|
America without the myths
|
by Herb Ruhs, MD, Unknown News
Nov. 8, 2005
Granted, it is pretty unnerving to watch the buzzards circling lower and lower over our country. I certainly understand the reluctance of many to notice this fact. Scares the shit out of me too.
I try to understand the super patriot zealotry of many of us. Circling the wagons in a situation like this is a natural response.
I even try to commiserate with the religiously deranged. With the four horsemen thundering up on us, I can understand the urge of some to hope for Divine salvation.
On the other hand, if there is to be any real hope for us, and probably for most of life on Earth, we can not continue to support the utility of denying facts. Continued denial is driving us crazy. It is setting us against each other when unity and cooperation is, if not sufficient, then at least necessary for any vision of the future that is not phantasmagoric.
In Politics of the Family, by R. D. Lang (in one of his books anyway, but I am pretty sure this is the one), he describes a traditional approach to mental illness in Polynesian societies. The idea was to bring the whole extended family of the deranged person down to the beach, and get them to start telling their secrets. If the insane person did not revert to sanity during this process then the belief was that someone was still holding out. No-one was allowed to leave the beach, no matter how long it took, until the sanity of the person was restored.
As a nation, we are in a similar position. If we keep believing in the ever-growing avalanche of lies about who we are as a people and what our government has been doing in our name, with our cooperation, then we will continue to sink into raving lunacy and the vultures will pick our bones.
It probably does not matter where you choose to start unraveling this warm sweater of lies, but I will try to make a few suggestions: I think the best approach is to avoid trying to chip away at the lies that keep surfacing, like turds in a cesspool, from current events -- too easy to get lost in the overgrowth of conflicting detail. Better to go to the root of the problem.
Current-day lies are all derivative of lies taught in our history books to suggestible school children and at American Legion rallies. Useful insights into the process of systematic lying in service of national myths can be gained from the book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen. Consistent with Loewen's approach, I suggest you start the unravelling by examining some of the core myths of our culture.
Myths are big lies that serve to cover up or distract us from the less appealing aspects of our unfolding reality. If we are to regain our sanity, I suggest that we begin the process of demythologizing our history as a nation. We will all be better off once we face the pain and get through the process of accepting reality as it is.
Contrary to how we were conditioned to believe, there is plenty to love about America without the myths. We don't need to believe lies to ensure our patriotism. We need to protest being systematically lied to, in order to ensure that we remain a nation.
For those just beginning a journey into the reality of American history I suggest reading A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, or A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence, by Ray Raphael. War is a Racket by General Smedly Butler is a good choice of departure point as well, especially for those of a non-pacifist persuasion.
The point is, that once you start reading real history it is likely to become a habit. Luckily, for the reading challenged, there are a whole host of great documentaries now available as well. I especially recommend The Corporation.
There is a lot of actual good in American History that has been buried by the con men who serve the powerful. Learning about the good things in our past can serve to help us retain our self respect as we begin to examine the massive pack of lies that we have been fed over the years. But please do not do this exploration in private. Discuss what you find with neighbors, friends and family.
First and foremost on our list of debunking targets should be the myth of national superiority, sometimes euphemistically called "American exceptionalism."
Anyone who has lived with other peoples of the world realizes that "Americans" (by this I mean US citizens of course, but I will in this case bow to the arrogant convention of ignoring all the other Americans in the hemisphere for the sake of clarity) are essentially the same as people elsewhere in the world. Neither better, nor worse.
The American dominance that characterized the previous century, and which is falling apart now, was made possible by amazing good luck, nothing else. This is good news. Belief in the crazy-making myth of superiority creates a vulnerability that makes us easy victims of the long sequence of confidence games that has characterized American history. Divine destiny my ass. More like "believe that we are robbing and enslaving for your benefit, because you deserve it."
If you can succeed in getting that myth out of your head, then I suggest that you move on to the myth that our country has been singled out as the chosen people to bring "democracy and progress" to the rest of the world.
I have to admit, some of the wording in our founding documents, particularly the Declaration of Independence, are great statements of humanistic values, but the walk does not match the talk. We embarked on a national crusade to bring liberty and justice to all at the same time that we were hungry for slaves and indentured servants (who we treated worse than slaves by the way) to fuel an economy based on genocidal ethnic cleansing of native peoples and the expropriation of their land.
When, during the presidency of that great white father of liberty, Thomas Jefferson, the Haitian people liberated themselves from colonial oppression, we sent troops down there to reestablish oppression lest our blacks get the wrong idea about freedom. That move set the tradition of American foreign policy on a relentless course of hypocrisy that our government, supported by the people, has pursued ever since.
It really does not matter what path you choose to take. "In God we trust?" More like "The Trusts are God." "One nation under God?" More like, "Don't blame us, God did it." "Give us your huddled masses yearning to be free?" More like, “We need cheap labor we can abuse.” And so forth.
This is the context from which I digest the news. Torture? Good thing we are getting around to admitting it. We tortured virtually all the people we made war on throughout history, especially if they were not white. Try to remember the use of crank field telephones to shock the genitals of captured Vietnamese soldiers. Try to remember the practice of throwing them out of helicopters. Torture is a military practice that goes way back, the Geneva Convention is new. Representatives of our government signed it, they just haven't gotten around to following it.
And what about lynching? Torture and mutilation were routine parts of the history of lynching, and it was done in a party atmosphere that included the kids. "Family entertainment" has always featured scenes of terror, torture and mass murder. Hollywood was built on it.
Going to war on false pretexts? Again, routine. Remember the Maine. Remember Pearl Harbor. Remember the Tonkin Gulf. Realize that what we have a chance of actually knowing about secret agendas is only a sliver of the mighty oak that is the totality of deception practiced by our leaders on the citizenry. The specific lies are not important. The practice of deception is the important feature here, and we need to show we don't like being made fools of if we expect to be told the truth.
Iraq? The genocidal fury demonstrated there by our military has a long history. Wounded Knee. The Philippines. Carpet bombing of cities. The use of the nuclear bombs in Japan. It is a tradition.
The "founding fathers" (there actually were women involved) were not just whistling Dixie when they warned against having a standing army. They understood the political implications of creating a permanent war footing. We are experiencing the consequences of not getting the point they tried to make.
How about the government feeding propaganda to the public to manipulate public opinion to support senseless wars? Read about World War I. How was it that forces that favored not entering the war came to be called "isolationist" rather than peace-loving? How was it that we tolerated, even then, the jailing of dissidents? Why did Lincoln suspend the right of habius corpus?
Nothing in the above complaints is peculiar to America. All governments lie. All peoples believe better of themselves than can be fully supported by the facts.
No, our national character is neither as good as we believe, nor as bad as we suspect. If there is something that makes Americans unique, it is the accumulated effects of good fortune that led to a certain degree of self-centeredness and sense of entitlement that has left us particularly blind to our own faults. These are just human failings, not national ones. National character is just human character that has been put through the meat-grinder of history.
So, I'm OK, and your OK. What we allow our government and our powerful to do, and have been allowing them to do for a very long time, is not OK.
© by the author.
What do you think?
|
|
Contrary to how we were conditioned to believe, there is plenty to love about America without the myths.
We don't need to believe lies to ensure our patriotism.
We need to protest being systematically lied to, in order to ensure that we remain a nation.
|
|
|
Dr. Herb Ruhs & grandson
|
Previous articles by this author:
To dream the impossible dream
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Refusing to see the obvious
by Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
with comments by Herb Ruhs, MD
What can we do? Rhetorically speaking, that is.
by Herb Ruhs, MD, Unknown News
Banned in Cloverdale, by Herb Ruhs, MD
All of us are being fatally poisoned
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Daubert is the most influential Supreme Court ruling you've never heard of
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Enough already
by Herb Ruhs, MD, Unknown News
War is sometimes justified, often not, but always insane
by Herb Ruhs, MD
The bad news is the same as the good news
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Trying to control your emotions "can make you pretty stupid"
by Herb Ruhs, MD
The gangsters' mentality
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Nietzsche, New Orleans, and 'Nam
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Four decades in five minutes
by Herb Ruhs, MD
The masquerade of "civilization"
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Habits of successful modern cannibals
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Face these horrors with acceptance, equanimity, humor
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Yet another, higher dose of pain
by Herb Ruhs, MD
The war of one against all:
The roots of our enslavement
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Doctors, medicine, hospitals, and the rest of the story
by Herb Ruhs, MD
System of privilege expands in scope and overall power
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Highway robbery turns out to be legal after all
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Class warfare, anyone?
Why class war is not a fiction but a fixture of our lives
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Why the little-known news is the most important
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Why "Free Speech" does not matter
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Big pharma
by Herb Ruhs, MD
The genius fish and other comments
by Herb Ruhs, MD
When all else fails, try the truth
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Childhood abuse and the role it plays in maintaining coercive power
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Murder by medical device
by Herb Ruhs, MD
|
|
I have to admit, some of the wording in our founding documents, particularly the Declaration of Independence, are great statements of humanistic values, but the walk does not match the talk.
We embarked on a national crusade to bring liberty and justice to all at the same time that we were hungry for slaves and indentured servants (who we treated worse than slaves by the way) to fuel an economy based on genocidal ethnic cleansing of native peoples and the expropriation of their land.
|
|
|
|
