Submitted by: Mike Spindell, Guest Blogger
Last night Ann Coulter, a person I loathe, appeared on the Bill Maher Show. She was pushing her new book “Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America.” Cringing as I watched her the thought nevertheless occurred to me that “She really believes this crap she sells.” This minor epiphany led me on to other thoughts. The battle in American politics has essentially devolved into a two sided affair between opponents convinced of the “demonic,” to use Ann’s term, nature of their ideological opposites. In this ongoing struggle one can’t merely disagree with us on a given political/societal issue, without our believing them to be hateful and worthy of being despised. Their motivation must undoubtedly be sociopathy and/or undemocratic. I must admit that I myself often feel that way about those who disagree with me and I say this with the rueful knowledge that when I do I am allowing myself to engage in stereotypical behavior.
This has been the American condition almost since its inception and was implicit in Ben Franklin’s question about our ability to maintain our Constitution and the freedoms it provides. In order to begin to find solutions for bridging the gaps between us all in the attempt to govern the body politic, we must first understand the fact that much of this division is the result of conflicting mythologies of what we are as a society. If we can identify the underlying mythologies that guide us, perhaps we can see beyond the constraints that limit our ability to see beyond them and discover basis for true negotiation between apparently irreconcilable differences.
In 1988, I watched a many part conversation Bill Moyers had with a Columbia Professor Joseph Campbell: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell and_the_Power_of_Myth I was fascinated by the man and by the concepts he was teaching. I found it so compelling that I ran out, purchased, and read most of his books. The books that were the most informative to me were “The Masks of God” series and “The Hero With a Thousand Faces”. What Campbell showed was human history was influenced greatly by the mythologies of various political states and ethnicities. These myths indeed reflected not only religious belief but also social and political philosophies. I don’t pretend great expertise in this area to explain it to you cohesively and the topic is one that has produced untold volumes of throughout thousands of years. Suffice it to say that the mythology of a people is a strong influence of not only its behavior, but of its interactions with other believing different myths. I’m sure as a general concept this idea is not a new one to readers here, especially when it comes to religious beliefs.
Stemming from Campbell reading I embarked on rediscovering the books on mythology I had previous read, but with the new perspective of Campbell’s insights. I later discovered: “TheGunfighter Nation: Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America” by Richard Slotkin. Using literature, history and even the movies, Slotkin persuasively posited that much of America’s domestic and foreign policy was dictated by the false mythology created of our frontier expansion, “Wild West” and rugged individualism. This myth was portrayed in the newspapers, literature, “Dime Westerns”, Wild West Shows and later on in the Movies.
The nature of myth is such that it’s ingested not only intellectually, but also viscerally. Seeing Gary Cooper in “High Noon” when I was seven in 1951 influenced my own life greatly and actually dictated some actions years later. John Wayne, a college football star spent WWII making innumerable, heroic war movies, while others such as James Stewart actually fought in action. Yet Wayne remains an iconic American Hero and that is pure, though deeply believed mythology. I would be safe to say that many who consider themselves conservative’s today look up to John Wayne as a role model and a hero. That myth becomes meme and that meme becomes point of view.
We of the left are no different in our choice of heroic figures to follow, mythologizing their activities and persona’s into something heroic. JFK, a man I admire on many levels and who I idolized in his time, was a serial philanderer of such epic proportions as to be pathological. Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, Jerry Rubin, Abby Hoffman were people who my generation followed with veneration and yet in retrospect, given their future lives, were hardly heroic.
We absorb both past and current myths and allow them to cloud our judgment, limiting our ability to make informed political choices, by shutting down our options of reacting to our environment based on the facts at hand and not the reality we perceive colored by the blanket of our mythology. We see people applying “What Would Jesus Do?” to a broad spectrum of possible decisions and yet isn’t even the concept of WWJD, different based upon ones particular Christian denomination. This is true conceptually for most other religions, all of which have subsets of varying belief.
We need to individually work to understand just what myths guide our own actions in order to be able to react appropriately to the to the decisions we need to make in reacting to the environment of life around us. If we can do that honestly perhaps, we can then comprehend what motivates those with which we disagree. Maybe then, in understanding the other’s mythological viewpoints we can find ways to bridge our differences. This is most probably an over optimistic view from the perspective of possibility.
So let me end on a less positive, but perhaps more practical note. We ignore the influence of our surrounding mythologies at our own peril. The human organism has a need to interact with its environment in such a way that it draws the sustenance it needs from that environment. If our perception of that environment is skewed by preconceptions of reality, we are unable to benefit fully from the interactions, to our detriment.
The country today is engaged in a deadly battle with itself. The rage and hostility on each side seems to be growing. There is a conflict of fundamental mythologies, neither of which holds all the answers, yet blinded by its own preconceptions. These types of battles can end in a total victory and concomitant harsh defeat for the loser; a continuing stalemate and ongoing struggle; a total collapse of our society; and/or perhaps understanding and cooperation by the parties leading to a synergy of ideas. I’d much prefer the latter, but I am sanguine about it’s’ possibility.
Mike,
My understanding and reading is that there’s more Sky God than trickster in the amalgamation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahweh_%28Canaanite_deity%29
“Our family car for many years was a dark green DeSoto. I think it was a 1946 or 1948 model.”
Elaine,
In a peculiar coincidence the first car I remember my family owning was a dark green 1947 DeSoto Coupe. My first car was a 1957 DeSoto Fireflight Sedan, Red with a white two-tone flair. The first night I got my drivers license I went out to drag race with it. It wasn’t easy drag racing with a push button transmission but I did it. The car was totaled 4 months later, in a parking lot, hit by a Corvair of all things.
Mike S.,
Our family car for many years was a dark green DeSoto. I think it was a 1946 or 1948 model.
“I’d say that Yahweh’s less of a trickster and more of a compiling of myths included some trickster gods.”
Gyges,
As to your surmise on the origin of the Torah, I don’t think you’re far from the mark. However, in many ways Yahweh does have the characteristics of a trickster. Remember too that tricksters weren’t always necessarily bad characters, such as Krishna for instance. I’m enjoying everyone’s comments. However, OS why is it that you are always so way ahead of me in knowledge? I once had the psychotherapy franchise here and lost it to you.
Now i only briefly had the Joseph Campbell franchise and there you go again. Damn, it aint easy having pretensions of pseudo-intellectuality at my stage of life, only to see its balloon busted.
Elaine,
In 1956 my father who owned a Desoto/Plymouth Dealership, was offered considerable incentives to turn it into an Edsel Dealership. He turned the offer down and so didn’t have to suffer the humiliation of going broke backing Edsel. However, he did go broke with his own dealership and DeSoto and Plymouth are long gone as auto brands. Sometimes even foresight does a person little good.
OS,
I’d say that Yahweh’s less of a trickster and more of a compiling of myths included some trickster gods.
The thing to remember, is that the ancient Israelis hit on this great idea, they took their god with them. Usually, gods just sort of stayed put, and when you moved to a city, you worshiped (among other things) it’s god. That’s why the Arc of the Covenant was always brought to battles; god literally was on their side. That’s why there’s those weird stories about the prophets that seem to imply that there are other gods that Yahweh was stronger than.
So anyway, they went place to place, their god in tow, and they found all these great myths. So they did what every other culture did, they changed the names and retold them, but because they only had one tribal god instead of a pantheon of gods with the same general roles as the other pantheons, they had to force all the aspects of these other gods into their one. Just look at the flood story in Gilgamesh, and then look at Noah’s story; The Sabbath wasn’t really a big deal until after the Babylonian exile; etc.
Elaine, one of the more curious things about the book banning, anti-abortion, anti-family planning crowd is that many of them are the same ones who want government to stay out of their lives. The same ones who brandish the “Don’t tread on me” flag. The cognitive dissonance and hubris is staggering.
America’s Book Banners Are Back in Force
“Groups are organizing around the principle that professional librarians don’t have the expertise, that they’re pushing porn on our kids.”
Miller-McCune Magazine / By Lewis Beale
February 16, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/rights/149924/america's_book_banners_are_back_in_force
On the website Parents Against Bad Books In Schools, some of the works deemed “sensitive, inappropriate and controversial” for K-12 students, even those who are college-bound or in advanced placement classes, include Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
“Bad is not for us to determine,” says the disclaimer on the site. “Bad is what you determine is bad.” One of the purposes of PABBIS.org, the disclaimer goes on to say, is to “provide information related to bad books in schools.”
Of course, “bad” is a relative term, and one person’s obscenity is another person’s Pulitzer or Nobel Prize winner. Yet websites like PABBIS.org and Safelibraries.org have become the vanguard for a recent increase in organized attempts to ban books from public libraries and school curricula.
“There are organized groups on the internet whose purpose is to remove books from libraries because they believe they may be inappropriate for children,” says Deborah Caldwell-Stone of the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association.
“Traditionally, when books are challenged, it’s usually a single parent. But we have found that groups are organizing around the principle that professional librarians don’t have the expertise, that they’re pushing porn on our kids.”
“Groups of parents are getting together and organizing in their communities to ban books,” adds Joan Bertin of the National Coalition Against Censorship. “I think what’s happening is once a book is challenged in one town, people on the same wavelength, it will flag that book for them. For example, we’ve seen three challenges to Sherman Alexie’s teen novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, all within the past three months, two in Missouri, one in Montana.”
Some other recent incidents:
• Self-identified members of the 9.12 Project, a conservative watchdog group launched by Glenn Beck, succeeded in removing Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology from a high school library in Burlington County, N.J., a Philadelphia suburb.
• A fight over library books featuring sex and homosexuality inflamed the town of West Bend, Wis., north of Milwaukee, and led four men to threaten to publicly burn Baby Be-Bop, a novel about a gay teenager.
• In Hillsborough County, Fla., which includes Tampa, parents objected to the inclusion of Augusten Burroughs’ memoir Running With Scissors on the suggested reading list of an English AP course. Out of nine high schools, two banned the book outright, and the other seven either required parental consent to read it or placed a “Mature Reader” label on the front cover.
“Books written for an adult audience are not frequently challenged,” says the ALA’s Caldwell-Stone. “The vast majority that are challenged are written for young people or provided to young people as part of an AP class. [Grounds include] profanity, sexually explicit, simply talking about having sex, or homosexuality. Books have been challenged simply because they had a homosexual character, and there was no sex in them. Unsuited to age group is a big complaint.”
“We have always seen a lot of challenges around sex,” Bertin adds. “Of course, gay and lesbian sex is even a hotter topic. Teenage sex is a big thing. And the sex issue ties in with religion, which goes by the code name of family values — these are not the values we want to teach our children, we don’t want them to know about casual sexual activity.”
This is not to say that some of the most challenged perennials — Huckleberry Finn (long a favorite target of the left, which might be placated by a little Bowdlerization …), Beloved, the Harry Potter books — aren’t still fighting off the censors.
But there has been a sea change in what kinds of books are being attacked, and the ways in which those challenges are handled. Whereas a decade ago, evangelicals seemed to concentrate on removing books about witchcraft and secular humanism from libraries, now the emphasis is definitely on sex, particularly of the homosexual variety. (Although there are always outliers, like Bowlderizing The Cartoons That Shook the World because of panels showing the Prophet Mohammed, or keeping minors from seeing Barbara Ehrenreich’s book on the working poor, Nickel and Dimed, off the shelves because of anti-Christian themes) And the book banners seem to be concentrating on award-winning literature taught in advanced high school classes.
“The fact people say AP high school students shouldn’t be reading Beloved, or Bookseller of Kabul, what I fear this indicates is that these are people who believe no one should be reading these books,” Bertin says. “In their view, these books are the product of a corrupt and immoral society, and they don’t want to have anything to do with it.”
There is, of course, a fine line being danced around here. What’s appropriate for one student might not be for another of the same age. Librarians, teachers and parents can help make these determinations, but, Caldwell-Stone says, “it shouldn’t be one parent deciding what’s appropriate for every 12-year-old. This is a pluralistic society, not everyone shares the same values, and publicly funded schools and libraries have to serve the public.”
Caldwell-Stone says about 25 percent of all challenges are successful, and that challenges often occur without being mentioned in the press because many librarians are afraid of losing their jobs and hesitate to report what’s happening.
The number of known challenges has remained relatively constant. The ALA says they’ve had as many as 700 in a given year, and as few as 380. The numbers generally come out in the 400-500 range (there were 460 challenges in 2009, the latest year for which figures are available). So the problem is not that there’s a major uptick in complaints, it’s that the challengers are starting to organize.
In that sense, they’ve taken a page from the opposition — the annual Banned Books Week was first organized in 1982 to highlight the issue, and it’s currently sponsored by organizations like the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, the Association of American Publishers, the American Society of Journalists and Authors and the National Association of College Stores.
“We never have a problem with people who don’t want their own kid to read a book,” Bertin says. “We have a problem with people who feel these books are corrosive to the culture, and they don’t want them taught in schools. They think it’s immoral and offends their religious values, whether they’re Jewish, Christian or Muslim.”
How sad. This place used to be full of people who at least debated civically. Guess the country really is going down the toilet.
rcampbell wrote:
To your point about writing a letter. Bill Maher has mentioned several times that Coulter is a personal friend of his and I’m pretty sure he owns the show.
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interesting… I don’t watch the show. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are my favorites. I would love to see Ann Coulter as guest on the Colbert Report! That I would watch with relish!
Gene & Otteray,
Memories of my childhood:
I’ve got to agree with Elaine on that one. The Edsel was not an attractive car no matter what gear it was stuck in.
Otteray,
An Edsel? Good grief! Goose poop all over it might be considered an improvement.
I saw one in an Edsel. D was broken so it could not go forward. So it only drove in R and backed into the pond where it got goose poop all over it.
Gene & Otteray,
Tricksters drive around in Karma-Ghias, doncha know?
Gene, I think Dr. Campbell would say that the tricksters around here drive dog-matics. And their Karmas are all in disrepair.
Joseph Campbell on the mythology of the trickster. He points out that even Yahweh is a trickster and gives examples.
Elaine,
Is it true what that say? That a dog-matic is easier to drive than a standard? I love my karma but I’ve been thinking about swapping out the transmission. I’d ask some of the other drivers posting here who obviously drive dog-matics, but it appears they all have right wing steering.
lottakatz,
I used to do an extensive unit on traditional literature in my elementary classroom. One of the most interesting things I discovered was the variety of Cinderella stories that come from different cultures all around the world.
Gyges: “How does Gilgamesh work in that theory? Gilgamesh wasn’t chosen, the gods basically made up a bunch of crap for him to do so he’d stop raping his own citizens.”
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“Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra”
(BIL’s not here, somebody has to make the reference)
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The only thing that made an impression on me from the Gilgamesh legend was that Gilgamesh at one point sought out the only immortal man. That man had been given the task of building a large boat and gathering up pairs of animals and saving them from a great, world destroying flood.
Myths that have their roots in history have always seemed to me to be oral histories, made worth remembering and retelling by tweaking with heroic acts. Rousing good tales (encompassing events that may well summaries of events separated in time) crafted and passed down from the first flickering of civilization.
The Gilgamesh epic has elements, like the great world-killing flood, that must be incredibly old. Writing was new when the epic was written so the elements therein that were stated to be old were perhaps some of the earliest and most profoundly memorable events in human history. The flood story could well be the greatly condensed record of the Ice melt from the last ice age. Homo sapiens were around and would notice over time, that up to about about 60 meters of water was again inundating the land, in spurts, over about 10,000 years. It’s something that would be memorialized.