer required so many cheap agricultural workers, many blacks left, only to be confined within northern ghettoes, where nearly equally severe conditions resulted in the poverty and violence that whites associated them with. By 1900 the mythmakers had succeeded: whites commonly believed that blacks hadn’t been ready for freedom because, like Dionysus, they couldn’t “sacrifice their lusts.”

Like the ancient Athenians, Victorian Americans saw themselves as Apollonian, hardworking, rational and progressive. Meanwhile, they had enshrined the Other in a form the Greeks would have recognized but burdened with Christian sinfulness. “Enshrined” seems to be the proper term here: there was (and is) simply no possibility of worshipping such a deeply corrupted version of the Christ without imagining an equally corrupt, “evil twin.” For more on this question, see Chapter Nine of my book.

There was no place for him within the pure American psyche, and to a great extent, the economy, but it was still necessary to keep him close. To several generations of white immigrants, the descendants of the slaves, in both their stereotyped, earthy physicality and the implied threat of their vengeance became America’s dark incarnation of Dionysus, our collectively repressed memory and imagination. Since whites desperately needed to project him, to see him, they created exactly those conditions – segregation and discrimination – that dehumanized him and fostered behavior that whites could demonize.

White Americans filled their imaginary underworld with monsters: the outer, Red Other (now transformed from Indians to communists) and the inner, Black Other. In 1960, Baldwin concluded,

We would never, never allow Negroes to starve, to grow bitter, and to die in ghettos all over the country if we were not driven by some nameless fear that has nothing to do with Negroes…most white people imagine that (what) they can salvage from the storm of life is really, in sum, their innocence.

Part Three: Conflicting Images of the Other in the South in the 1960s

The old joke comes close to explaining the stunning combination of racial animosity and innocent ignorance that white Americans accepted as reality in the early 1960s. Only about 6% approved of interracial marriage, while 84% were convinced that blacks had equal educational opportunity. 

Even though anti-segregation protests had been happening for years, most whites had been unaware of a national movement for racial freedom until most acquired televisions. Rather abruptly, it seemed that by sitting in at lunch counters across the South, the Other was stepping in from his and her internal exile, demanding to sit at the same the table as the master. Insisting that neither freedom nor equality was possible without the other, the Civil Rights Movement defined freedom in terms of inclusion. But for Southern whites (and later for Northern whites as well), inclusion meant something that absolutely threatened their myth of innocence: meeting the Other on equal terms.

Are you old enough to remember those “black-and-white” photos and newsreel films of the demonstrations and attempts to desegregate schools? Find some videos online and notice several things. First: the dignity, determination, religious fervor and conservative attire of the African Americans. Second: the presence of northern whites accompanying them. Then, as the camera pans back, we comprehend the broader context: hundreds of local whites, brought to the scene by the possibility of seeing or participating in violence – with fury or fear on their faces.

We see the burning crosses, the police dogs and the fire hoses.  

But we also see leather-clad toughs and housewives in high heels taunting the marchers with astonishing profanity.

What we don’t see is the 350-year legacy of fear that turned working-class whites and blacks into adversaries. We don’t see the religious conditioning that divided whites internally, against their own bodies. We don’t see the heritage of alienation that required the construction of an entire race of scapegoats so that whites could cling to their privilege and their innocence. 

Still, the demonstrators are merely sitting quietly, singing or marching in silence. Why is there such rage on the white faces? Certainly, blacks are demanding equality and whites fear some economic loss. But furious, violent, out-of-control rage?

Perhaps it is because the blacks aren’t “shuffling and jiving,” lowering their heads or stepping off the sidewalks to let them pass. Perhaps because they are no longer presenting the false persona of childish or contented servant. Perhaps it is because some are looking the whites directly in the eye for the first time in anyone’s memory, refusing to call them “sir.”

I propose that then (and, sadly, 60 years later) the whites, whether “crackers” or prosperous shopkeepers, were facing a profound dilemma. They could no longer successfully project self-contempt for their sexuality, their bodily connection to the old pagan gods, to Dionysus, onto the blacks. Forced to contemplate people just as self-controlled as themselves, and quite often more so, they faced an Other who was themselves.

In another context, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote:

…and they searched his prison

but could only see themselves in chains.

White violence wasn’t merely intended to disrupt the marches. Here is the secret: the whites were trying to incite the blacks into retaliating in anger, to move their bodies, to dance, or at least to lower their heads. They were hoping to provoke them into re-inhabiting the psychic space of the Other, so that they, the whites, could be free of the oppressive weight of self-awareness. Whites were desperate to remove it from their own shoulders and place it back where it belonged.

But how could they do that when (a few years later) blacks were chanting, “Black is beautiful?” If the Other was everything that the citizen of the polis was not, and the Other was self-controlled – or beautiful – what did that make the citizen? And if the citizen has his innocent persona stripped away, what then rises to the surface? How could it not be self-hatred? Rather than facing it, Americans have long learned to channel their darkness into religion, substance abuse, consumerism, race hatred and a unique capacity to seek out and enjoy vicarious violence.

The miracle of the early 1960s is not the legal freedoms and voting rights won by African-Americans, but the fact that they could hold so much hope amid such hatred without retaliating. The movement eventually failed when they could no longer restrain their own rage within the ritual container of pacifist religion and finally struck back.

Langston Hughes wrote,

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

So much had been promised – even poor families now had TV and could see what the Good Life appeared to be – and so little was delivered. Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty failed because his other war against Vietnam was bankrupting the nation. Historian Milton Viorst wrote, “…rising expectations prevalent in the mid-1960’s had transformed everyday discontent into an angry rejection of the status quo.”

After the Watts riots of 1965 a phrase that perfectly articulated the return of the repressed – Black Power! – first appeared.   In 1967 (ironically the same year that the Supreme Court finally struck down the last Southern laws prohibiting interracial marriage) blacks rioted in 23 cities, leaving scores dead and thousands arrested.

Once Blacks refused to submit, two things resulted. First, many others – students, women, Native Americans, Latinos, prisoners, disabled people, environmentalists and gays – also rose up. 1968 was a surreal explosion of televised war carnage, anti-draft demonstrations, political assassinations, ferocious riots and mayhem at the Chicago convention.

Secondly, public opinion, which had solidly favored civil rights, began to change. TV showed not only the rage but also ecstatic images of blacks looting only blocks from the White House. Violence was familiar, but this was new: the internal Other would no longer serve as primary victim of American violence. The white middle class was losing jobs and feeling disenchanted, exhausted, victimized and vulnerable to reactionary backlash.

Hollywood saw the opening and responded with vigilante movies (starring Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood and Chuck Norris) in which solitary redeemer-heroes, in an old mythic format, took matters into their own hands and cleaned up the urban chaos with brutal violence. Everyone knew what “urban” meant. And everyone was familiar with the mythic themes that the film Fort Apache, the Bronx invoked.

Conservatives, also seeing an opening, were quick to perceive class differences between white anti-war activists and returning soldiers, as well as the police they were fighting. When the National Guard exploded in violence at Kent State in 1970 (few even noticed the black students killed a week later by state police at Jackson State College in Mississippi), the public was outraged at the students, not their killers. Viorst writes that many rejoiced that, “…the act had been done at last…the students deserved what they got.”

“The act” was the murder of the children – white, educated – in a nationally televised, ritual sacrifice of a new scapegoat. Enough youth had rejected American values so completely that, to the shocked elders, it seemed that they had become the Other. They were acting “just like blacks,” and this, finally, was unacceptable.

Although America had been killing the children in Vietnam for years and in the ghettoes for generations, here was an unmistakable response from their elders: Your purpose is to be like the fathers, or to die. Shortly after Kent State, while students were striking at 450 campuses, thugs attacked peaceful demonstrators while New York City police watched.

Years later, after exonerating the students, Kent State commissioned a monument. However, it rejected sculptor George Segal’s model of Abraham  poised with a knife over Isaac.

The myth of innocence had weathered a series of terrible shocks, but its image of the internal Other had survived. Whites no longer perceived blacks as discreet, religious, non-violent saints who were shaming America into remembering its values. They were now dashiki-wearing, long-haired, foul-mouthed terrorists who ruled the city streets at night – “Black Panthers.” And the panther was Dionysus’ animal. The Black man once again carried the projection of America’s Dionysus. And one could well ask, Did the South actually win the Civil War? 

Part Four: Fifty Years Later

Martin Luther King’s assassination in April of 1968 marked the end of the Civil Rights movement. What has changed since then? Few would deny that significant, fundamental transformation has occurred in American race relations over these decades. Discrimination is illegal everywhere and blacks can theoretically vote if they want to. A black middle class has developed, and a few have become truly rich. Hundreds of blacks and other minorities have attained elective office and some have achieved real influence in the centers of power. And of course Barack Obama was President.

According to this narrative, the agonizingly long process of acknowledging the Other as part of the polis has concluded. And if the American story is about anything, it is about progress. The Civil Rights movement succeeded! Obama was proof that we had completed the transition to a “post-racial” society. Republicans (who had viciously resisted the movement at every single step while it was happening) now adore this narrative, because it allows them to justify slashing funds for welfare and other aspects of the New Deal. Democrats love it because it allows them to ignore or co-opt the minorities who make up their actual base.

Part of this narrative involves creating a new variant on the myth of perpetual American progress that moves in a straight line from exclusion of the Other to inclusion. It involves valorizing Dr. King while covering up the history of the true radical and outspoken anti-war activist who would have been bitterly disappointed by Obama’s subservience to the American empire. It involves denying how the liberal establishment hated him in his last year. 

And it means that reactionaries (it’s no longer accurate or appropriate to use the word “conservative”) in government and media have been able to justify all manner of cruel legislation and new forms of voter suppression with the absurd notion that since discrimination is now illegal, special voter protections are only longer needed. Do I exaggerate? In 2013 the Supreme Court struck down the central features of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 using exactly this language, and the decision quickly resulted in Trumpus’ election. 

These things are obvious to African Americans. White Americans, however, have proven over and over that their perceptions about race are hopelessly out of line, both with those of blacks as well as with the statistics.

African Americans know that much of their economic and social progress has stalled or even reversed; that the war on drugs killed tens of thousands of their people; that hundreds of thousands are in prison; that literally millions of them have lost the right to vote; that school segregation is worse than it was twenty tears ago; that the financial crisis of 2008 impacted blacks disproportionately, and that the banks had deliberately targeted them; that 2020 replicated those conditions; that black mothers in New York City are twelve times as likely to die in childbirth as white mothers; that despite the Black Lives Matter movement, police continue to murder large numbers of unarmed black people without fear of reprisal; that the idea of white privilege finally entered the lexicon, but with little effect; that 87% of blacks believed that Trayvon Martin’s murder was unjustified, while only 33% of whites did; that 30% of whites over 65 still disapprove of interracial marriage; that blacks and whites are still worlds apart when polled on how well things are going ; that arsonists torched some fifty black churches between 1990 and 2017; that the media still regularly portray blacks negatively; that mortgage lenders still discriminate against them; that race (as voter suppression, gerrymandering, computer fraud, voter I.D. laws, new forms of the poll tax and massive, fundamentalist backlash) turned what everyone expected to be a Democratic landslide in 2016 into a social, financial and environmental disaster; and that tens of millions of whites now openly, unashamedly, support blatantly racist politicians.

2016 was what I called a “Dionysian Moment” in which the old Puritan values of self-restraint and the polite hypocrisies of coded rhetoric were finally ejected for someone who “says just what he means,” a man who, from the center of the culture, encouraged every vile hate to come out from the shadows, to be  pardoned in advance.

Despite the evidence of progress, one major cultural difference between the America of 1955 and our current condition is this. Then it was possible to shame whites (or enough of them) into behaving themselves; that is, to at least consider acting as if their uniquely professed values of freedom and equality for all were real. Then only a few people felt comfortable enough to voice their bigotry. Now, after several decades of TV saturation, normalization of cruelty, dumbing down of education – and now social media algorithms designed to confirm social biases – it seems to me that the most accurate pejorative we can use to describe Trumpus and his believers is “shameless.”

I’ve written many essays on race in America and on Obama in particular (these are noted at the end), so I’m trying not to repeat myself here. To conclude this one, I want to add an observation that is consistent with my argument in Part Three that in the 1960s Southern whites could not bear the tension of observing an “Other” with whom (in terms of behavior) they might well be identical.

Obama experienced a unique dilemma beginning well before his election. From the right, there was plenty of the predictable (and some not so predictable) racist nonsense. Some critics on the left, however, complained that in attempting to appeal to the middle he simply wasn’t acting “black” enough. Then there were the really loony allegations: he was not an American citizen, he was a secret Muslim, he was a socialist, etc. He wasn’t white enough. It was a branding problem that his handlers struggled with throughout his eight years in office. But at the time, I wrote that like any other candidate hoping to attract major funding, he had been carefully vetted by the Deep State and tasked with the work of shoring up the glaring holes in the fabric of American exceptionalism. Eight years later, I think I was right. 

In regard to that brand, Obama, despite his modest family roots, was clearly a well-mannered, rational, dispassionate, Ivy-League educated, cultured, articulate, even brilliant card-carrying member of the upper middle class, and so was his wife. Their children were talented and beautiful; they were the most photogenic Presidential family since the Kennedy Camelot of the early 1960s. They had no scandals, sexual or otherwise. The “darker brother,” in Langston Hughes’ words, had finally arrived “at the table” and “They’ll see how beautiful I am – And be ashamed.”

 This created a profound dilemma for countless working-class whites; the old poem was too accurate in its prediction. Throughout their adult lives, they had been subjected to a daily, unending barrage of hysterical fear mongering about the racialized Other that was far more intense than anything their parents had seen in the fifties and sixties. And they experienced eight years of war, job loss caused allegedly by affirmative action (an absolute lie of course, but much easier to digest than the fact that the politicians they’d elected were screwing them) and countless examples in the media of assaults on their sense of white masculine potential; all of which led to an opiate epidemic that by 2016 would kill 50,000 of them per year. Is it any surprise that it was white males who perpetrated almost every one of the 336 mass murders in 2017? That’s right: almost one per day, and almost always white males.

Ironically, the fact that Obama was continuing the financial and military policies of his Republican predecessor seems to have mattered little to the Tea Partiers, Alt-Rightists and Christian extremists who would eventually become Trumpus’ foot soldiers. What mattered to them was branding, symbol, imagery, victimization and race.

To millions of white people, the constant sight of this, yes, privileged family in the seat of power was a daily reminder of how low they had sunk, and that (quite inaccurately, of course) 350 years of injustice were being rectified: the Other was at the table – their table. The shock-jocks seemed to be right. Blacks were replacing them at that table. Polls indicated that white people now actually perceived themselves as more discriminated against than blacks. 

Plenty of political writers have analyzed this subject. But I insist on the psychological and mythological approaches, because when we look through these lenses, we can see that little has changed since 1955:

The whites, “crackers” or middle-class, are facing a profound dilemma. They can’t project self-contempt for their sexuality, their bodily connection to the old pagan gods, to Dionysus, onto the blacks. Forced to contemplate people just as self-controlled as themselves, and quite often more so, they face an Other with whom they are identical.

Their perception of Obama – and of the possibility of true racial healing – seems to have been determined on three levels. On one level, the constant media barrage (with massive funding from the Koch brothers and friends) was successful. The shock-jocks and the televangelists repeated the old con, converting disillusionment with the system itself into racial animosity and hatred of immigrants.

But on another level, their spokesmen were, in a sense, unsuccessful. None of the venomous and very thinly veiled racism of Fox News or Republican politicians could incite Obama into retaliating in anger, to re-inhabit that psychic space of the Other, to act like a dangerous, angry black man. By contrast, what they got was a leader who seemed comfortable weeping at the thought of dead (American, not Muslim) children. 

…so that they, the whites, could be free of the oppressive weight of awareness…If the Other was everything that the citizen of the polis was not, and the Other was self-controlled – or beautiful – what did that make the citizen?

Hate grew on a third level, out of frustration and denial. I think the dynamic was and is the same as in 1960: we hate them because they’re lazy and dangerous. And we hate them more when they prove that they aren’t.

Trumpus didn’t create any of this. But as a long-time con man and Reality TV star, he was simply smart enough to perceive it and run with it – directly, proudly, arrogantly, with no shame and using only the thinnest of euphemisms – in a way that the Republican establishment had never dared to. Joshua Zeitz writes:

…Trump has also, arguably more than any other candidate for president in the past hundred years (excepting third-party outliers like Strom Thurmond and George Wallace), played to the purely psychological benefits of being white. From his racially laden exhortations about black crime in Chicago and Latino gangs seemingly everywhere, to his attacks on an American-born federal judge of Mexican parentage and on Muslim gold star parents, he has paid the white majority with redemption…Trump might be increasing economic inequality, but at least the working-class whites feel like they belong in Trump’s America.

The other Republican candidates attacked him in the primaries not because he was a racist thug and a bully – they had been doing precisely the same ever since the days of Nixon, only with more restrained hints and innuendo (“urban”, “gang violence”, “welfare queens”, etc) – but more for his style. By comparison, their brands were higher-class, more restrained, in that old Puritan style.

But of course they quickly rallied around their useful idiot when he won, because they sensed the possibility of achieving the reactionary legislation that their corporate sponsors had always demanded.  Once in office, he quickly became, as Charles Derber writes, a “fig leaf for the GOP’s Horrific Policies.”  And within six months, his public support dwindled down to that base of angry and fundamentalist whites. Why? Because they were the only crowd with an imagination impoverished enough to value race hatred over their own economic self-interest.

And, in an ironic 2021 version of the “return of the repressed,” this crowd remains angry and powerful enough to intimidate most Republican politicians into defending the ex-President against impeachment.

Many analysts predicted that these people would eventually figure out exactly how and where Trumpus and the Republicans had been sticking it to them and move back to the center or even the left. But they failed, and still fail to understand how the perception of white privilege is self-interest. A blogger known as “Forsetti” who grew up among fundamentalists, explains why they won’t:  

When you have a belief system that is built on fundamentalism, it isn’t open to outside criticism…Christian, white Americans…are racists…people who deep down in their heart of hearts truly believe they are superior because they are white. Their white God made them in his image and everyone else is a less-than-perfect version, flawed and cursed.

The religion in which I was raised taught this…Non-whites are the color they are because of their sins, or at least the sins of their ancestors. Blacks don’t have dark skin because of where they lived and evolution; they have dark skin because they are cursed. God cursed them for a reason. If God cursed them, treating them as equals would be going against God’s will.

Since facts and reality don’t matter, nothing you say to them will alter their beliefs. “President Obama was born in Kenya, is a secret member of the Muslim Brotherhood who hates white Americans and is going to take away their guns.” I feel ridiculous even writing this, it is so absurd, but it is gospel across large swaths of rural America.

A significant number of rural Americans believe President Obama was in charge when the financial crisis started. An even higher number believe the mortgage crisis was the result of the government forcing banks to give loans to unqualified minorities. It doesn’t matter how untrue both of these are, they are gospel in rural America. Why reevaluate your beliefs and voting patterns when scapegoats are available?

Some have claimed that southern evangelicals first entered the political world after the nation made abortion legal. Randall Balmer, however, shows that the issue that actually aroused them was the same one that had motivated their ancestors to sacrifice themselves by the hundreds in the Civil War: race. Then, and for a hundred years, the issue was “race mixing.” For the next fifty years it was and has continued to be the issue of desegregation allegedly mandated by liberals.

Three years before the attack on the Capitol, half of all white southerners believed that white people were under attack, while 55% of all whites believed that discrimination exists against them.  These figures are not mere statistics; they are indications of how deeply ingrained in the American psyche is the idea of victimization. They indicate the enduring strength of American myth.

By the way, if it isn’t perfectly obvious to you that religion is a mere fig leaf concealing their racism (and the fear that lies below it), simply recall that black evangelicals have never shared their opinions or voted with them.

This is what a demythologized world looks like. Our politics and our religion are so utterly corrupted that millions of under-educated people continue to support billionaire con-men who are fleecing them blind but offering a refuge in othering, while millions of other, well-educated people take refuge in another narrative, “Russiagate”,  that offers a different kind of refuge: denial.

My articles on Race in General:

— The Mythic Sources of White Rage

— Privilege

— Affirmative Action for Whites

— The Race Card

— The Sandy Hook Murders, Innocence and Race in America

— Hands up, Don’t shoot – The Sacrifice of American Dionysus

— Do Black Lives Really Matter? 

— Did the South Win the Civil War? 

— A Mythologist Looks at the Election of 2016

— The Dionysian Moment: Trump lets the Dogs out 

My articles on Obama:

— The Presidential Dilemma

— Obama and the Myth of Innocence

— The Con Man: An American Archetype

— Obama’s Tears

— Grading the President

— Stories We Tell Each Other About Barack Obama