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Thursday, November 03, 2005
Jay Gatsby and Willy Loman
American Myths
By Davidson LoehrIn one of the shortest sermons ever delivered, and one of the most famous, the Buddha said "All I do is sit by the river, selling river water."
I think it's one of the most profound revelations of the secret of nearly all wisdom: that nothing is hidden, that we just need to be reminded of things we already knew, so that perhaps this time we will awaken, and act.
I wish more people would attend memorial services. Because if they did, and if they heard the memories and stories people get up to tell about the person who has died, they would realize that we know exactly what is right and wrong, good and bad. We know exactly how a noble life is to be judged. Not by might, arrogance, wealth or intimidation, but by the kinds of things every religion has always preached: compassion, understanding, peace, love. We don't really fool people. That's the river water, and every good preacher makes their living by selling it.
So as we're going to talk a little about the American myths, I need to say that we can talk about them, but you already know what's wrong with them, and how life would look if we were living it more wisely.
Every society has basic stories that define it, and it isn't hard to list some of the deepest myths of America. I think there are four basic myths.
First is our fascination with newness. We have been the "New World" since at least 1492, but "newness" is a central part of who we are. To Americans, it has always symbolized an improved version of what came before. They called this the New World, and named their settlements New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New England. When they went west two centuries later, they named a patch of desert New Mexico.
If you read studies of traditional cultures, you find that all of them would regard this idea that "new" means "improved" as completely insane. Most societies look to the wisdom of the ages, the wisdom of their elders, in a way Americans haven't for a long time. If new means better, than old begins to mean outmoded and irrelevant. And if you don't think old means irrelevant, ask a dozen people over seventy how they feel our society regards them. We don't have elders to whom we routinely look for wisdom that surpasses our own.
The second part of the American story is about Success and Capitalism; and in America they are also tied to Salvation, for one of the most fundamental equations of American mythology is the simple formula that "wealth = worth."
Our myth of success is probably the most important myth in American history. It was given its most powerful expression during the 19th century through the many stories written by Horatio Alger (1832-1898), the chief prophet of our American Success myth. Take just one of his stories, a story called "Struggling Upward or Luke Larkins' Luck." You have probably never heard of it. But a century ago, it sold fifty million copies in paperback and was read by millions more. That means that almost all of the adult population of the United States a hundred and thirty years ago bought or read that one little book. And Alger wrote over 134 books. I don't think you can overstate the influence of a book read by virtually every adult in America, and don't think we have had any book to match it since then.
Horatio Alger was a Unitarian minister in the 1860s. He was also a pedophile who took street children with him on his travels as sexual toys.
A third part of our American myth is our radical individualism. This is the country of Lone Rangers. The myth of the lone cowboy is one of our most powerful myths. We could talk about this for hours, but this is a point that hardly needs reinforcing in Texas.
The fourth part of our American myth that I want to consider is our imperialism.
From the start, the Pilgrims saw themselves as God's chosen people, the faithful remnant come to the New Eden to create the New Jerusalem, with a mandate from God to extend the kingdom of Christ, to extend it across the whole new world, to bring civilization to this wilderness. In the 19th century, mythic heroes including Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, Mike Fink, Calamity Jane, even Custer and Buffalo Bill saw themselves as God's agents appointed to civilize the west. Buffalo Bill believed he stood between civilization and savagery.
Officially, our imperialism goes back at least to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which was quickly and repeatedly interpreted to mean that we could advance our economic interests aggressively in this hemisphere, which we have done ever since.
These parts of our script have been with us for a very long time. But things have not been good for the American Dream for quite awhile, at any of these four levels.
First, our addiction to the new has been frustrated at many points. We no longer have any new frontiers, no wildernesses left to take over or move on to. Forty years ago, the TV series "Star Trek" tried to satisfy our wanderlust by defining "Space" as "the final frontier," sending our Lone Rangers off in space ships. But the frontier metaphor had already worn thin when we settled California over a century ago. And now the last of the "Star Trek" programs is being cancelled, and the last installment of the "Star Wars" movies has been finished – another series of cowboys on the space frontier.
Here's an example of how completely we have adopted an imperialistic attitude toward the rest of the world. Think about this, if you will. Fifteen years ago, we essentially kidnapped the president of another country and brought him to this country to stand trial in a drug deal which had also involved agencies of our own government connected with the Iran-Contra affairs. We arrested him after a coup attempt we supported failed to kill him.
If you Google Noriega's name, the third entry shows a mug shot of him after we arrested him. The caption underneath reads, "Manuel Noriega, former president of Panama, rescued by American marines for incarceration in the United States." Now think about this. If Iraqis invaded the United States, kidnapped our president and took him back to put in an Iraqi prison for causing the deaths of over 100,000 Iraqis in the past few years, how would you look at a caption of his mugshot that read, "George W. Bush, former president of the United States, rescued by Iraqi soldiers for incarceration in Iraq"? We have an attitude toward all other nations that we would find arrogant and criminal if they expressed it toward us. As almost anyone from other countries can tell you – even Canadians – this attitude is 100% American.
We have presumed the right to meddle in Middle Eastern oil pricing for eighty years, and assume that our actions must be justified because we want cheap oil. But think about this. Imagine Saudi Arabia or Russia sending troops into Kansas to regulate the price of wheat because they want cheap food. We have invaded half a dozen tiny countries in the past decade, taking armed forces there as though we had a divine right to do so. We have no such divine right. We never have.
Further, our imperialism is embarrassed by the growing awareness that we are not even the best at very many things any more, or anywhere near it. Our education is near the bottom of the industrialized countries. Our infant mortality rate is the highest in the developed world, our illiteracy rates are soaring, our cars are second-rate, we are barely in the running in televisions, stereos, and a dozen other items. Our family structures seem ineffective, and both in politics and in religion we have seen the norm moving steadily away from honesty and toward hypocrisy.
We murder fifty times as many of our fellow citizens as either the Swedes or the British do. We are a superficially religious society, but in 1989 a special edition of Life magazine conducted a survey showing that 70% of our citizens believed in an active spirit of evil they called the devil, and only 40% of them believed in a God. I'm betting that's a far more honest and accurate poll than all the happy-face polls insisting that 90% of Americans "believe in God" (without ever asking people what they mean by the word 'God'). The national mood increasingly favors not empowered citizens, but obedient ones. Well, this list can and will go on, but you can continue it on your own.
A third level of our American Dream has involved our radical individualism, which has led us into another blind alley, as our Lone Rangers have become mostly lonely rangers. There is an interesting medical syndrome that can serve as a metaphor for our predicament today. It is the syndrome in human babies known as the "failure to thrive" syndrome. It means that babies who are left alone without being picked up, held, and touched by others can die. They cannot live as isolated individuals, and neither can we. Our emphasis on individualism and our accompanying dismissal of the responsibilities we owe the larger society are way out of touch with the reality of human life, and we are paying the price for it. Psychological depression is ten times as common now as it was before WWII, and since the 1960s our dominant psychological problems have been narcissistic personality disorders. We too are failing to thrive, both as individuals and as a society.
In the fourth part of the American myth, our equation of financial success with personal value, of wealth and worth, there is really nothing new at all. The American philosopher William James spoke of Success as our "bitch goddess" a hundred years ago. But even then this was not a new observation. The ancient Hebrews worshipped the golden calf, and were scolded for it by their prophets. The prophet Amos accused his contemporaries of making people secondary to profits: of selling the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes. Jesus was clear in his own teachings that you can either worship God or money, but not both, and that it would be easier to get a rope through the eye of a needle than to get a rich man into heaven.
As individuals, we all know this. It isn't news. And talking about it is like sitting by the river, selling river water. Most of that selling river water business has been done by our poets, artists and professional storytellers. When you look back into the first few decades of the 20th century, it is surprising just how accurately the failings of the American Dream were named, and in very famous books, all of which also became movies.
When Arthur Miller wrote "Death of a Salesman" in 1949, he focused on the fact that capitalism is about selling both things and people: that to be a successful salesman you must sell not only your product but also yourself. That is what his character Willy Loman did. He sold himself in pursuit of the American Dream, but on a deeper level he had put his faith in the American Dream to give his life meaning, to make him whole - or, in religious jargon, to grant him salvation. It could not do it, and Willy Loman's suicide was the death of a lost and hopeless soul, abandoned by its god. In the end, at a funeral hardly anybody came to, his eulogy was really summed up in just two phrases: "He was the best-liked," and "He never knew who he was." I am reminded of Jesus's asking what a man gained if he gained the whole world and lost his soul. Poor Willy never even gained the world.
A decade earlier, John Steinbeck wrote his powerful book "The Grapes of Wrath." Steinbeck's variation on the theme of critiquing the American Dream was different from Arthur Miller's, but no less devastating: it is a capitalistic dream achievable by only a tiny percentage of people, he said, whose power and greed will impoverish the overwhelming majority of the rest.
This is even more true today than it was in the late 1930s. During the past dozen years, the gap between the rich and the poor has become a chasm, as we have become a two-tiered society in which the richest 10% of our people control well over 90% of our wealth, a proportion more lopsided than at any time in the history of this nation. The salvation offered by the American Dream is increasingly a salvation available only to the priests and priestesses of capitalism, carried on the backs of an immense number of the masses.
At the end of his book, Steinbeck offered his solution in a form so graphic and powerful it may always fill theaters with sobbing, as it did when I saw it. Here are poor and desperate people who were merely used as dupes by those few who controlled the American Dream, who have been driven against the wall with nothing and no one to care for them but each other. And so the final scene has a young mother whose baby was born dead, now offering her milk to a starving man: a man she did not even know, except to know him as another human being in need.
Here is the "milk of human kindness" in its most elemental and heart-wrenching form. Steinbeck is saying that the kind of salvation we most dearly need cannot come from the American Dream or from economic success. It comes only from reaching out to the strangers around us and offering them what we have to share. This is river water. Every religion has sold it.
And a decade before John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald offered an even more fundamental criticism of this American Dream in his book "The Great Gatsby," which many have called the greatest American novel of the 20th century. As Steinbeck saw that the salvation held out by the American Dream is an illusion for all but a very few, Fitzgerald saw that even for the very few, it is still an illusion, for it can not save anyone.
Gatsby had it all, and he had nothing of value because he had lost his soul: he had lost his integrity, his authenticity. That is the reward for worshiping false idols, as it has always been. That is the reward for spending a human life in the service of values and ideals that cannot grant life. As Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" ended with a death and a funeral, as "Grapes of Wrath" ended after the death of both a baby and the dream that the baby had symbolized, so "The Great Gatsby" ended with a death and a funeral - a funeral to which nobody came.
The novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote a short story called "Two Old Men" about salvation, about wholeness, about where the sacred dimension of life is to be found, about the way in which life is given its most enduring meaning. Tolstoy's story is not well known, but it is full of river water.
In this story, two old men decide to go on a pilgrimage to worship God at Jerusalem. On the way they meet a poor family near starvation. One of the old men goes on to the Holy Land the next morning, the other stays to do what he can to help the family. Emergency help becomes long-term aid, as he stays with them for months. He helps them plant crops, cooks meals for them, and spends all his money buying them what they need. Finally, months later, the family has recovered and the old man, his money gone, returns home.
The first man, now back from the Holy Land, swears he saw the other man in Jerusalem, surrounded by a halo-like glow and crowds of admirers. The second man, whose money and energy were spent helping the poor family and who never made it to Jerusalem, just changed the subject. The first old man, you could say, visited the Holy Land as a tourist; the second man had become holy. The first sought the sacred as a separate thing, the second reached out to others, gave of himself, and turned the place in which he found himself into holy ground.
This is like the last scene in "The Grapes of Wrath": someone reaching out to offer the milk of human kindness to a stranger. Like the two old men in Tolstoy's story, Steinbeck's characters found nothing at the end of their journey but people like themselves: alone and in need, with little to share but their humanity. And so they reached out and turned a small spot on this earth into a momentary shrine where kindness overflowed and strangers were nourished. Jesus could not have said it any more clearly, nor could the prophet Amos, nor Mohammad.
This has been the message of the best prophets in all times: that we are the agents of salvation on this earth. And the measure of the gods we serve, the measure of our own spirits, is the measure to which we have overflowed, have reached out to strangers outside of our family, outside of our religion, outside of our race, to share with them the milk of our own human kindness.
This is the river water that is sold by every religion on earth that's worthy of the name. It isn't news. You don't really come here to learn this; you come here to be reminded of it. Perhaps what we come to church for is not the river water. Perhaps, instead, we come to church hoping once more to learn how to be thirsty for it.
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Posted by fm on November 03, 2005 at 12:24 AM