Leave America, and you begin to see it as the rest of the world sees it: as an unpredictable, potentially hostile force dedicated exclusively to protecting its own interests; as a gargantuan military power with an aggressive presence on the world stage and a dangerously undereducated populace. We’ve toppled governments, covertly assassinated democratically elected leaders, waged illegal wars that have poisoned and destabilized entire regions around the globe. The enormous postwar bonus we’ve enjoyed—our status as the world’s darlings—has been eroding steadily away, yet incredibly, we still imagine that everyone loves us. Peering wide-eyed from our self-absorbed bubble, we issue Facebook “apologies” to the rest of the world for our mortifying president and his absurd coterie, not quite realizing that the world, at this point, is less interested in how Americans feel than in foreseeing, assessing, and coping with the damage the United States is likely to wreak on world peace, stability, economic justice, and the environment.
James Baldwin, after having spent more than a decade in France, observed that “Europeans refer to Americans as children in the same way that American Negroes refer to them as children, and for the same reason: they mean that Americans…have no key to the experience of others. Our current relations with the world forcibly suggest that there is more than a little truth to this.” Although Baldwin was conflicted by the feeling that he’d shirked his responsibility by moving abroad, and he returned many times throughout the civil rights era, he also understood that a great deal of his artistic and intellectual maturity had grown out of the distance he’d put between himself and his native country.
A special type of perception arises when we see something we already know fairly well but after a protracted absence: when it’s stripped of its familiarity and all of a sudden becomes a strange new thing—but only for a little while. Habit quickly settles back in and the specialness of this particular type of perception fades. For the first few moments, though, you get a sense that what you’re seeing is essentially reality, divested of its numbing effect. It’s kind of like the mildly hallucinatory state one experiences on psilocybin, and I get an initial jolt of this kind every time I come back to the U.S. It starts in the airport: For a minute or two, the entire scene, including myself standing in a line of passengers waiting to proceed through passport control, feels like an insane asylum in which utter nonsense issues forth from TV screens everywhere while people barely take notice or, worse, watch with interest and don’t find it shocking at all. The fake jokiness of the news, the non-news content of it, the stupefaction, the graphics. The entire appalling reality of what the country has become and the memory that it used to be very different.
When a German friend of mine visited me one year in Brooklyn, she remarked that she felt confused: Everything looked and sounded just as it did in the movies and on TV—the cops-and-robbers-blare of the police sirens, the steam rising in thick clouds from the manhole covers—it was all too familiar; she’d seen it all hundreds of times, and therefore nothing seemed real. While I found myself struggling to articulate this indescribable thing—the surreal whatness of things, the sense that everything had fallen under some kind of evil spell—to her, American identity, or Americanness, felt like a simulation of itself. This narrative insistence, narrative hegemony even, this adamant and endless proclamation of ourselves, is virtually unique to the United States in its power and its exclusion of the rest of the world. It not only permeates every facet of life in the U.S. but also implicitly questions the validity of other cultural identities it has not, in some way, already absorbed. Indeed, other narratives are virtually untranslatable unless they conform to the American script and contain the requisite ingredients. You need a good guy and a bad guy; you need a dream and something standing in the way of that dream. You need inauspicious circumstances that threaten to defeat the hero so that he can take heart, rise to the challenge, and win.
The national narrative is a narrative of infantilization, a fairy tale written for children in which love, sex, family, in fact all human endeavor, is sentimentalized, stripped of nuance and ambiguity and all of life’s inherent contradictions. We need everything spelled out; we are a culture with childish notions, even of childhood. It’s as though the American mind were calibrated to a single overriding narrative: It can be found not only in our movies but in our politics, our journalism, our school curricula; it’s on our baseball fields, in our TED talks, award ceremonies, and courts of law, among our NGOs and in our cartoons and the way we speak about disease and death—virtually anywhere we enact the stories we’ve created about our history; our collective aspirations; our idea of who we are and what we’d like to become. But to disagree with this narrative, to call its major premises into question, is to betray the tribe.
Identity is a construct that forms in response to a psychic need: for protection, for validation, for a sense of belonging in a bewildering world. It’s a narrative; it tells itself stories about itself. But identity is also a reflex, a tribal chant performed collectively to ward off danger, the Other, and even the inevitable. Its rules are simple: They demand allegiance; they require belief in one’s own basic goodness and rightness. It’s a construct based not in fact but on belief, and as such it has far more in common with religion than with reason. I try for the life of me to understand what it is and how the fiction of what this country has become has turned into such a mind-altering force that one can only speak of mass hypnosis or a form of collective psychosis in which the USA still, bafflingly, sees itself as the “greatest nation on Earth,” in which anything that calls what makes America American into question is met not with impartial analysis or self-scrutiny but indignant and often hostile repudiation. We have, as Baldwin observed in his Collected Essays, “a very curious sense of reality—or, rather…a striking addiction to irreality.” Are we really as brave as we think we are; are we as honest, as enterprising, as free as we think we are? We’re not the envy of the world and haven’t been for a long time, and while this might not match the image we have of ourselves, it’s time to address the cognitive dissonance and look within. (...)
There’s the old story of the frog sitting in a pot of water on the stove: As the temperature rises, the change is too gradual for the frog to detect the danger and escape to safety. National culture exerts a similar spellbinding effect, in which all forces serve to craft and reinforce a narrative that passes for objective reality. One of nationalism’s most deleterious illusions is that “evil” is something that comes from without—and not something lurking inside each of us, waiting to be activated, waiting to be unleashed. In the words of Baldwin, writing about Shakespeare, “all artists know that evil comes into the world by means of some vast, inexplicable and probably ineradicable human fault.” Taking this thought to its logical conclusion, Einstein claimed in Ideas and Opinions, “in two weeks the sheeplike masses of any country can be worked up by the newspapers into such a state of excited fury that men are prepared to put on uniforms and kill and be killed, for the sake of the sordid ends of a few interested parties.” We are, in other words—despite our prodigious brains—still very much animals, subject to a herd mentality. But there is also a subtler form of spellbinding, one that lies in acquiescence. Americans know they’re in crisis, understand that their democracy is at risk, yet what I see—with very few exceptions beyond the occasional comparisons to the Weimar era that directly preceded the advent of fascism in Germany—are not efforts to transcend national identity in order to understand the dangerous ways in which the human mind is vulnerable to suggestion and manipulation, but a clambering to recover American “values” and cherished attributes and to reaffirm them.
One of the arenas in which these efforts are enacted is language itself. Yet while Orwell foresaw the rewriting of the historical past and the falsification of existing documents, including newspaper archives, books, films, photographs, etc., to bring them into line with party doctrine and prove its infallibility—while he predicted the reduction of language as a powerful tool to curtail the radius of human thought for political ends and postulated a semantic system in which words are used to denote their opposite and are thus rendered meaningless—even the broadest political, historical, and psychological analysis of how propaganda has been used throughout the ages to whip up popular support and manipulate the mass mind pales when applied to the phenomenon of fake news, which takes “Newspeak” and multiplies it to kaleidoscopic dimensions.
All the U.S. needs is one good international crisis for the patriotism reflex to kick in: It’s an immediate emotional response, yet what is needed most in times of shock is a suspension of emotion, distance to the forces that would manipulate us. What happens is this: Something shakes us to the marrow, we rally around what makes us feel safe—and it’s the bulwark of national identity we cling to, even if this identity is precisely what clouds our cognitive faculties most. But when someone steps forward and offers a truly critical perspective—Susan Sontag in the days immediately following 9/11 comes to mind here—this is the moment she is held in the greatest suspicion, because critical distance means that she is not part of the emotional bond a reaction to a state of shock brings about, that the observations she makes or the conclusions she draws might find fault not with some evildoing Other but with us, with our own. Better to brand the critic an alien with alien allegiances—in other words, something dangerous: a tainting, a contamination, a contagion.
It’s through narrative that reality acquires meaning and becomes intelligible, that it conceives itself, enacts itself. Yet the national narrative has made it virtually impossible for Americans to perceive themselves and the world around them in any accurate or objective way. Words have morphed to the point where they no longer signify anything but rather act as invisible triggers, actively shut thought down and preclude the possibility of communication. Everywhere we look, we see what we want to believe about ourselves. We are, after all, the birthplace of Hollywood: It should come as no surprise, then, that we prefer fairy tales to the laws of nature and the tedious facts of reality; that the boundaries between fact and fiction have not only blurred but have become, to us, undetectable. “We are often condemned as materialists,” Baldwin wrote. “In fact, we are much closer to being metaphysical because nobody has ever expected from things the miracles that we expect.” We’re in the business of inventing superheroes with fabulous, gravity-defying superpowers and have been daydreaming about them for such a long time that it’s entered our collective subconscious, become a part of our DNA. And so we imagine that Robert Mueller and his investigation will save us, or Stormy Daniels and her titillating revelations, or our very own Jeanne d’Arc, Emma Gonzalez, with the incorruptibility of youth and a God-given ability to speak truth to power.
As written in the German paper Die Zeit, the “ostentatious vulgarity” of the present American administration “shouldn’t distract us from the fact that…something is happening that goes beyond mere audacity, that cannot really be described, even with the word ‘propaganda,’ a term that today has become inflated and imprecise.…It’s more about doing away with the principle of truth altogether, the categorical differentiation between true and false.” As the author of the article mentions, the philosopher Hannah Arendt analyzed precisely this in an interview with Roger Errerain 1974: “If people are constantly lied to, the result isn’t that they believe the lies, but rather that no one believes anything at all anymore.…And a people that can no longer believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”
by Andrea Scrima, The Millions | Read more:
James Baldwin, after having spent more than a decade in France, observed that “Europeans refer to Americans as children in the same way that American Negroes refer to them as children, and for the same reason: they mean that Americans…have no key to the experience of others. Our current relations with the world forcibly suggest that there is more than a little truth to this.” Although Baldwin was conflicted by the feeling that he’d shirked his responsibility by moving abroad, and he returned many times throughout the civil rights era, he also understood that a great deal of his artistic and intellectual maturity had grown out of the distance he’d put between himself and his native country.A special type of perception arises when we see something we already know fairly well but after a protracted absence: when it’s stripped of its familiarity and all of a sudden becomes a strange new thing—but only for a little while. Habit quickly settles back in and the specialness of this particular type of perception fades. For the first few moments, though, you get a sense that what you’re seeing is essentially reality, divested of its numbing effect. It’s kind of like the mildly hallucinatory state one experiences on psilocybin, and I get an initial jolt of this kind every time I come back to the U.S. It starts in the airport: For a minute or two, the entire scene, including myself standing in a line of passengers waiting to proceed through passport control, feels like an insane asylum in which utter nonsense issues forth from TV screens everywhere while people barely take notice or, worse, watch with interest and don’t find it shocking at all. The fake jokiness of the news, the non-news content of it, the stupefaction, the graphics. The entire appalling reality of what the country has become and the memory that it used to be very different.
When a German friend of mine visited me one year in Brooklyn, she remarked that she felt confused: Everything looked and sounded just as it did in the movies and on TV—the cops-and-robbers-blare of the police sirens, the steam rising in thick clouds from the manhole covers—it was all too familiar; she’d seen it all hundreds of times, and therefore nothing seemed real. While I found myself struggling to articulate this indescribable thing—the surreal whatness of things, the sense that everything had fallen under some kind of evil spell—to her, American identity, or Americanness, felt like a simulation of itself. This narrative insistence, narrative hegemony even, this adamant and endless proclamation of ourselves, is virtually unique to the United States in its power and its exclusion of the rest of the world. It not only permeates every facet of life in the U.S. but also implicitly questions the validity of other cultural identities it has not, in some way, already absorbed. Indeed, other narratives are virtually untranslatable unless they conform to the American script and contain the requisite ingredients. You need a good guy and a bad guy; you need a dream and something standing in the way of that dream. You need inauspicious circumstances that threaten to defeat the hero so that he can take heart, rise to the challenge, and win.
The national narrative is a narrative of infantilization, a fairy tale written for children in which love, sex, family, in fact all human endeavor, is sentimentalized, stripped of nuance and ambiguity and all of life’s inherent contradictions. We need everything spelled out; we are a culture with childish notions, even of childhood. It’s as though the American mind were calibrated to a single overriding narrative: It can be found not only in our movies but in our politics, our journalism, our school curricula; it’s on our baseball fields, in our TED talks, award ceremonies, and courts of law, among our NGOs and in our cartoons and the way we speak about disease and death—virtually anywhere we enact the stories we’ve created about our history; our collective aspirations; our idea of who we are and what we’d like to become. But to disagree with this narrative, to call its major premises into question, is to betray the tribe.
Identity is a construct that forms in response to a psychic need: for protection, for validation, for a sense of belonging in a bewildering world. It’s a narrative; it tells itself stories about itself. But identity is also a reflex, a tribal chant performed collectively to ward off danger, the Other, and even the inevitable. Its rules are simple: They demand allegiance; they require belief in one’s own basic goodness and rightness. It’s a construct based not in fact but on belief, and as such it has far more in common with religion than with reason. I try for the life of me to understand what it is and how the fiction of what this country has become has turned into such a mind-altering force that one can only speak of mass hypnosis or a form of collective psychosis in which the USA still, bafflingly, sees itself as the “greatest nation on Earth,” in which anything that calls what makes America American into question is met not with impartial analysis or self-scrutiny but indignant and often hostile repudiation. We have, as Baldwin observed in his Collected Essays, “a very curious sense of reality—or, rather…a striking addiction to irreality.” Are we really as brave as we think we are; are we as honest, as enterprising, as free as we think we are? We’re not the envy of the world and haven’t been for a long time, and while this might not match the image we have of ourselves, it’s time to address the cognitive dissonance and look within. (...)
There’s the old story of the frog sitting in a pot of water on the stove: As the temperature rises, the change is too gradual for the frog to detect the danger and escape to safety. National culture exerts a similar spellbinding effect, in which all forces serve to craft and reinforce a narrative that passes for objective reality. One of nationalism’s most deleterious illusions is that “evil” is something that comes from without—and not something lurking inside each of us, waiting to be activated, waiting to be unleashed. In the words of Baldwin, writing about Shakespeare, “all artists know that evil comes into the world by means of some vast, inexplicable and probably ineradicable human fault.” Taking this thought to its logical conclusion, Einstein claimed in Ideas and Opinions, “in two weeks the sheeplike masses of any country can be worked up by the newspapers into such a state of excited fury that men are prepared to put on uniforms and kill and be killed, for the sake of the sordid ends of a few interested parties.” We are, in other words—despite our prodigious brains—still very much animals, subject to a herd mentality. But there is also a subtler form of spellbinding, one that lies in acquiescence. Americans know they’re in crisis, understand that their democracy is at risk, yet what I see—with very few exceptions beyond the occasional comparisons to the Weimar era that directly preceded the advent of fascism in Germany—are not efforts to transcend national identity in order to understand the dangerous ways in which the human mind is vulnerable to suggestion and manipulation, but a clambering to recover American “values” and cherished attributes and to reaffirm them.
One of the arenas in which these efforts are enacted is language itself. Yet while Orwell foresaw the rewriting of the historical past and the falsification of existing documents, including newspaper archives, books, films, photographs, etc., to bring them into line with party doctrine and prove its infallibility—while he predicted the reduction of language as a powerful tool to curtail the radius of human thought for political ends and postulated a semantic system in which words are used to denote their opposite and are thus rendered meaningless—even the broadest political, historical, and psychological analysis of how propaganda has been used throughout the ages to whip up popular support and manipulate the mass mind pales when applied to the phenomenon of fake news, which takes “Newspeak” and multiplies it to kaleidoscopic dimensions.
All the U.S. needs is one good international crisis for the patriotism reflex to kick in: It’s an immediate emotional response, yet what is needed most in times of shock is a suspension of emotion, distance to the forces that would manipulate us. What happens is this: Something shakes us to the marrow, we rally around what makes us feel safe—and it’s the bulwark of national identity we cling to, even if this identity is precisely what clouds our cognitive faculties most. But when someone steps forward and offers a truly critical perspective—Susan Sontag in the days immediately following 9/11 comes to mind here—this is the moment she is held in the greatest suspicion, because critical distance means that she is not part of the emotional bond a reaction to a state of shock brings about, that the observations she makes or the conclusions she draws might find fault not with some evildoing Other but with us, with our own. Better to brand the critic an alien with alien allegiances—in other words, something dangerous: a tainting, a contamination, a contagion.
It’s through narrative that reality acquires meaning and becomes intelligible, that it conceives itself, enacts itself. Yet the national narrative has made it virtually impossible for Americans to perceive themselves and the world around them in any accurate or objective way. Words have morphed to the point where they no longer signify anything but rather act as invisible triggers, actively shut thought down and preclude the possibility of communication. Everywhere we look, we see what we want to believe about ourselves. We are, after all, the birthplace of Hollywood: It should come as no surprise, then, that we prefer fairy tales to the laws of nature and the tedious facts of reality; that the boundaries between fact and fiction have not only blurred but have become, to us, undetectable. “We are often condemned as materialists,” Baldwin wrote. “In fact, we are much closer to being metaphysical because nobody has ever expected from things the miracles that we expect.” We’re in the business of inventing superheroes with fabulous, gravity-defying superpowers and have been daydreaming about them for such a long time that it’s entered our collective subconscious, become a part of our DNA. And so we imagine that Robert Mueller and his investigation will save us, or Stormy Daniels and her titillating revelations, or our very own Jeanne d’Arc, Emma Gonzalez, with the incorruptibility of youth and a God-given ability to speak truth to power.
As written in the German paper Die Zeit, the “ostentatious vulgarity” of the present American administration “shouldn’t distract us from the fact that…something is happening that goes beyond mere audacity, that cannot really be described, even with the word ‘propaganda,’ a term that today has become inflated and imprecise.…It’s more about doing away with the principle of truth altogether, the categorical differentiation between true and false.” As the author of the article mentions, the philosopher Hannah Arendt analyzed precisely this in an interview with Roger Errerain 1974: “If people are constantly lied to, the result isn’t that they believe the lies, but rather that no one believes anything at all anymore.…And a people that can no longer believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”
Image: Flickr/Darron Birgenheier
[ed. See also: Special Operations Forces Continue to Expand Across the World—Without Congressional Oversight]
[ed. See also: Special Operations Forces Continue to Expand Across the World—Without Congressional Oversight]
