American Mythology

The version of patriotism that my upbringing handed me was a neatly wrapped narrative package, filled with pride, virtue, and a sense of cultural accomplishment:

<Upbringing Patriotism>

In that version, God-fearing people were willing to give up everything they had in Europe...even in the face of death... to escape religious oppression, and come to a wild, unknown continent, in order to practice their beliefs in freedom. When they arrived, they weathered hardships, hostile natives, starvation, etc. to establish a "city on a hill"...a bastion of Judeo-Christian principles that the world would look to.

In that version, sure...America has had a few bumps in the road. But the bumps were isolated incidents that:

1) don't negate the overwhelming victory that we've had as a beacon of freedom and democracy in the world, and…

2) the bumps are caused directly because of our turning away from those same Judeo-Christian principles that are our wise, benevolent founding fathers wrote into the Constitution.

If only America could just return to the values of its Judeo-Christian heritage, many of our problems would be instantly solved.

In that version, the strength of our democracy comes because of men that are something like a Christian John Wayne. Strong, fiercely independent, faith-based, tough exterior, willing to do violence, but only in defense of "me and mine."

Our military was full of people that were knowingly, consciously putting their lives on the line every day for the noble ideal of freedom from tyranny and oppression.

It was the real patriots who knew that "freedom isn't free", and voted to uphold traditional, conservative values that would keep our country strong.

</Upbringing Patriotism>

That whole ideology is, of course, mythology. But nobody that I grew up with treated it as anything other than objective reality.

And, in a way, I get it. It's a powerful mythology. It's got curb appeal. You can see yourself wanting to live in that.

I've talked, at length, in other posts about some of the key moments of my journey that deeply shook the foundations of that framework. But even still, that foundation was deeply entrenched. It required numerous mortal blows of stark reality to finally die.

It took years of visceral, first hand experiences to finally recognize that the reality of the American experiment is fragile, broken, and at all times precariously in the balance.

When I believed the myth, I had a few, at-the-ready defenses on the occasion of hearing someone dare try to contradict the patriotism I had been handed.

One that I often said was "why do you hate America so much??"

It made so much sense to me at the time, and also it felt like a great zinger "gotcha" comeback. If the mythology I was given was true, then to deeply criticize America over a few minor stumbles seemed like a completely disproportionate reaction that could only come from malicious hatred of what we stand for.

And that's the thing: patriotism, much like religion, is often a patchwork of loosely connected basic facts, common sense-y ideas, and feelings, held together with the threads of family/cultural tradition, and unexamined assumptions about things you've never really thought deeply about.

You get to feel like you know a lot about the subject, while knowing very little factual detail about any of it.

Pull any of those threads, in any sort of systematic way, and the whole damn quilt falls apart rapidly.

When I began to look at some of the details of American history in a systematic way, I had to mourn the death of the mythology.

The mourning happened in phases. None of it was fun.

It shook my identity as an American to lose that mythos.

In some ways, I still haven't recovered that sense of pride that I once had. It may never come back. That's ok.

I care about truth and objective reality.

Caring about what America should be, means that you have to care about what it actually is right now.

And it's impossible to care about what it is right now if all you can see is mythology.