My substack.com colleague Greg Fishbone just published a short essay about politics and American mythology and I wanted to respond, or at least branch off, in a way that would get too long in a comment on Greg’s newsletter.
TL/DR types: This is going to be nerdy and wonky, and it might get a little political. Or not political enough. Or both.
I am very particular about the definition of the words myth, myths, and mythology. It is extremely easy to confuse and conflate the word myth, for example, as a simple lie (“That’s a myth. The truth is…”) with its definition as a shared story that reinforces the values of a particular culture.
The former definition is negative. It implies deception, ignorance, and/or malicious intent.
The latter is neutral. It is simply a description of what a story does.
Plato, the philosopher, popularized the idea of a myth as a lie. He didn’t like Greek myths with their accounts of gods who behaved badly. He hated that nannies would terrorize children with horror stories about the Lamia, a demon who stole naughty children from their beds.
As the world progressed to the present day, this definition persisted.
So when we talk about American mythology, I like to be careful about what I mean.
It’s true that the American political ethos has been founded on a series of propositions, such as that all people are created equal and have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I don’t call these propositions myths. I call them ideals, which have not yet been realized.
And, as Greg rightly says in his essay, there is a divide in America now over to what degree the ideals have been realized, and how they should be realized.
So I’d like to refocus. What is American mythology? What is an American myth? And how does all this relate to the present political moment?
American mythology, to me, is a complex of shared tales (fictional narratives, mostly) that we all—conservative and liberal—agree reinforces our values and tells us who we are.
I’ll give you examples. Americans adore happy endings to stories. We adore resurrection—the idea of the best outcome happening after all seems lost. This type of story is ubiquitous in American popular culture. I always think of that moment in the original Jungle Book movie where Baloo the bear comes back to life after it appears that the tiger Shere Khan has killed him, but you can take your pick.
We love underdogs and second-chance heroes who triumph against all odds. I like The Natural for that.
We love ordinary people who expose the rot at the top. Remember that old movie (and book) The Firm? More about that presently.
We love children, dogs, and romance. We’re quite sentimental that way. Hello, Air Bud.
Cats, too.
And here is another important, really crucial aspect of American mythology: our stories tell the tale that we are a community. Red or yellow, black or white, we are precious in God’s sight. We want to believe that discrimination does not exist. We want to believe that everyone is indeed created equal and does have that aforementioned equal chance at life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. There’s even a movie called The Pursuit of Happyness that reinforces that value.
But that’s where the consensus breaks down, and where Greg’s use of the term mythology and mine begin to intersect.
Some of us believe we are a community with equality. A lot of us do not.
And our stories are shifting and becoming less predictable because of the divide.
Some of us want the stories we tell in popular culture—movies, TV shows, books—to include those who have been traditionally excluded from our stories.
Then there are others who think that there’s no reason to change anything about our stories, whether it’s the identity of those who play the parts or the details of the stories themselves, because nothing is broken in the first place.
And as Hollywood and Disney and Netflix and a whole bunch of other content creators have begun to move toward more diverse stories, the anger on the other side has increased.
My conclusion? American mythology is broken, at least in this one (very important, maybe most important) area.
And though I sort of mourn that, I don’t think it’s a bad thing.
And I think it will be fixed.
I recently rewatched The Firm on Netflix. It is from 1993, a time of great optimism in America. The Berlin Wall had come down; the Soviet Union had been dissolved. We were going to enjoy a “peace dividend” where government resources for so long devoted to the deterrence of nuclear war would be repurposed. In the southern United States, where I lived at the time, there was a great groundswell of hope for something called the New South. This would be a place where racial inequity would be put away and the rich traditions of language and place would be celebrated.
This was the time when we discovered shrimp and grits and fried green tomatoes. When we visited the spice market in Charleston, South Carolina where Black women entrepreneurs called for shoppers to “ease on down the road” and see what they had on offer. This was the time when Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary both horrified us and made us proud as we listened to the reassuring, polished turns of phrase of the Mississippian scholar Shelby Foote.
And The Firm, set in Memphis, Tennessee, a movie in which Black people appeared mainly as servants and musicians, told us that the evil lawyers of Bendini, Lambert, and Locke, with their deliciously evil henchman, Wilford Brimley (who hawked oatmeal on television), were ultimately doomed by the cooperation of the mob, an adulterous secretary played by Holly Hunter, and the adulterous underdog hero, Tom Cruise, with absolutely essential assistance from his furious but loyal wife, southern belle Jeanne Tripplehorn.
How we loved The Firm, and the New South, and community.
Of course, smack dab in the middle of all that optimism—1992—we had Rodney King.
That was America’s wake-up call that racial equity was not even close to being a reality. The beating of a Black man by police officers wasn’t just an isolated incident in a time of progress. It was symptomatic of systemic inequality which the riots in Los Angeles violently exposed.
We should have changed then. We didn’t. We retreated into mythology. The Firm. And plenty of other movies like it.
This has been a long time coming, this reckoning with American mythology and American ideals. We do have to face this now. Smarter people than I are charting the course. I just want to say that as a mythologist, I do think there are good things about our mythology that I want to see preserved.
Happy endings. Resurrection. Dogs and cats. Romance. Community.
But also as a mythologist, I want to say I am not in favor of lies.
We are no longer telling ourselves that America is okay the way it is. That is all to the good.
But here is my hope: that the good things about American mythology—the resurrection and the romance and all the rest—will carry us through to a time where stories reflect both our values and real life. I think there is real power in American mythology, positive power.
It’s not going to be easy. But I’ll do my part. You’ll do yours. And we’ll come out better on the other side.