American Culture.
With a unique and diverse history of rebellion, emigration, development, and war, the mythical culture of the United States is rich and conflicted. American universities traditionally require students to participate in a course “The History of Western Civilization”, which outlines the cultural sphere to which the US subscribes. This course places America in a continuum from the Greeks and Romans to Western Europe and finally the American colonies. Modern political debates over same-sex marriage have reemphasized the importance of mythology and ritual in American society. Popular support for the argument that marriage is not merely a legal arrangement but a symbolic, religiously founded union that would be fundamentally threatened by subjection to alternate lifestyles makes it clear that our culture is still wed to its mythologies.
At the same time as Americans cling inflexibly to traditional mythologies, American culture has fostered a rich set of new rituals and myths that it defends with equal vigor. From the great Texas rangers to the urban legends of Pulp Fiction, from SoCal Hollywood to NorCal Silicon Valley, Lewis and Clark, baseball, World War II, the New York Times, even Custer’s Last Stand, the United States has produced and propagated a diverse system of myths, rituals, and customs that cluster together in our collective cultural memory. This list is obviously incomplete, a quick brainstorm of the factors of American identity possessed by a twenty year-old college student from Oregon. However, pulling one example from the list may serve to reveal the nature of American myth formation.
Custer’s Last Stand is an epic American war myth, an Alamo-like standoff in which the heroes are slaughtered to the last man. This myth is typically American in its simplicity, its blond curly-haired hero, its epic proportions, and its unforgivable arrogance. Hardly representative of a greater conflict in which the Native Americans were routinely defeated, slaughtered, and displaced, ‘our’ man actually lost. Custer was really a cruel and rather stupid man who chose to occupy an unnecessary and untenable position. These two images of Custer, one as a martyr and one as a villain, are two sides of the same coin. They serve to place an American at the center of the story of Native American genocide. Thus this American war myth allows both supporters and dissenters to discuss a conflict in the same American-centric terms. American news media, especially as it engages with foreign policy, employs the same devices. It is easy to romanticize victory, but as long as defeat can be wrapped up in epic language it becomes impossible to lose.