Barry's Blog # 32: The Two Great Myths of the 20th Century
Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE
Where were you (or your parents) on October 12th, 1944? If you were a teenage girl in the New York City area, you might have been in or outside the Paramount Theater, where some thirty to thirty-five thousand adolescent girls made such a commotion that authorities dubbed the event the Columbus Day Riot. These girls were in “a squealing ecstasy,” according to Time magazine – freaking out, as the next generation would say – over the presence of the pop idol Frank Sinatra (www.pophistorydig.com/?tag=columbus-day-riot). Later, their younger sisters and daughters would do the same thing over Elvis Presley and the Beatles.
If you were a teenage German boy, however, you might have been a member of the 12th SS-Panzer Division Hitlerjugend, the army of boy soldiers (www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/hitleryouth/hj-boy-soldiers.htm). You might have been one of the 600 survivors of a military unit that had numbered some 10,000 boys only five months before. They had confronted the Allied invasion, often fighting to the last boy, and their brethren would continue to fanatically resist, dying in the thousands in the battle for Berlin.
More purely than in any other example I can cite, these two groups of teenagers were enacting the two great mythic narratives of the twentieth century, myths that western culture had literalized since long before the Greeks and Hebrews created stories to name them.
The American girls were either modern day maenads (from the same Greek root that gives us mania and manic), or they were bacchants. The bacchants willingly worshipped the god Dionysus in irrational, ecstatic trance. The maenads, by contrast, were the mythic women who went insane because they had refused to recognize him as divine. My book delves into the differences between them, and the cultural significance of their choices.
The German boys, sadly, were enacting the myth of the Killing of the Children, which I also address in detail in my book. They had been deluged with Nazi propaganda since early childhood and had been groomed by their elders to offer up their bodies in the great ritual sacrifice of modern, nationalistic war, to die for the fatherland.
Many of my readers may know that I often offer two poems during our poetry salons and rituals. These poems speak to these two myths. The conflict between them has been at the center of western culture for hundreds of years. We can see it today in every Occupy/police encounter.
One myth addresses the explosive surge of erotic and creative energies – the meeting of the spiritual and the sexual – that each new generation offers to its community and the world. It is the cyclic renewal of the world. The Invocation to Dionysus introduces us to it:
Be good to us, you girl-crazy goat!
We the poets begin and end our singing through you,
And it’s impossible without you.
Without remembering you, we cannot remember our sacred songs!
The other myth speaks of how western man lost both his knowledge of the old initiation rituals and his protective concern for his own children, how, instead of symbolically killing boys so that they might transition into authentic adults, he gradually made the choice to sacrifice them quite literally. The killing of the children is the great, unspoken (and therefore sacred) secret behind the myth of American innocence. This myth was best given poetic expression by the other poem I often recite, by Wilfred Owen:
Parable of the Old Man and the Young
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
And, to make things truly mythic, that is, truly complicated, consider that there is a point where these two narratives intersect, in Euripides’ Bacchae. After Dionysus drives the female disbelievers mad, they attack the king and slaughter him, led by his own mother. The release of repressed energy under patriarchy results in the slaughter of the innocent.
And the only way out is further into the madness.
We are the Ones that We Fear: Barry's Blog #3
Email to Philip Muldari of KPFA Radio: I enjoyed your recent excellent and necessary conversation with Meredith Maran about her book on mistaken accusations of child sexual abuse ("My Lie: A True Story of False Memory," Jossey-Bass, 2010)
However, may I respectfully suggest that it is possible to go much deeper into these issues by considering some of the mythic narratives that have driven Western history for hundreds of years. My recently published book, Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence, speaks of one of these narratives: “The Killing of the Children.” Beginning with Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, patriarchs have sent generations of young men to be killed in war, while diminishing the potential of all children with every form of mistreatment, from foot-binding and rape to the soul-killing irrelevance of public education. In order to deny these historic crimes, adults for centuries have displaced their culpability by idealizing the very children that they have abused. Children are indeed innocent, and this is not in any way to deny actual abuse. But the decade of the 1980s (the years of Maran’s story) is a good example of this theme. During this time (just after the wholesale slaughter of a million and a half children in Southeast Asia), countless well-meaning people became obsessed with the issues of either child abuse or abortion. For many people, however, it was far easier to scapegoat certain groups (gay men, abusive fathers, preschool teachers and abortion doctors) than to accept the fact that our national leaders were systematically destroying the federal safety nets that protected millions of children. We were labeling the scapegoats as the agents of abuse when the nation as a whole was (and continues) crushing the souls of its children.
The Secret of their Appeal: Barry's Blog #2
We are the innocent ones. Sure, we all love to make fun of Sarah Palin and Christine O’Donnell. After we finish laughing at the latest outrageous statement or revelation, we usually comment on how inaccurate or even downright ignorant they are, and we wonder how anyone can believe them.
This is true but of little value to progressive people , for several reasons. First of all, writes Frank Rich (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/opinion/03rich.html), O'Donnell plays a very important role in diverting attention from the fact that very wealthy interests have been bankrolling the Tea Party from the start. It also gives the Republicans the image that they are supporting working-class and middle-class Americans. But I, as always, am interested in the mythic issues. We innocently hope that if the Tea Partiers learned the truth, thefacts, they would stop supporting such people. Perhaps some would change their minds, but I suggest that most wouldn't. There is a deeper, mythic truth here: they support Palin and O'Donnell precisely because these politicians appear to be such idiots. It isn't their arguments which are so popular; it is their vocalizing of a very old aspect of the Myth of American Innocence: anti-intellectualism. This stems from attitudes, images and values which developed in the eighteenth century that appeared to divide the effete, condescending, stuffy, superior, wealthy, wine-sipping, "know-it-all" intellectuals of the established east coast cities from the hard-working, adventurous, profane, whiskey-drinking (yet real Christian), Indian-fighting farmers and hunters who lived along the frontier and blazed their way across the continent. Indeed, such people formed the "Know-Nothing" political party, whose primary purpose was to demonize the immigrants who were arriving on the east coast and populating the cities. Eight generations later, following the example of George Wallace, the Republican party managed to convince most working-class white men that the Democrats represented the "establishment," while they, the Republicans, were outsiders, rebels against that establishment. They could do so because they had learned (much better than the Democrats) the basic vocabulary of American myth. And they knew how to manipulate the mythology of white privilege (more on that in my next blog). Every time Palin or O'Donnell makes a silly gaffe or reveals another insane family secret, their fans approve! Why, because the fans see themselves in them; they see politicians who act (and sound) just like them. Remember how George Bush (and before him, Ronald Reagan) would smirk like a teenager when someone confronted their political clichés with the truth? They simply didn't care that they had been proven wrong. Every time they were contradicted, their popularity increased, because, like the holy fool Parcifal, they had tweaked the noses of the "establishment." The image is the key to national denial. Their supporters get more nourishment, apparently, from the image than from the truth. And that's a truth that, for the time being, we must accept.
The Mystery in the Message: Barry's Blog #1
Almost all statements about politics and the economy have contradictions. Progressives support anything that increases the freedom of the individual, while also supporting the ability of government to enhance that freedom. This is a nuanced and admittedly ambivalent position.
Here is the most basic conservative message: All government involvement in the life of the individual is intrusive and wrong. However, with the exception of extreme libertarians, these same "conservatives" support massive military expenditures, corporate welfare, severe restrictions on "immoral" acts such as gay marriage and -- most significantly -- outright bans on a woman's personal right to have an abortion.
Equivalencies do not exist between these messages. Progressives can and must live in a real world of difficult choices, while reactionaries (they are not true conservatives) are apparently quite willing to ignore the obvious contradictions in their language. Why do they do this? Perhaps it is because they want to maintain their "freedom" in a world where most people are not free. Or perhaps it is because they are desperate to maintain their own sense of innocence.
The Race Card – Barry’s Blog #31
After all the writing I’ve done about race in America, it came to me as a shock of insight. It was so obvious, yet I hadn’t noticed it before. I was talking with a friend about white privilege, when he interrupted me and asked, “You’re not going to bring up the race card, are you?” Suddenly, it was clear…
He was, of course, making fun of media pundits, who utilize that phrase to shut down any serious discussion about the one issue that underlies all others in America. By controlling public conversation, these gatekeepers establish the boundaries of acceptable discourse. Their primary function – and that of all corporate media – is to distract us from identifying the true sources of our distress.
Conservatives (that is, reactionaries), however, use the race card all the time, and have throughout American history. These days, so as to not appear blatantly racist, they use commonly understood code words (“law and order,” “states’ rights,” “inner city,” “super-predators,” “gangs,” “drug dealers,” etc.) to manipulate the fears of their political base.
American innocence is built upon fear of the “Other” – Indians, Mexicans, Asians, Communists and terrorists, but always and primarily, African-Americans. The fact that conservatives regularly admonish progressives for speaking about race (from actually saying the word “race”) indicates the terrifying truth that the subject is taboo. And anthropology teaches us that what is taboo is sacred. Like the Hebrew god Yahweh, it is too holy to be named.
I contend that race (as white privilege, as the prison-industrial complex, as the underpinning of our entire economy and as the quite justified fear of retribution) 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, institutional violence and a severe mind/body split, we have, for over three centuries, defined the Other as those who cannot or will not restrain their impulses. And we continue to project those qualities upon Black people.
In this American context, the question of government intrusion upon the individual too often serves as a euphemism for the fear that one’s personally hard-earned assets (despite a legacy of white privilege) might be taken away and given to people who are too lazy to work for themselves. When conservatives make the absurd accusation that Barak Obama is a “socialist,” they are using the newest code word for the race card, and their base is perfectly aware of this.
These attitudes are essentially religious, even if articulated in secular terms. Underneath the clichés lies our still-powerful Puritan contempt for the poor. Indeed, surveys still show that Americans of all social classes believe that losers are bad and morally corrupt. To fail economically (regardless of institutional racism) is not simple failure but – in America – moral failure.
These themes have been played out with devastating 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 one alternative to the hero – the victim. And the victim who cannot be a hero will search for villains or scapegoats. This narrative emphasizes “values” over “interests,” redefining class war, once again, in racial and cultural rather than economic terms.
The continuing backlash against the perceived excesses of the 1960s has resolved whites of responsibility and renewed their sense of innocence and privilege. The theme of this revolution is a return to small town values. But its subtext is greed, racism and hatred of the poor.
White males, oblivious to their privilege, now identify as victims – not of the rich, but of the minorities who compete with them, the women claiming equality with them, the gays who publicly question the value of their masculinity and the intellectuals who appear to be telling them how to live.
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 affluent people who actually perceive themselves to be the victims of people who have far less than they do. And not just the 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 ignore his own white privilege.
With most white, older Americans wanting to have their cake (government services) without having to pay for it (taxes going toward lazy black and brown “welfare cheats”), too many of us are willing to collude with a great secret. It is a holy secret, because we will not name it.
The Dancing Ground at the End of the World
I’ve returned from my first Mardi Gras. New Orleans is an infinitely complicated amalgam of the actual place, its people, its terribly violent history – and the projections laid upon it by the rest of the country. Puritan America needed a place where its unacknowledged ecstatic (both sexual and spiritual) drives could be both loved and demonized. And for two hundred years, at least until the advent of Las Vegas, New Orleans was that place. As such, it was and remains white America’s primary destination of pilgrimage. It was no accident that our language uses the word “spirits” for alcohol. And New Orleans is certainly full of spirits, in each sense of the word.
Escaping the madness (again: in each sense of the word) of the French Quarter, I crossed Rampart Street, where the actual city walls were, to the quiet of Louis Armstrong Park. There, I came to Congo Square, where, on Sundays throughout the nineteenth century, slaves were allowed to congregate by the hundreds to drum and dance, watched over by white police and an encircling throng of white spectators. (Prior to those times, the Oumas Indians had used the field for their sacred corn feasts).
In 1853, an observer described the scene:
Let a stranger to New Orleans visit of an afternoon of one of its holy days, the public squares in the lower portion of the city, and he will find them filled with its African population, tricked out with every variety of show costume, joyous, wild, and in the full exercise of real saturnalia...Upon entering the square, the visitor finds the multitude packed in groups of close, narrow circles, of a central area of only a few feet; and there in the center of each circle sits the musician, astride a barrel, strong-headed, which he beats with two sticks, to a strange measure incessantly, like mad, for hours together, while the perspiration literally rolls in streams and wets the ground; and there, labor the dancers male and female, under an inspiration of possession, which takes from their limbs all sense of weariness, and gives to them a rapidity and a duration of motion that will hardly be found elsewhere outside of mere machinery.
The best piece of writing on the significance of Congo Square, indeed the very best essay I have ever read is Michael Ventura’s Hear That Long Snake Moan (www.michaelventura.org/writings/EB2.pdf), which deeply influenced the writing of my book.
Ventura writes: “The dances were an attempt by the city government to deal with the increase in Voodoo that had resulted from the recent Haitian immigration. It was feared that Voodoo meetings were being held to work sorcery against whites, and perhaps to plot revolution, so in 1817 the Municipal Council forbade slaves to congregate for any reason, including dancing, except in designated places on Sundays. Congo Square was the major place.”
“This is the way of things. It was precisely by trying to stop Voodoo that, for the first time in the New World, African music and dancing was presented both for Africans and whites as an end in itself, a form of its own. Here was the metaphysics of Africa set loose from the forms of Africa. For this form of performance wasn’t African. In the ceremonies of Voodoo there is no audience. Some may dance and some may watch, but those roles may change several times in a ceremony, and all are participants. In Congo Square, African music was put into a Western form of presentation. From 1817 until the early 1870s, these dances went on with few interruptions, the dance and music focused upon for their own sake by both participants and spectators. It is likely that this was the first time blacks became aware of the music as music instead of strictly as a part of ceremony. Which means that in Congo Square, African metaphysics first became subsumed in the music. A secret within the music instead of the object of the music. A possibility embodied by the music, instead of the music existing strictly as this metaphysics’ technique. On the one hand, something marvelous was lost. On the other, only by separating the music from the religion could either the music or metaphysics within it leave their origins and deeply influence a wider sphere.”
And what was that wider sphere? America, and by extension (through music and film), the entire world. For Congo Square was the place where Jazz and Blues were born, out of that music the slaves made, and eventually Rock n’ Roll. As Ventura and I (in my book, especially Chapter Eleven) argue, it has been and will continue to be this influence of the African metaphysics upon an America defined by a separation of body and mind that will be the source of healing for us all.
I thought of all this as I sat quietly on a bench. But more importantly, I could feel the extraordinary energy of the place. Because this is where the spirits of those thousands of African-Americans who danced all those years – to forget their troubles, to contact their ancestors, to attempt to find some peace within the horrors of slavery – reside. The grief is palpable. I wept for them, for the victims of Hurricane Katrina and gang violence, and for all of us who have been willing to settle for the deeply diminished life of white privilege. Along with the tears, the phrase came to me: This is the dancing ground at the end of the world.
But when (as Africa has always tried to teach us) we allow ourselves to grieve fully, we may be blessed by an experience of joy and ecstasy equal in intensity to our sadness. Congo Square is still a place of pilgrimage.
In its center is a fountain (where one can easily imagine the great Voodoo queen Marie Laveau presiding over the ritual), surrounded by a couple of dozen manholes (can you see the drummers around her?). The surface of the square is covered with hundreds of six-inch rectangular paving stones. And the stones are arranged into a series of scallop-shell shapes that radiate out and down from the center in all directions. They flow like water, like tears, and seem to carry both the grief and the blessings (the latter impossible without the former) out into the city and the world.
- Posted from New Orleans, LA
Gingrich and His Masks
Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE
I recently read two interesting articles about the Republicans presidential contenders. If the subject doesn’t completely nauseate you, please read on for my mythological perspective.
The first article, by Robert Weiner and Jaime Ravenet, is “Why Do Conservatives Vote Against Their Own Interests?” (http://www.truth-out.org/why-do-conservatives-vote-against-their-own-interests/1327682978). In this well-meaning article, the authors reveal the usual Democratic inability to perceive that most Republicans, and certainly most fundamentalists, do not perceive their “interests” in purely economic terms. Millions of these people make up the voting block of so-called “values” voters who are motivated by anti-feminist, anti-gay and, yes, racist concerns. They are most certainly voting for their “values” (as they perceive them) when the demagogue du jour animates their fears and articulates his nostalgic and hateful vision of a return to an America of the 1950s.
I insist that these are mythic issues, wholly within my idea of the myth of American innocence. And mythic issues, as the Republican think tanks have understood perfectly well for forty years, requires the mythic language of simple images that bypass the head and go straight to the heart (and points further south as well). Sadly, all Democratic politicians and most progressive pundits have shown that they have learned absolutely nothing about this conversation. To imply that people are voting against their interests is to assume that the writer has the privilege of knowing those interests better than the people themselves. It is arrogant and patronizing. Worse: it is, mythologically speaking, profoundly stupid.
The second article, by Amanda Marcotte, is titled, “Why Evangelicals Don't Care When Rich White Conservatives Defile Marriage” (http://www.alternet.org/story/153893/why_evangelicals_don%27t_care_when_rich_white_conservatives_defile_marriage?akid=8174.80614.dM0FdD&rd=1&t=12). Marcotte notes that Gingrich’s popularity continues to rise even as further revelations of his serial infidelities surface. She gets close to the truth when she writes:
…for the Republican base, “family values” don’t actually matter, but are just a gloss painted over what really motivates them: reactionary rage.
Gingrich “gets a pass” from quite a few of these people, who, as I’ve just written, are usually motivated by exactly the values he flaunts in his personal life. What’s up with that? Here, we must leap from political analysis into mythic imagery.
Our political system is clearly broken. In its place, we have entertainer-politicians (including Barack Obama). They are not ideological warriors, but they play them on TV. Gingrich, perhaps the best trickster of them all, wears a series of interchangeable masks with which he plays to his base.
The Mask of Rage: Here, Marcotte gets it right: “They love Gingrich because he’s a flaming ball of rage they can wield against everyone they hate.” Rage is exciting, and, for now, it seems to trump puritanical “values.”
The Mask of the Outlaw: What else trumps those values? The notion that the lonely, libertarian hero (played by Gingrich) has the privilege of flaunting the values of the community (or the government, which he and they consider illegitimate), because he stands for rugged, self-creating individualism. In America, the outlaw is merely the mirror-image of the hero.
Here, I would go on and add two more masks:
The Mask of Fallibility: Evangelicals love the spectacle of the fallen leader (through drugs or sex, or in Newt’s case, political corruption as well) who admits his failures, accepts Jesus and repents. Why? Because enacting the mask of imperfection, he shows that he’s just like us sinners! Under this mask, he has learned from the masters: Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush (who, according to insiders, speaks with perfect diction and no Texas accent when he’s away from the camera).
Finally, The Mask of the Victim: We saw this in a recent debate when a moderator asked about the infidelities and Gingrich responded by attacking him for degrading the process with “personal” innuendos. It was, said Newt, “despicable.” Here, he was shifting from hero to the most fundamental of all right-wing masks, that of the victim. He (and, by extension, his massively applauding supporters in the audience) was being victimized by an arrogant, intrusive – liberal – press.
This brings us full circle. The “values” voters have been told, repeatedly, every day, every hour, by their ministers, their politicians, their shock-jocks and their TV crime shows, that they are victims – of, take your pick: blacks, Latinos, women, liberals, professors, gays, abortionists, communists, pornographers, criminals and terrorists – ever since the 1960s.
Gingrich’s supreme talent is to be able to play all these roles and wear all these masks, contradictory and hypocritical, as it may seem, because, as he knows very well, in American mythology, the only alternative to the hero is the victim. Below his and our national bravado and bluster is the rage of the insulted hero, and below that is the grief of the defeated victim.
It all fits into the story of our American tragedy. Over a century ago, Friedrich Nietzsche claimed that all tragic heroes represented the original sacrificial victims of early ritual; they were all “masks of Dionysus.”
Gingrich and His Masks
Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE
I recently read two interesting articles about the Republicans presidential contenders. If the subject doesn’t completely nauseate you, please read on for my mythological perspective.
The first article, by Robert Weiner and Jaime Ravenet, is “Why Do Conservatives Vote Against Their Own Interests?” (http://www.truth-out.org/why-do-conservatives-vote-against-their-own-interests/1327682978). In this well-meaning article, the authors reveal the usual Democratic inability to perceive that most Republicans, and certainly most fundamentalists, do not perceive their “interests” in purely economic terms. Millions of these people make up the voting block of so-called “values” voters who are motivated by anti-feminist, anti-gay and, yes, racist concerns. They are most certainly voting for their “values” (as they perceive them) when the demagogue du jour animates their fears and articulates his nostalgic and hateful vision of a return to an America of the 1950s.
I insist that these are mythic issues, wholly within my idea of the myth of American innocence. And mythic issues, as the Republican think tanks have understood perfectly well for forty years, requires the mythic language of simple images that bypass the head and go straight to the heart (and points further south as well). Sadly, all Democratic politicians and most progressive pundits have shown that they have learned absolutely nothing about this conversation. To imply that people are voting against their interests is to assume that the writer has the privilege of knowing those interests better than the people themselves. It is arrogant and patronizing. Worse: it is, mythologically speaking, profoundly stupid.
The second article, by Amanda Marcotte, is titled, “Why Evangelicals Don't Care When Rich White Conservatives Defile Marriage” (http://www.alternet.org/story/153893/why_evangelicals_don%27t_care_when_rich_white_conservatives_defile_marriage?akid=8174.80614.dM0FdD&rd=1&t=12). Marcotte notes that Gingrich’s popularity continues to rise even as further revelations of his serial infidelities surface. She gets close to the truth when she writes:
…for the Republican base, “family values” don’t actually matter, but are just a gloss painted over what really motivates them: reactionary rage.
Gingrich “gets a pass” from quite a few of these people, who, as I’ve just written, are usually motivated by exactly the values he flaunts in his personal life. What’s up with that? Here, we must leap from political analysis into mythic imagery.
Our political system is clearly broken. In its place, we have entertainer-politicians (including Barack Obama). They are not ideological warriors, but they play them on TV. Gingrich, perhaps the best trickster of them all, wears a series of interchangeable masks with which he plays to his base.
The Mask of Rage: Here, Marcotte gets it right: “They love Gingrich because he’s a flaming ball of rage they can wield against everyone they hate.” Rage is exciting, and, for now, it seems to trump puritanical “values.”
The Mask of the Outlaw: What else trumps those values? The notion that the lonely, libertarian hero (played by Gingrich) has the privilege of flaunting the values of the community (or the government, which he and they consider illegitimate), because he stands for rugged, self-creating individualism. In America, the outlaw is merely the mirror-image of the hero.
Here, I would go on and add two more masks:
The Mask of Fallibility: Evangelicals love the spectacle of the fallen leader (through drugs or sex, or in Newt’s case, political corruption as well) who admits his failures, accepts Jesus and repents. Why? Because enacting the mask of imperfection, he shows that he’s just like us sinners! Under this mask, he has learned from the masters: Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush (who, according to insiders, speaks with perfect diction and no Texas accent when he’s away from the camera).
Finally, The Mask of the Victim: We saw this in a recent debate when a moderator asked about the infidelities and Gingrich responded by attacking him for degrading the process with “personal” innuendos. It was, said Newt, “despicable.” Here, he was shifting from hero to the most fundamental of all right-wing masks, that of the victim. He (and, by extension, his massively applauding supporters in the audience) was being victimized by an arrogant, intrusive – liberal – press.
This brings us full circle. The “values” voters have been told, repeatedly, every day, every hour, by their ministers, their politicians, their shock-jocks and their TV crime shows, that they are victims – of, take your pick: blacks, Latinos, women, liberals, professors, gays, abortionists, communists, pornographers, criminals and terrorists – ever since the 1960s.
Gingrich’s supreme talent is to be able to play all these roles and wear all these masks, contradictory and hypocritical, as it may seem, because, as he knows very well, in American mythology, the only alternative to the hero is the victim. Below his and our national bravado and bluster is the rage of the insulted hero, and below that is the grief of the defeated victim.
It all fits into the story of our American tragedy. Over a century ago, Friedrich Nietzsche claimed that all tragic heroes represented the original sacrificial victims of early ritual; they were all “masks of Dionysus.”
What will the New Myths be?
Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE
Often in interviews I am asked, “What will the New Myths be? How will we create them?”
The question itself implies a characteristic American impatience with “being” in favor of “doing.” We like to think of ourselves as a practical, “can-do” people. We prefer the heights of spirit to the depths of soul. Often, however, the desire to move quickly toward action and solutions reveals an inability to tolerate, or even to investigate, the suffering in our midst, the diminishment of our imagination, the darkness that surrounds us, the massive grief that lies just below the surface. So my first response is: wait, consider just how rough our predicament is, sit quietly and feel the messages of the soul, and the soul of the world. Be, in Roethke’s words, “A god of nature weeping to a tree.”
As Michael Meade has said, the proper response to a great ending – in our case, the end of a cultural story, of a mythic belief system, of a way of life, of a 3,000-year-old dream, as well as of the collapse of the environment – is to enter into rituals of mourning (even as we continue to resist the forces of destruction). We must acknowledge that we are talking about massive death and hoping that new life will arise from the ashes of this ending.
Joseph Campbell said that we can no more predict what the new myths will be any more than we can predict what we’re going to dream tonight. But he did say that the new myths would no longer be tribal stories related to specific places. The only myth worth considering (“with the stars”) would express the metamorphoses of the Earth and all living beings. It would construct a mesocosm that connects all individuals to each other and to the universal macrocosm of spirit, which will be living, interdependent Nature. And we’ve had the image of that new story since around 1970: the Whole Earth. Another image, the Web of Life, implies the interconnectedness of any living ecosystem. When one strand is broken, the web starts to unravel. What affects one part of an ecosystem affects the whole in some way. Such thinking brings us back to old notions like the anima mundi – the soul of the world – that speaks to us through the unconscious images of dreams and art.
Myths, unfortunately, change exceedingly slowly. After all, it took perhaps 5,000 years for the myth of patriarchy to become fully constellated across the planet. We have seen, perhaps, only the beginning of the reversal of this story in the last 150 years of feminism. Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of that much time to create the new myths. And yet the growth of feminism (and spiritual feminism, and the men’s movement that arose partially in response) is evidence of a new myth, the return of the Goddess. We intuitively understand the bumper sticker: “She’s back, and she’s pissed!” But will She return raging and inconsolable, or will She accept our welcome? It is still within the power of the human community to influence the nature of Her return. This story is already approaching mythic proportions not simply because millions already entertain its images of female empowerment, but because it takes us out of a linear sense of history and back into the processes of the natural world. This story of times when all genders lived in partnership allows us to imagine our own myth of return (and the return of myth). If it happened once, why can’t it happen again? Skeptics might suggest that this story simply mirrors Biblical myth (with the onset of patriarchy – women’s fall from grace – substituting for the departure from Eden). But the Goddess is not a mirror image of the omnipotent, omniscient Heavenly Father. She is the inherent spiritual capacity in every individual, our most ancient image of the soul. She exists in all beings that paradoxically emerge from and return to her.
OK, so what can we do? Chapter Twelve of my book goes into much more detail, but here are some ideas.
The Polytheistic Imagination -- Now we are called to remember things we have never personally known, to remember what the land itself knows. We have the opportunity to remember who we are, and how our ancestors remembered, through art and ritual. Our task is unique: inviting something new, yet familiar, to re-enter the soul of the world. We can do this invocation in two ways. The first is to restore memory and imagination. To Federico García Lorca, imagination was “synonymous with discovery…(it) fixes and gives clear life to fragments of the invisible reality where man is stirring.” We can replicate the original process of myth making and dreaming – by telling as many alternative stories, as often as possible, for as long as necessary, until they coalesce into the world’s story.
The second thing is to engage in the rituals – and do the arts – that bypass the predatory and paranoid imaginations and stimulate the creativity that makes new myths. We need to use sacred language, in the subjunctive mode: let’s pretend, perhaps, suppose, maybe, make believe, may it be so, what if – and play. This willing suspension of disbelief is what Coleridge called “poetic faith.” Then, says Lorca, the artist stops dreaming and begins to desire. Love moves from imagination, which “creates a poetic atmosphere,” to inspiration, which invents the “poetic fact.” Thus the imagination, engaged by the restoration of memory, moves toward inspiration, where new life comes not from us but through us.
Now, all creative acts have political implications. Poet Dianne Di Prima writes, “The only war that matters is the war against the imagination.” Another poet, Frances Ponge, says that genuine hope lies in “…a poetry through which the world so invades the spirit of man that he becomes almost speechless and later reinvents a language.” We are required to collapse so deeply into the mournful realization of how much we have lost that we become speechless. Only from that position can new forms of art and language arise that might break the spell of our amnesia. Then it is possible for us to speak -- and act -- without being throttled by belief systems riddled with unconscious forms of violence.
Can we imagine a society like Bali – where people practice dance, music, painting or sculpture so universally that they have no word for “art?”
In the tribal world, art (as ritual) serves to balance the worlds of the living and the unseen. Healing comes through memory, both in purging grief and guilt and in creatively re-framing one’s story – what James Hillman called “healing fictions.” Mythology tells of art’s ancient connection to memory: it was Memory herself, Mnemosyne, who mated with Zeus and birthed the Muses. Perhaps all art is remembering something that already exists. Artful reconnection to memory reverses the work of Kronos, countering Time’s linear progress with the cyclic imagination of Memory, who knows both past and future. Myth, which provides the basic pattern, connects to story or memoir, which provides the details. Jung said that myth offers us two gifts: a story to live by, and the opportunity to disengage or “dis-identify” from an outmoded pattern and thus re-engage in a different way with the archetypal energies from which our stories arise.
Freeing oneself from old ways of seeing requires the creative imagination. Susan Griffin argues that this is “…a collective activity…What one is willing to see is dependent on what others see…A change in public perception will change the public.” Eventually, the unthinkable becomes thinkable. Ultimately, both individuals and cultures heal by re-membering what we came here to do. Recall The Bacchae’s ambiguous ending: do Agave and Cadmus simply reassemble Pentheus, or do they re-member him as an initiated man? Creative re-membering can result in a similar ending, but with a different meaning closer to the essence of the story. If we choose the initiatory ending, then we choose to welcome the Other back into our bodies, souls and nation. The Stranger becomes the Guest, and his darkness becomes our blessing. It is said that Memory’s daughters, the Muses, collected the scattered limbs of dismembered bodies; it was they – art – who reassemble what the madness of the world rips apart.
We must choose to deliberately involve ourselves in the sacred technologies that indigenous people still offer us. Participation in the evolving forms of ritual will facilitate emergence of the new myths. The purpose of authentic ritual is to re-establish balance, clarify intention and recover the memory in our bones. The old knowledge has never completely left us, but the spirits need to know that we are interested.
My Hope for OWS
Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE
I’ve been doing a lot of radio interviews and book talks lately, and one of the most common discussion topics has been the Occupy movement and its demands. So I’d like to address the deeper issues as I see them. As always, I (and I hope, you) ask, how might we look at this phenomenon not just in political or psychological, but in mythological terms?
We have experienced a rare combination of factors in the past several years. The slow, long-term increase in the disparity between the rich and the rest of us that I documented in my book has become a freight train. America is now essentially a Third World Country in terms of wealth distribution, and more and more of us are finally realizing this.
At the same time, the traditional force that occasionally seemed to work against these trends – the Democratic Party – has revealed itself as merely another face of the single Party of the Wealthy, its leadership as corrupt and as beholden to corporate interests as the Republicans.
And now, so many have lost their faith in Barack Obama as a savior (the traditional, if African-American, hero riding in from the wilderness to clean up the mess within the walls of the city and restore innocence). Indeed, many now recognize him to be, as one writer has said, “the most reactionary Democratic president since Woodrow Wilson.” In other words, we have lost our innocence, once again.
As I have argued in my book, when this disillusionment occurs, as it has many times in our history, great cracks can appear in the Myth of American Innocence. It is a time – the present moment – when the whole country, maybe the whole world, is in a liminal state, between worlds, between myths, so to speak. It is a historical moment of great opportunity, when great changes may be possible. We can move, individually and as a culture, toward deeper, more nuanced appreciation of the tragic mystery of our lives – or we can retreat deeper into ignorance.
History has shown us that when cracks appear in our unconscious and/or unquestioned belief systems (and the stories that convey those beliefs), strong and often violent reaction follows, as is happening in our city streets. The “one percenters” are well aware of the mythic issues at stake. And they know very well how to distract large numbers of older, white, middle-and-working-class people (the people Richard Nixon referred to as the “silent majority) – through fear of the Other. They did it after the 1960s by fomenting racial fear, and they did it after the anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s with 9-11 and its aftermath.
My fear is that the new distraction will be a provocation of war with Iran. And there’s very little any of us can do about that, because Obama appears to be quite willing to go down as a war-monger.
But I want to end this essay with my hope. My hope is that the conversations going on in the public assemblies at the various Occupy encampments are going deeper than economics. Certainly, economic losses – of home, jobs, dreams and perhaps innocence – are driving the very necessary protests about a political system and a tax system that have made the rich so much richer at the expense of almost all of us.
But if the conversations stop at that level, we are missing a great opportunity.
For the first time in maybe forty years, we have the chance to question aspects of the American mythic story that underlie the economic discussion: the myths of progress and consumerism; the myth of unlimited growth (which, said Edward Abbey, is found in Nature only in the cancer cell); the myth of white privilege; the myth of American exceptionalism with regard to the world’s resources; the myth of America’s good intentions and responsibility to police the world and protect it from evil; and many other narratives that we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to live with the gaps between our ideals and our realities.
My hope is that millions of people are beginning with questions such as “Where did my job/house/future/dreams go?” and moving on to questions like “Aren’t notions like full employment and the paradise of consumerism (not to mention a permanent war economy) absolutely inconsistent with a sustainable world and the need to reverse global warming?” and “Why did I value such things and beliefs even if they never satisfied me? Isn’t the repetition of an unsatisfying experience the very definition of addiction?
If they do, then we as a nation may finally be getting into the kind of trouble that we were meant to confront. If we stay with such questions, my hope is that they lead us into much deeper ones, such as “What is the meaning, not of life, but of my life? Why did I come here? How can I support the (re-)emergence of a set of mythic stories that will provide the container for my descendants to flourish when the world we think we know collapses completely and is swept away by the winds of history? What do I owe to my ancestors, to my children’s children (to seven generations), to the spirits of this land?”
NOW we’re talking!
