American myth and reality

After I characterised various contemporary European myths (Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, English, German and Swedish) in the previous post and found them to be both Christian in nature, though deficient, and an accurate guide to modern history, let us take a look at the American situation.

The American myth is centered on a hero who, by his exemplarity, thwarts an attack on the well-being of society.

That is the formula. And when I describe it in the general way associated with the dimensions of history, it reads like this:

1. the unfolding of the political will is elementary,
2. there's a danger of adapting to evil and
3. the maintenance of the political will is the important thing.
   

But that is exactly how I described the ancient Greek myths as opposed to the Christian understanding of life, the only difference being that in the American myth the adaptation to evil is always the consequence of cowing to it, whereas in the Greek myths evil usually enters by seduction.

Of course, this formula may create at times very Christian stories, like It's a Wonderful Life, and that film may perhaps also be described by another formula, but if we look for its truest manifestation, we find the Western and in particular, let's say, True Grit, and whereas It's a Wonderful Life is set before a background of decades of small-town life, True Grit is set before a background of timeless rock.

The settlers usually are good Christian people, True Grit's (open) focus on freemasonry is an exception, but they are really just the herd a hero in the Greek style looks after, often not even understanding what's at stake, the peace, the beauty, the purity of the land, as if the concept of closure was revolutionary in the Old West.

Now, having established this, we do see a reflection of the American myth in American history, the wars, the death penalty, but that reflection is very incomplete, whereas, when you know the contemporary European national myths, you know the history of those nations down to the hopes of the people.

The reason for this is of course that the European myths include the unfolding of the political will, though in the case of England, Germany and Sweden in a semiconscious or even coincidental way, so that the history of those nations naturally arises from their myths, but since bare rock gives little indication of how political will unfolds, the unfolding of the political will of the United States is not covered by their myth.

But just as of course, Christianity is still there to fill that void. Only, if you look at the concrete unfolding, Christianity seems to be less responsible than something else, some bastardisation of contemporary European myths, mixed together in impossible ways, because, as I already stated in the previous post, they all have their distinct requirements to make their approach work. Well, I was in the Epcot center in 1986, and even then, 12 years old, I felt that it expressed a particularly stupid American idea of cultural significance. When I last visited the States in 1994, I considered Americans to be apolitical on the whole, yet it doesn't feel like it: Somehow, policies are being born there.