Mythologies
Mythologies
Sugarplum-tuckered from a day
of cookie-making and present-shaking, I transfixed bleary eyes upon the night
sky on December 24, 1980. I could barely
make out the red-nosed smear across the cool heavens. Yet, I knew, unflinchingly,
that it was there: the glowing streak was as unmistakably real as the Santa who
I was sure had been watching my naughty-and-niceness for the previous five
years.
At some point, we stopped
believing in our myths.
With a childlike optimism, we
once underwrote our hopefulness with a belief in the goodness of our
forebears—of our American myths. We
contented ourselves that we could believe in believing; that, in that single act,
we shared a commonality. We believed—some called it faith and others called it
hope—that we could progress along a trajectory toward a not-too-far-off
perfection. We believed that we were special, that we could leverage a Declaration, a Constitution, a Proclamation,
an Ask-not, and a Time for Choosing into a collection of
secular scriptures upon which we could base our collective identity. We
believed in heroes. We invested in the mythology of a straight line from Jesus
to Washington to Lincoln to Kennedy to Reagan to Obama.
We were bound together by our
myths: our innocent, optimistic beliefs in common history, common purpose and
common future. In this commonality, we proclaimed our exceptionality as a
people. We underwrote this exceptionality with self-confirming institutions:
strong military, beneficent government, thrilling sport, culture-affirming
media: America.
Santa, before we could
understand virgin-birth or the travails of martyrdom, is how many of us learned
to believe. He was our first foray into mythology. He was, for many of us, also
the first myth we’d reject: our first assertion of self-garnered knowledge in
the face of patriarchal wisdom. And then, we grew up. We learned: we came in
contact with others outside of our immediate spheres and we learned about
others’ myths. We learned about Maccabean miracles, we learned about Muhammed’s
ministries. We learned that the we
that saw the world through common eyes included communities that stretched
beyond nearby neighborhoods toward the limitlessness of a vast multiverse. We
learned that to those for whom our myths were foreign, we were “others.”
We raced from childhood into
adolescence; we slouched into adulthood.
Even as Edith Hamilton’s
studies fell into the trash-heap of ninth grade English reading lists, so too
have the myths of America’s exceptionality fallen into 2017 America’s historical
reappraisals. Multiplied within the endless halls of reflections that the
twenty-first century has forced upon us, mythology has fractured like a broken
mirror. In our broader we, Americans
now understand that our scriptures are made whole with the stories in which
there are no cherry trees; we are made whole by recognizing a history that
includes Trails of Tears and slavery and Jim Crow. Disappointments fill in the
shared spaces within our mythologies.
New information enriched our
myths. We found, as they had always been there, heroes to complete our
mythology: Crispus Attucks, Harriet Tubman, Walt Whitman, Booker T. Washington,
Eleanor Roosevelt, Harvey Milk, Martin Luther King. Unfortunately, for some,
this enriching-of-myth was misunderstood as an assault on commonality. Equally
unfortunate, for others, it was misunderstood as a reason to stop believing in
anything. The rejection of our myths, whether overdetermined or discarded, has
scattered us with a freedom approaching anarchy: listless, splintered tribes
wandering a vast and uncertain digital plain. We are left without sincere myths
to pass on. We are left with no village for our children: no commingled past, a
desolate presence, a hopeless future.
Myths need to rise above
politics and partisanship. They need to be inclusive, rooted in the best of who
we are, like cherry trees and Leaves of
Grass; like Dreams of standing
arm-locked with neighbors and former oppressors, singing spirituals: “Free at
last, free at last.”
We need to re-apprehend the
broken mirror image as a prism. We need to re-empower childlike belief. We need
to reinforce the building blocks of innocence and optimism. We need our myths
for our children and for their children. We need to let them see us believe, to
let them know that believing in things larger than ourselves is just fine. We
need to let them know that myths, like our bodies and our ideas and our nation,
evolve in an ether of progress.
Especially now, we need
myths.
Let’s remind ourselves, this
holiday season and beyond—for ourselves and our posterity—what it was like to
believe in flying red-nosed reindeer, naughty-and-nice lists, and an
exceptional America.
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