George Bush says he going on offense rather than defense, he’s going to use the military rather than the police to deal with terrorists whom he has defined as enemy combatants rather than criminals, he says he will use any and all methods including the most anti-American and inhumane tools of torture to fight the enemy, that it isn’t important to determine who did what to whom but it’s important to just kick somebody’s …anybody’s….. ass, and the American people said, “Cool.” How can this be?
Because Americans believe the message of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies; that violence committed by the pre-defined hero against the pre-defined enemy is redemptive. That the murder committed by the Clint Eastwood character is different from the murder committed by the Eli Wallach character. (Apparently with Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood has become aware of the lies about violence which he told for most of his career; that violence is not redemptive or heroic, it is just sad, pathetic and de-humanizing.)
These twentieth century American movie versions of the myth of regeneration through violence are built upon the predominant strain of American self-definition. Where did that myth come from? It came from the attempts by the Europeans who invaded North America to make sense of the lives they created here. The European universe of the mind which they carted over to North America with them didn’t explain life here. On one level, our forebears created a Constitution to fit part of that new life. They also created a new self-definition of what a Frenchman named Crevecoeur who came to America called, “this new man, this American.”
In a nutshell, Europeans who came to America discovered that the European symbolic universe they brought with them didn’t work so well in North America.
John Winthrop described their invasion of America as an enterprise that would be “a city upon a hill,” a beacon that would shine from New England back to the Old England about how to build a perfect society. The Puritans didn’t emigrate to find the freedom to practice their religion. They emigrated to form a utopian society based upon the exclusive practice of their religion. (The lunatic, religious right in America has a tradition as long as any other.) Puritans wanted to replicate the journey into the wilderness by the Israelites who, according to the founding myth of Israel, escaped from bondage in Egypt to freedom in Canaan. In both instances, this was not a peaceful emigration into a wilderness but an invasion and conquering of previously established societies. Canaan was not empty. Neither was America
It is wrong to think that the Puritans (and this goes for the Spanish in Central and South America) didn’t know anyone lived in America. Of course they knew. Europeans had incorporated the existence of the “new world” into their symbolic universe ever since Columbus’s “discovery” of what he thought was the Indies. Hence the invention of a new “race” of people that Europeans called “Indians.”
(Parenthetically, this is precisely when Europeans invented racism. The symbols Indian and Negro were created to deny the humanity of the people thus defined. Indians and Negroes were not part of human civilization. They were defined to be part of nature. This is what makes the European symbols of “Indian” and “Negro” different from that of, for example, the Greek symbol of “barbaros.” For the Greeks, barbarians were simply people from other human societies. Our connotations of barbarians as rustic, uncouth, classless, well “barbaric,” are equivalent in that the humanity of those who are different is never in doubt. Europeans who invented racism looked back into their past to find justifications that did not exist. Racism denies a shared humanity. But this is a whole other diary.)
In order for America to be the wilderness that Puritans were to immigrate into, the people already populating America had to be redefined as simply aspects of the wilderness, as parts of nature rather than of a shared humanity. As such, the Pequot, Narragansett, Mohican, Lakota, Arapaho, Apache, Hopi, Nez Perce, (and many others) were all redefined in the European/American symbolic universe as “Indians,” as creatures of the wilderness who could then be conquered in the same manner as one felled the trees to create farmland, without remorse as part of creating one’s own civilization. The humanity of the indigenous people was denied through their re-creation as denizens of the wilderness, as demons, as inhuman. This could lead a well respected Puritan cleric, Cotton Mather, to gleefully equate the murderous arson of a Narragansett city which burned women and children in their homes as having the aroma of roasting “Westphalian gammons.”
Imagine the impact on the Puritan symbolic universe when they discovered that they could not survive in their utopian, new world without incorporating aspects of the societies which already existed here and whose very existence as human societies the Puritans denied. This discovery manifested itself in the Salem witchcraft hysteria. How else could they explain that those living on the edges, on the frontier, were incorporating “Indian” ways to not only survive but to live well. To the Puritan, they were becoming, by definition, demonic.
This transformation from demonic to “this new man, this American” was the beginning of the new American myth of regeneration through violence. The re-definition left the Puritan symbolic universe in ruins because they could only define those who were not themselves as demonic, but it created the new American mythical self-understanding. As Europeans became Americans, as they incorporated more and more of “Indian” ways of living and surviving in the “new world” they had to somehow redefine themselves from being demons and denizens of the wilderness in the European symbolic universe to being “Americans.” Violence against the “Indians” was the means of this transformation.
More in Part Three.
