Myth America

Recently I got a chain e-mail, from an acquaintance whom I haven't seen in some twenty years. (Because it was our class reunion this year, I have heard from quite a few people I hadn't seen for twenty years. It's actually a nice surprise -- counter to the usual lurid portrayals of the perils of high school cliquery and such, I genuinely liked the people I went to school with.)

This e-mail, claiming in the header to be a "cool chain", started off innocuously enough. A tale of a nameless delayed flight, a grouchy passenger mulling over the mundanities of his life being held up by a mysterious problem, et voilà! It turns out that the plane has been held in dry-dock lo these countless minutes to allow Marines returning home from Iraq to board. Huzzahs all around.

So now the passenger in the e-mail ruminates on his own selfishness, and their sacrifices. Keep in mind that this is all in roughly 328-point Comic Sans font, and the e-mail is festooned with requisite hyper-patriotic photos of rhinestone-studded flags and steroided eagles and such, practically every paragraph. Still, I thought, it may not be exactly my æsthetic preference, but I can certainly agree with the sentiment, apocryphal or not. I respect and appreciate the efforts of the troops, and I want them to come back home safe, as soon as possible. Unlike the patrioticer-than-thou crowd, I just automatically assume that we're all on the same side of that particular subject, whatever our other disagreements.

So then the end of this thing finally appears. First, a photo of a toddler praying. Then an illustration of two dutiful toddlers praying, on the background of a flag, framed by the words "One Nation Under God". Then a third image, this time of an eagle carrying a flag in its talons, high above the earth -- but of course only the US is visible on the earth below. Above the eagle is a bright, presumably celestial, light. (I tried experimenting with Picasa to get the images to upload; needless to say it didn't work out.)

Then one last breathless burst of text:

Pass it on to everyone and pray.
Something good will happen to you tonight at 9:11 PM.
This is not a joke
Someone will either call you or will talk to you online and say that they love you.
Do not break this chain. Send this to as many people as you can in the next
15 minutes.
>>> GO

There are several levels of willful delusion in those few sentences, punctuated by the braying certitude that one normally finds in an obstinate second-grader. First is the basic principle of the chain letter. Chain letters are a very efficient way to find the suckers in any given crowd. It's amazing that even morons are still willing to be involved with even supposedly benign chain letters.

And this is certainly not a benign chain letter, though it pretends to be. It casts its "with Bush or with the terrists" fog over the whole proceedings, both with the shamelessly manipulative narrative of the story, and the various pseudo-patriotic gewgaws dotting the virtual landscape amidst the mawkish prose.

The real calling card of this travesty, obviously, lies in the "something good will happen to you at 9:11 PM" bit. It is of no use to try to parse this craziness from the viewpoint of mere rationality. There is a dizzy, irresponsible conflation of common lies in this little beauty of a sentence. The obvious one is the fraudulent association of 9/11 with Iraq, but the deeper lie surrounds that associative cow chip, as if to shield it from the bitter truth. Yes, pass this bullshit story on to your hapless friends, mach schnell, and someone will call or e-mail to tell you they love you at the precise moment of 9:11 tonight. What could any of these elements have to do with each other? Why would an acknowledgement of the sacrifice of service personnel result in a phone call from a loved one? What the fuck is wrong with these people?

This chain mail, and the countless others like it, are a warped synthesis of misplaced exceptionalism, misguided faith, and sheer misinformation and lack of common sense. I don't care that it was meant to be a "nice" thing; it is not a "nice" thing at all. It's a mishmash of jingoistic impulse, irrational religiosity, and the pervasive subtext that, once again, Jeebus likes us more than the other 95% of the humans His father created in His own image.

Of course, we're not meant to deconstruct these stupid things, or even critically think about them, for that matter. We're just supposed to automatically, reflexively genuflect to the approved signs and symbols -- eagles, flags, yellow ribbons, doe-eyed apple-cheeked younguns, etc. It's all part of the nationalist myth-making.

But you know who else had so much emotionally invested in all the trappings and symbols, without worrying about the, uh, substance and factuality all that much? Fascists. Stalinists. Modern students of fascism and Stalinism, like Kim Jong-Il and Saddam Hussein. We snicker at all the silly murals of the Great Uncle, watching mercilessly, tirelessly over the multitudes of Pyongyang or Baghdad, while we fret that perhaps our cheap Chinese-made magnetic ribbon is not positioned just so on the ol' Grocery Schooner.

Investing in mythos first requires a dedicated break from rationality, a persistent cognitive dissonance.

(to be cont'd)