Excerpt from Gunfighter Nation by Richard Slotkin

p.642

The "post-Western" genre map suggests that, while the Western may no longer provide the most important of our ideologically symbolic languages, the underlying mythic structures it expressed remain more or less intact. Action in the imagined world of myth-symbolic play still takes the form of captivities and rescues, still invokes the three-part opposition in which the American hero stands between the extremes of bureaucratic order and savage license, and still re- quires a racial symbolism to express the most significant ideological differences. What has been lost is not the underlying myth but a particular set of historical references that tied a scenario of heroic action to a particular version of American national history .The passing of the Western may mark a significant revision of the surface signs and referents of our mythology, but it does not necessarily mark a change in the underlying system of ideology , which is still structured by its twin mythologies of bonanza economics and regeneration through savage war. Indeed, those mythologies provided the structuring principles of the so-called "Reagan Revolution" of the 1980s, which began as a systematic and initially successful attempt to regenerate American "public myth" and ended in a return to something very like the "malaise" of 1978-80.

Back in the Saddle Again?: The Reagan Presidency and the Recrudescence of the Myth

If Ronald Reagan or any of his handlers had read McNeill's diagnosis of the disease of "public myth," they would have wondered why McNeill failed to recognize their administration as the prescribed cure. The mythographers of the Reagan Revolution sought to overcome the "malaise" of the 1970s-the breakdown of public myth that prevented consensus on purposeful action in both domestic and foreign affairs-by substituting for the distressing memory of "the Sixties" a fictive replica of a simpler time: the "Happy Days" when the Cold War was young and the world was divided between an "evil empire" and a TV-pastoral, "Leave It to Beaver" America that a few good men could save by fighting dirty wars. The central theme of Reagan's two presidential campaigns, and of his conduct of office, was the systematic re sanctification of the symbols and rituals of "public myth"-a task for which Reagan's experience as an actor was ideal preparation. His 1980 and 1984 campaigns associated him with iconic and idealized American settings drawn from the mythic landscapes of cinema: "Morning in America" (1980) depicted an America of farms, country churches, suburban lawns, the "decent" streets of cities, all seen in a soft early-day light; and many of his most characteristic anecdotes, phrases, and slogans ("Make my day!") were borrowed from movie dialogue. But these patently celluloid backgrounds and gestures seemed both appropriate and authentic as settings for candidate and President Reagan, because they were icons of movie-America, and that imagined space was indeed the historical setting in which Reagan matured and acquired his public identity.

From the beginning of his campaign for the presidency, Reagan was widely (and inaccurately) identified as a "B" Western cowboy actor, particularly (at first) by his detractors. The famous campaign poster, "Bedtime for Brezhnev," which shows a cowboy-clad Reagan, holding a six-gun on the Russian leader, illustrates the achievement , of the Reagan campaign: it transformed the most ridiculous of pop-culture formulas ("B" Westerns and comedies like Bedtime for Bonzo) into recipes for a renewal of the American myth. Reagan acquired a more "serious" heroic aura through images that linked him closely to the two most prominent Western movie stars, John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. The most impressive of these images came at the 1984 convention, when clips of John Wayne introduced a film celebrating Reagan's life and the achievements of his first term.

Reagan had a legitimate claim on this kind of heroic aura. Neither Wayne nor Eastwood had actually been a cowboy or a leatherneck-like Reagan, they had merely played those roles on the screen. The use of mythic allusion to lend a politician the afflatus of a hero was hardly unique to Reagan. William Henry Harrison traded on his Indian-fighting laurels to gain the presidency in 1840, and in 1900 Theodore Roosevelt rode into national office as "The Rough Rider" and "The Cowboy President." But Roosevelt's claim to those titles was proved by reference to his actual deeds as a stockman, sheriff, and Rough Rider, while Reagan's claim to heroic character was based entirely on references to imaginary deeds performed in a purely mythic space. The difference between them indicates the change that has occurred in our political culture over this century: the myths, produced by mass culture have become credible substitutes for actual tc,c, historical or political action in authenticating the character and ideological claims of political leaders. Moreover, the substitution of myth f for history serves not only as an advertising ploy for electing the I candidate but as an organizing principle for making policy. The obsession of the Johnson and Nixon administrations with symbolic victories was an early exercise in mythopolitics, but Ronald Reagan was the virtuoso of the form. At the height of his powers he was able to cover his actions with the gloss of patriotic symbolism and to convince his audience that-in life as in movies-merely symbolic action is a legitimate equivalent of the "real thing."

The public's favorable response to Reagan's conflation of "cowboy," "star," and "president" suggests that (on some level of awareness) it shared McNeill's belief that a refurbishing of public myth was the proper antidote to the demoralization of American culture. That response also suggests that the key terms of the myth will be drawn from the language of mass media and not from the language of the intelligentsia. However one evaluates the substance of Reagan's policies and achievements, during his term of office he enjoyed perhaps the greatest personal popularity of any president in our history-a popularity that was not affected by the public's disapproval of many of the specific measures and policies of his administration. By the conviction with which he performed his public role, enacted the rituals of his office, and voiced the requisite religious and patriotic pieties, and by his convincing display of innocence of and disdain for the criticisms that were leveled against the traditions he espoused, Reagan dramatized or impersonated the condition of mythic belief whose loss McNeill laments. Thus by identifying with the President as dramatis persona, one could vicariously enjoy the comforts of credulity.

There was more to the myth/ideology of the Reagan Revolution than mere manipulation of surface imagery .The structuring principles of that revolution represented an authentic recrudescence and revision of the Frontier Myth. According to that myth, a magical growth of American wealth, power, and virtue, will derive from the close linkage of "bonanza economics"-the acquisition of abundant resources without commensurate inputs of labor and investment- with political expansion and moral "regeneration" through the prosecution of "savage war ." In the "post-industrial" 198os a similar economic bonanza was to be achieved through the magic of supply-side economics coupled with a regeneration of the nation's spirit through more vigorous prosecution of Cold War (against Russia as "evil empire") and savage war (against enemies like Ghadafy of Libya, Maurice Bishop of Grenada, and the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua).

"Reaganomics" developed in reaction to the failure of the Carter administration to deal with the economic crisis of "stagflation." The Reagan campaign faulted Carter's policy for its vacillation between conservative pro-business policies and conciliation of those labor and minority groups that formed the Democrats' liberal constituency. But the Republicans were equally effective in challenging the intellectual basis of Carter's conservatism: his acceptance of the idea that we had indeed reached "The End of the Cowboy Economy ," and that on "spaceship earth" Americans could no longer look forward to high and ever-increasing rates of growth. The Reagan campaign's praise of the bonanza economies of previous "boom" eras was more than just an exercise in nostalgia: it was the prelude to an attempt to revive the "cowboy economy" under "post-industrial" conditions.

The Reagan version of "supply-side economics" represents a recrudescence (with modifications) of the Turnerian approach to economic development. In its original or primary formulation, (Frederick) Turner's Frontier Hypothesis held that the prosperity and high growth rates of the American economy had been made possible by the continual expansion of the Frontier into regions richly endowed with natural resources. As industrial production replaced agricultural and mineral commodities as the primary source of wealth, a revised or secondary version of Turnerism saw rapid increases in industrial productivity as a viable substitute for the land and resource bonanzas of the past- an idea suggested by Turner himself but codified as historical theory by Beard in the 1930s. The theoreticians of the liberal consensus saw the "affluent society" of postwar American as the vindication of this secondary Turnerism and extrapolated from the American model a universal theory of modernization.

"Reaganomics" in effect proposed a tertiary Turnerism, in which the multiplication and manipulation of financial capital replaces both agrarian commodities and industrial production as the engine of economic expansion. A "bonanza" of new capital, released through measures favoring business and the wealthy (tax cuts and deregulation), was to act as the magical guarantor of perpetual and painless economic growth, in just the way that the opening of "vast untapped reserves" of free land or gold or cheap oil on the Frontier had energized the economy in the past. At the ceremonies attending his signature of the St. Germain/Garn bill, which deregulated the savings and loan industry, Reagan hailed the measure as one that would cost the taxpayers nothing but would produce limitless benefits for the whole economy by energizing the banking industry and the crucial investment sectors of housing and real estate: "All in all, I think we've hit the jackpot." Although the poor and the middle classes would not benefit directly, some of the newly generated wealth would .'trickle down" through the economy. (Even here the parallel with the Frontier held: the opening of new lands had not only benefited the minority who pioneered them, it had contributed indirectly to the prosperity of others by raising the value of land and labor and lowering the cost of food.)

The enactment of tertiary Turnerism was accompanied by the recrudescence of ideas and behaviors associated with the bonanza economics of the old Frontier. The term "frontier" enjoyed its widest currency since 1960-63. Writers on economic subjects and promoters of particular businesses publicized a range of new "frontiers" in marketing and development, while on the left Robert Reich suggested that The New American Frontier lay in the development of human resources neglected by the "politics of greed" that shaped the Reagan program. Proposals for extraterrestrial colonization (on space stations or in lunar or planetary settlements) transformed "outer space" into The High Frontier; and since every American frontier presupposes the threat of Indians, the same term was used in polemics on behalf of a space-based nuclear warfare system, the Strategic Defense Initiative, or "Star Wars." Closer to home, the unexploited realm of the oceans was dubbed our "Last Earthly Frontier," a potentially inexhaustible source of nutriment, mineral wealth, and energy-and of course, an embattled wilderness whose more intelligent natives (the dolphins) might be enlisted as our allies in warfare.

But perhaps the most characteristic use of "frontier" as a term of cultural significance in the Reagan era occurred in the voice-over by Robin Leach that introduced one of the most popular television programs of the decade, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Leach invites his viewers to share with him the privilege of a voyeur's peep into the lives of "super" celebrities and the "super" rich, who inhabit "Fame and Fortune-the Final Frontier!" As on other frontiers, minimal investments of labor yield fabulous returns: the most trivial actions are seen to yield the extravagant perquisites of celebrity, especially a license for excessive consumption and conspicuous waste.

In its celebration of wealth and fame as things supremely valuable in themselves, Lifestyles seems a self-parody. But the show's abstraction of "wealth" from concrete scenarios of labor, savings, and investment highlights the distinctive character of this most recent recrudescence of Turnerian economics, in which vast speculations in the paper values of real-estate developments, Third World debt, junk bonds, and debt-leveraged corporate takeovers replaced productivity and investment as the calculus of economic value. The economic style of the 1980s has been likened to that of the Roaring 20s. But there is an equally good precedent in Mark Twain's description of bonanza economics during the Nevada silver boom of the 186os:

It was the strangest phase of life one can imagine. It was a beggar's i revel. There was nothing doing in the district-no mining-no milling- r no productive effort-no income- ...and yet a stranger would have ! supposed he was walking among bloated millionaires. ...Few people took ! ' work into their calculations-or outlay of money either; except the work ! and expenditures of other people. ...You could. ..get your stock l. printed, and with nothing whatever to prove that your mine was worth ! a straw, you could put your stock on the market and sellout for hundreds l, and even thousands of dollars. To make money, and make it fast, was as f easy as it was to eat your dinner. They burrowed away, bought and sold, and were happy.

Conceiving of our landed, wooded, animal and mineral wealth as inexhaustible, the frontiersmen of the past felt licensed to exploit that wealth without restraint. That same ethic had been applied in the metropolis to the human resource of labor, first in the exploitation of slaves and later in the somewhat more limited exploitation of immigrant and industrial laborers. Under Reaganomics, a marvelous new mother lode of wealth was discovered in the heritage of our society's accumulted savings and in the capital produced by past labor ; and investment, and a generation of junk-bond financiers and corporate raiders became rich and famous by strip-mining it. As Garry Wills has said, "'Wealth. ..became staggeringly non-productive in the Reagan era. It "was diverted into shelters. It was shuffled through paper deals; it financed its own disappearance; it erased others' holdings, along with the banks that contained them. It depleted rather than replenished. It shriveled where it was supposed to irrigate. Huge sums were bandied about at art auctions while bridges were disintegrating. Money flew in all directions at home, while seeping almost invisibly abroad.

Although the economy expanded under Reagan, the benefits of expansion were distributed so unequally that, while the richest Americans were acquiring a larger share of the national wealth, the number of persons living in poverty increased and the real income and assets ", of most of the population declined. The savings and loan deregulation, which Reagan had hailed as a 'Jackpot" in 1982, proved to be the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression. The government's colossal indebtedness-the result of Reagan's insistence on cutting taxes while accelerating defense spending-seems certain to limit for years to come the government's fiscal resources and its ability 'f to pursue needed policies of social and economic reconstruction at home and to take a leading role in the investments that will shape '"c~ the post-Cold War political and economic order.

Like the "beggar's revel" of Reaganomics, the "savage war" side of Reagan's revived Frontier Myth shows a disparity between nominal values and real values. The center of Reagan s foreign-policy agenda was the more energetic prosecution of the Cold War against the Soviet 1 Bloc, primarily through a massive buildup of military forces and the acquisition of the most advanced military technology. The renewed Cold War also envisioned the nation's resumption of an active counterinsurgency role in the Third World, both as a means of resisting the advance of Communism and as a way of asserting American' , interests against those of local opponents. Both policies required the discovery of a cure for "Vietnam syndrome": the public's unwillingness to support military engagement in the Third World for fear of becoming trapped in another "quagmire."

To build public support for defense expenditures, government spokesmen and policy-makers pointed with alarm to the continuing growth of the "Soviet menace." They abandoned the rhetoric of detente for an apocalyptic symbolism which labeled the Soviet Bloc an "evil empire" and "the foundation of evil in the modern world." "Vietnam syndrome" presented a more difficult problem, because engagement in Third World conflicts threatened immediate costs in blood instead of the deferred costs of the anti-Soviet buildup. The administration solved the problem by recognizing that "Vietnam syndrome" could be treated as merely a defective symbolism-a tendency to interpret every Third World contest as a metaphor of the Vietnam War and to conceive of that war as a "mistake" and inherently unwinnable. Reagan himself became the chief spokesman for a revisionist history of the Vietnam War. He represented that war as a I noble, unselfish struggle that could have ended in victory if only the liberal politicians in Washington had not tied the hands of the military.

This version of the war was supported (and by Reagan explicitly linked) to a contemporary genre-myth of great currency and power which might be called "The Cult of the POWs/MIAs." The Deerhunter incorporated this theme in its epic treatment of the war. But the theme reached its widest audience through the films of the Rambo! and Missing in Action series. The concentration of these films on the captivity formula links them to the most basic story-form of the Frontier Myth, and their obsessive repetition of the rescue fantasy makes them seem like rituals for transforming the trauma of defeat into a symbolic victory. The heroes of these films are military vigilantes, ex- Green Berets who cannot fully return to America until they have completed their failed "mission" and canceled the debt of honor owed to comrades they survived or left behind. The American who, as representative of the world's mightiest army, had been defeated by ragtag, Vietnamese guerillas now gets to play the war movie in reverse: this time he is the guerilla, and he defeats a rigid, regularized, totalitarian enemy who has him outnumbered and outgunned. But the redemption of national honor in these films also requires the defeat of a domestic, American opponent: the most insidious enemies of these rescuer-heroes are officials of their own government who represent those politicians and "big shots" who (as the Nazis said of the Weimar liberals) "stabbed the army in the back" and prevented it from winning the war.43

In these Vietnam-rescue films, mass-culture myth plays its classic role, which is not (as critics of media violence fear) to act as a stimulus to individual violence but to justify social violence through the symbolic enhancement of a tale of personal violence. The belief that numbers of POWs/MIAs are still held by the Vietnamese had been a recurrent preoccupation in every administration since 1975 and remains an important factor in our Southeast Asia diplomacy.

But the most significant political referent of these films was not the Vietnam War but the new crisis in America's relations with the Third World symbolized by the series of ,hostage crises that began with the Mayaguez incident and became a major factor in our politics after Iranian Revolutionary Guards seized our Tehran embassy in 1979. The mythic imperative implicit in any hostage "crisis"-that we must rescue or avenge the captive at all costs-has given such events a fatal attraction for public concern, media attention, and political opportunism. Carter's failure to rescue the Tehran hostages helped bring down his administration, and Reagan's obsession with the Beirut hostages distorted our policy in the Levant and encouraged the CIA and the NSC to undertake a series of scandalously illegal covert actions that tainted the last years of Reagan's presidency.

"Standing tall" in places like Central America required the explicit repair of those counterinsurgency myths that had been discredited by Vietnam. The Reagan administration invested a good deal of time, effort, money, and moral capital in justifying its support of the "contra" war against the Marxist regime in Nicaragua: a war fought by "Chicago rules" which breached American moral codes and ultimately (in the Iran-Contra affair) federal law as well. More recently, the Bush administration's "War on Drugs" has invoked the traditional myths of savage war to rationalize a policy in which various applications of force and violence have a central role. Here the Myth of the Frontier plays its classic role: we define and confront this crisis, and the profound questions it raises about our society and about the international order, by deploying the metaphor of "war" and locating the root of our problem in the power of a "savage," captive-taking enemy.

Once invoked, the war-metaphor governs the terms in which we respond to changing circumstances. It spreads to new objects; it creates a narrative tension for which the only emotionally or esthetically

satisfying resolution is literal rather than merely figurative warfare. What begins as a demand for symbolic violence ends in actual blood- shed and in the doctrine of "extraordinary violence": the sanctioning of "cowboy" or (more properly) vigilante-style actions by public officials and covert operatives who defy public law and constitutional principles in order to "do what a man's gotta do."

The mythic scenarios that rationalize and perhaps govern policy no longer take their language primarily from Western movies. They draw as well on the vocabularies of the vigilante-cop film and the Vietnam War rescue-revenge fable. Terms and images derived from Vietnam are used to interpret the "drug crisis" and to project a scenario of response. Advisers are sent to Colombia and Peru, and naval and air power is deployed to interdict supply routes and help the native troops conduct search-and-destroy operations. There are projects for defoliation or coca-crop destruction and efforts to win the hearts and minds of the people (both American drug users and Colombian peasants). The invasion of Panama in january 1990, which literalized the metaphor of the "War on Drugs," was framed by the classic rationales of the Frontier Myth: the tyrannical Manuel Noriega , (formerly a paid agent of our own CIA) was characterized not only as a dictator but as a physically repellent man (with pocked face and "Indian" blood), asexual deviant and a drug addict; and the immediate pretext for the invasion itself ("Operation just Cause") was the need to rescue American civilians from abuse by Noriega's forces and to avenge the assault on an American officer and his wife.

The most triumphant, and the most disturbing, of these exercises in mythography is the Gulf War of 1991. In justifying the largest deployment of American military force since the Vietnam War, President Bush invoked the classic elements of "captivity" and "savage war" mythology. Saddam Hussein's potential dominance of the Gulf oil fields was seen as a danger to the future of "bonanza economics"; defeating Saddam would facilitate long-term development and save American jobs in the present. Hussein himself was the perfect enemy for a modern Frontier-Myth scenario, combining the barbaric cruelty of a "Geronimo" with the political power and ambition of a Hitler . This characterization was made credible by the oppressive character of the Ba'ath regime, the murderous occupation of Kuwait, and Sad- dam's ill-managed attempts at hostage-holding. The vivid symbolism and the passions it aroused effectively masked the questionable as- pects of American policy in the region, including our earlier complicity with Saddam in his war against Iran.

More disturbing still is Bush's assertion that the violence of the Gulf War has regenerated the national spirit and moral character by expiating the defeat in Vietnam. Mythopolitical exercises of this kind are of course inimical to the successful conduct of affairs, to the extent that they palliate or even justify badly conceived policies. But their most harmful effect may be their distortion of the language and logic that inform the discourses of our political culture. By treating the Gulf War as a ritual of regeneration through violence, and asking us to receive it as redemption for our failure in Vietnam, Bush asks us to conceive our political and moral priorities in exclusively mythic terms-with primary reference to the conflicts, needs, desires, and role-playing imperatives that are exhibited in mass-culture mythology , and with secondary or negligible reference to the realities of public and political life. By assuring us that the sentiments we feel when watching a movie-captivity like Rambo II or Missing in Action are a sufficient basis for engaging in war, the President authorizes the shedding of blood, not as a cruel means to a necessary end, nor as a defense of vital interests or principles, but as a cure for the illness of our imagination-to erase the discomforting memory of our historical experience of error and defeat, and to substitute in its place the lie of "symbolic victory."

The destructive effects of this kind of mythological thinking are not restricted to foreign affairs, but (like counterinsurgency) have their domestic counterpart. The "savage war" paradigm has also been invoked to conceptualize and formulate policy for the social disruption and urban violence that have attended the "drug war" and the "Reagan Revolution" in American cities. The tide of a popular novel and film of the early 198os-Fort APache, the Bronx-vividly captures the public's sense of cities "reverting to savagery" and ruled by semi-tribal youth gangs representing African-American and other Third World "races" or ethnicities.50 The policy scenarios implicit in this paradigm emphasize "military" over social solutions: the use of police repression and imprisonment--a variation on free-fire zones and "reconcentration camps" or "reservations"-as policies of first resort preferable to more laborious and taxing projects of civic action or social reform.

The political successes of the Reagan and Bush administrations suggest that in the 1980s there was indeed a renewal of public myth: a general disposition to think mythologically about policy questions, substituting symbol and anecdote for analysis and argument; and a specific revival of the ideological structures of the Frontier Myth (savage war and bonanza economics) abstracted from its traditional association with Western movies and the historical Wild West. However, it would be a mistake to see this recrudescence as proof of the restoration of a true public myth capable of organizing the thought and feeling of a genuine and usable national consensus. The iconography, symbolism, and public ritual associated with American patriotism were indeed given new currency and credibility by Reagan's performance of his role. But his repair of public myth was partial and incomplete. He did not {could not) wholly succeed in effacing either the material consequences of our historical experience or its registration in memory.

The magical effects of Reagan's performance began to dissipate with the departure of the performer and with the discovery that some rather costly "due bills" were left behind. Although the economy had revived between 1982 and 1990, the Reagan "boom" was followed by a prolonged recession, by some measures the longest since 1945. Nor has the refurbished myth/ideology of the Reagan Revolution functioned as a unifying or consensus-making tool. On the contrary, as the 1988 presidential campaign made clear, it has helped to polarize political discourse by reviving {in more polite form) the old symbols and codes of racial prejudice, anti-intellectualism, and red- baiting. Reagan sailed into the presidency by smiling and waving Old Glory; his successor won by brandishing the flag, playing the race card," and deriding his opponent's Americanism.

Despite such triumphs as the collapse of Communism and victory in the Gulf War, polls taken in 1990-91 indicate that most Americans have not recovered their faith in the most fundamental principles of national ideology: the belief that American democracy offers effective means for expressing the will of the people through political action, and the belief in national and personal progress--the idea that each generation will do better and produce more than the one before. There is widespread public skepticism about the ability of the political leadership, Republican or Democrat, to provide an accurate assessment of our problems, a useful set of predictions and policies, or even an honest set of account books. There is a growing awareness that the real bases of American political and industrial strength have been weakened and our culture undermined by the waste and abuse of our human resources in the last fifteen years, in particular our failure to invest in public health and education, in the restructuring of our displaced industrial workforce, in the improvement of our cities, and in measures for reducing the size and permanency of the "underclass." These failures have undermined our capacity to compete with other industrialized nations and have prolonged the crisis of demoralization that has affected our political culture since the end of the 196os.

Nations, as Benedict Anderson says, are "imagined communities." With all their flaws, the liberal consensus and the Frontier Myth did attempt to imagine-and so to constitute-the nation as a cultural community. Although initially defined in racially and sexually exclusive terms, the mythic " American nation" was always the broadest and most inclusive of our imagined communities; and the most successful movements for democratic re- form-abolition, labor and welfare legislation, civil rights-have usually acted in the name of a national community and have achieved their ends through national legislation. '"(he historical experiences of 1965-75 broke up the consensus and discredited the "public myth" of liberal progressivism, and it seems unlikely that a new national consensus can be built on the ambivalent mix of nostalgia, bellicosity, and resentment that characterize the ideology of the Reagan and Bush administrations. But so long as the nation-state remains the prevalent form of social organization, something like a national myth/ideology will be essential to its operations.

We are in a "liminal" moment of our cultural history. We are in the process of giving up a myth/ideology that no longer helps us see our way through the modern world, but lack a comparably authoritative system of beliefs to replace what we have lost. As McNeill notes, a good deal of the creative energy of the intellectual establishment goes into the criticism and de mystification of old myths. This critical mood both reflects and adds to a public skepticism that is the product of hard experience. But the history of humanity gives us no reason to suppose that we will ever cease to mythologize and mystify the origin and history of our societies. Critical projects of demystification are, in the long run, merely part of the process through which existing myths are creatively revised and adjusted to changing circumstances. In that long run, our choice is not between myth and a world without myth, but between productive revisions of myth-which open the system and permit it to adjust its beliefs (and the fictions that carry them) to changing realities-and the rigid defense of existing systems, the refusal of change, which binds us to dead or destructive patterns of action and belief that are out of phase with social and environmental reality. We require a myth that can help us make sense of the history we have lived and the place we are living in. Although myth is a fictive form of expression, its social function is to imagine effective ways of apprehending and controlling the ma- terial world. Mythic formulations are therefore, at every moment, implicitly subject to tests of validity or truth. A viable, functioning mythology is one whose truth seems validated by the apparent ac- curacy with which it accounts for experience and facilitates the design of successful actions. When the language of myth is seen to provide only meaningless, false, or useless representations of the reality to which it refers, myth itself will be discredited. -

Myth is the language in which a society remembers its history, and the reification of nostalgia in the mass culture and politics of the 198os is a falsification of memory .If a new mythology is to fulfill its cultural function, it will have to recognize and incorporate a new set of memories that more accurately reflect the material changes that have transformed American society, culture, and politics in the last forty years. The historical adventure of our national development will have to be reconceived to incorporate our experience of defeat and disappointment, our acquired sense of limitation, as well as the fabulous hopefulness that has perennially informed and energized our culture. Even in its liberal form, the traditional Myth of the Frontier was exclusionist in its premises, idealizing the White male adventurer as the hero of national history. A new myth will have to respond to the demographic transformation of the United States and speak to and for a polyglot nationality. Historical memory will have to be revised, not to invent an imaginary role for supposedly marginal minorities, but to register the fact that our history in the West and in the East, was shaped from the beginning by the meeting, conversation, and mutual adaptation of different cultures.

Our given mythology tends to reduce the parties to the American cultural conversation to simple sets of paired antagonists, and a powerful current of opinion in the academy holds that any attempt to transform our cultural discourse is impossible so long as we continue to work within the grammar and lexicon of that myth. The demand for radical and revolutionary transformation implicit in this approach may be questioned on theoretical and political grounds. As I have been at pains to show, the beliefs and practices that hold societies together are the product of a long historical interaction between ideas, experience, and remembering. To propose significant social change without reference to that language renders the proposal un- intelligible; to impose change as if from outside the culture, appealing for authority to values that the culture has not generated and accepted for itself, is to assert dictatorship.

The history we have been tracing suggests that the discourses of myth are not fixed and programmatic-not a "prisonhouse of language" from which conceptual and political escape is impossible. The mythic codes to which we subscribe derive their authority not only (or even primarily) from their linguistic form, but from their historicity-which also renders them vulnerable to modification when they are tested against current experience. The poetics of myth entice the naive audience into false or dangerous identifications, as when the captain in Vietnam invited Michael Herr to play "cowboys and Indians." But the rules of mythic expression are not fixed constraints, like those that govern games. They are more like the structures that define the forms of expressive art: the study and practice of such rules ultimately give the artist the freedom of the form, the power to transgress and transform its regulations. When we understand the history and structure of our mythic language, we acquire the power to innovate and invent in that language-to alter the practice of the myth and thereby (potentially) to initiate an adaptation of its basic structure. The language of myth allows us to speak in terms that are fully intelligible and rich in historical resonances for the people to whom we speak. Through the discourses of myth we can recover a true (or truer) understanding of our history.

In 1960 Robert Frost helped inaugurate Kennedy's New Frontier with his signifying "gift" of the poem "The Gift Outright," in which he invoked the mythology of savage war to symbolize the processes that had created our nationality. Nothing in the poem would have seemed alien to Theodore Roosevelt. We became Americans, Frost said, by giving ourselves to "the land vaguely realizing westward"- land we claimed in possession but which was not fully ours until we had given ourselves to it. And "The deed of gift was many deeds of war ." The "we" of the poem is ambiguous, but since the westward movement is the only historical event referred to in the poem, we may guess that it refers primarily to the European settlers who re- generated their identities and generated their nation by violently dispossessing the Native Americans-who are never mentioned in the poem.

But in his last published volume Frost took a different view of our national myth. In "America Is Hard to See" (1962) he recalls the original promise of the Frontier Myth and of American history- that it was to provide the basis for an exceptional future, anew departure from the fatal limitations of human nature and European society:

Had but Columbus known enough

He might have boldly made the bluff

That better than Da Gama's gold

He had been given to behold

The race's future trial place

A fresh start for the human race.

He might have fooled Valladolid

I was deceived by what he did.

If I had had my chance when young

I should have had Columbus sung

As a God who had given us

A more than Moses' exodus.

The light of American historical experience has exposed a fatal flaw in the original myth: in its intent focus on the "high purpose" of a single type of hero, an exclusive system of value and belief, the visions of Columbus (and his metaphorical successors) have made the reality of America and American history "hard to see." Against the delusory vision of America as an escape from history and from the limitations of our human and social condition, the poet sets a capsule version of our experience of history:

But all he did was spread the room

Of our enacting out the doom

Of being in each other's way,

And so put off the weary day

When we would have to put our mind

On how to crowd but still be kind.

"The Gift Outright" declares rightly that "we" gained title to "our" nationality through "many deeds of war." But the poem, like the ideological regime Frost helped inaugurate, was too narrow in its understanding of how "we" were actually constituted. From today's perspective, we can see "our" history as including those who once were considered beyond the pale of American citizenship: even the "Indian wars" have proved to be civil wars. Before we can "put our mind/ On how to crowd but still be kind" we must learn to consider kindness, not as the charity of the privileged to the disadvantaged, but as an enlarged sense of mortal kinship-the kindness invoked by Melville in Moby-Dick when Ishmael, weary of Ahab's apocalyptic quest, imagines the fatal divisions among people dissolved "into the very milk and sperm of kindness." If our culture is to be responsive to the conditions in which we live, we will need a myth that allows us to see our history as an ecological system: not a false pastoral of pure harmony, but a system bound together by patterns of struggle and accommodation within and among its constituent populations, in which every American victory is also necessarily an American de- feat. We need a myth that will help us acknowledge that our history is not simply a fable of sanctified and sanctifying progress, but that our national experience, and the space we inhabit, has been constructed out of what "we" have won and of what "we" have lost by our manner of "winning the West." Adrienne Rich poses the problem for the artist or scholar who wishes to tell critical truths, and still serve as makers of a public myth:

What if I told you your home

is this continent of the homeless

of children sold taken by force

driven from their mothers' land

killed by their mothers to save from capture

-this continent of changed names and mixed-up blood

of languages tabooed

disaporas unrecorded

undocumented refugees

underground railroads trails of tears

What if I tell you, you are not different

it's the family albums that lie

-will any of this comfort you

and how should this comfort you?

There is no reason why a myth of national solidarity and progress should not be claimed and used by Americans who envision the nation as polyglot, multicultural, and egalitarian and whose concept of '.progress" is not defined by the imperatives of the commercial corporation or the preferences of a managerial or proprietary elite. The history of the Frontier did not "give" Roosevelt or Kennedy or Reagan the political scripts they followed. What they did-what any user of cul- tural mythology does-was to selectively read and rewrite the myth according to their own needs, desires, and political projects. It follows that our mythology has been and is available, at every moment of our history, to the claims of other constituencies. Indeed, such claims have historically been made both in the folklores of resistant communities and movements and (as the case of the dime novel illustrates) in the specialized sectors of the mass-culture industries as well. The traditions we inherit, for all their seeming coherence., are a registry of old conflicts, rich in internal contradictions and alternative political visions, to which we ourselves continually make additions.

The myth/ideology of a living culture is not a determinate program that endlessly and helplessly reproduces itself but a volatile and on-going conversation in which the basic value-conflicts, ambivalent de- sires, and contradictory intentions of the culture's constituents are continuously entertained. It is true that in a modern society, where powerful corporate and political institutions make it their business to "imagine the nation" for us, mass-culture myths can be effective instruments for manipulating and directing public opinion. But the demise of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe suggests that no system of cultural hegemony, no matter how perfect its monopoly of the instruments of cultural production, is impervious to the effects of cultural or social change. Hollywood's inability to revive the Western in 1975-76 and 1980-81 is a smaller but no less significant reminder that capitalist culture industries are also unable to monopolize or control the production of myth and ideology , and that no mythic system can be perfecdy invulnerable to the rebuke of events. A moment always comes when conditions force us to choose between adherence to a comfortable old formula and successful adjustment to new conditions.

If we wish to contest or alter the myth/ideology produced for us by mass-culture industries and exploited by corporate and political leadership, the full repertoire of cultural and political responses is still available to us. The cultures of media-company board rooms and political bureaucracies are dependent on, and blunderingly responsive to, the shifting moods and preferences of the populations they both exploit and serve. We ourselves can agitate and organize, enlist or resign, and speak, write, or criticize old stories and tell new ones. If the corporate structure of mass culture excludes us, other bases and sites of action remain-the classroom, the congregation, the caucus, the movement, the street corner, the factory gate.

Myth is not only something given but something made, a product of human labor, one of the tools with which human beings do the work of making culture and society. The discourses of myth are, and have been, medium as well as message: instruments of linguistic and ideological creativity as well as a constraining grammar of codified memories and beliefs. We can use that instrument to reify our nostalgia for a falsely idealized past-to imagine the nation as a monstrously overgrown Disneyworld or Sturbridge Village-or we can make mythic discourse one of the many ways we have of imagining and speaking truth. By our way of remembering, retelling, and reimagining " America," we too engage myths with history and thus initiate the processes by which our culture is steadily revised and transformed.