Martin Luther King’s I Have a  Dream Speech has rightfully taken on mythic status in American history.  In the process of becoming mythic, it has been stripped of much of its depth and content.  Most people will know one or two lines, and I’d wager most Americans can conjure in their heads echoes of King’s voice as as he intoned “I have a dream . . .”  The full text can be found here.  It’s not accidental that so many of the people interviewed over the weekend at Whitestock talked about the myth of King, the myth of American unity.  The entire event is a prime example of the ways in which some people experience myth.

As human creatures we experience the mythic – it is part of how we live and relate to one another.  We hear and trade stories of the past which both shape and express our understanding of the world.  As for example, I think every school child in America has heard the story about George Washington and the cherry tree.  It’s part of our American myhthos.  These myths serve mutliple purposes and are believed partly because they are consonant with who how we perceive their subjects but they also serve as moral instruction for us – want to be president you must be great from birth, you must be honest, humble . . . blah, blah blah.  Not for nothing, this tendency actually creates problems – if the leaders of the past were such great men, then our leaders today cannot possibly measure up.

In the 1960s, the US produced three mythic leaders – John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.  All three men were originally seen as liberal icons but they have moved into mainstream American mythology, they belong to all of us.  JFK and RFK seem to embody the same myth – the great leader cut down before his time of greatness, the myth of great hopes dashed.  For MLK the myth is different – his assassination seems to not figure much into the myth around him, rather he is remembered for the phrase “I have a dream” and a generalized perception that he wanted to unite all Americans.  Generally when we think of these figures, we think of them as “good guys.”  Conservatives have dedicated a huge amount of time and effort to create a similar mythology around Ronald Reagan.  They have been partly successful – among conservatives Reagan is regarded as one of the greatest presidents ever; the mainstream has yet to agree to that consensus (although Reagan is regarded generally positively); actual historians are less sanguine.  It’s probably ancillary but I think it’s interesting that Reagan’s greatness arises from the perception of his foreign policy successes while the Democratic leaders are regarded positively for their domestic policies.

I’ve written before about the sense of being part of something great when I walk into the state capitol in Utah.  When I’ve been in DC my response to seeing the capitol building or the other monuments is a flutter in my chest, a sense of being near to great things.  The iconography of American democracy is a combination of people and places and phrases that create a generalized “myth of America.”  It is a mythology that tells us we are the most free people ever, that we are the greatest nation on earth, that we are a shining city upon a hill and we must not hide our light under a bushel basket.  It is a myth of both greatness and exceptionalism, a myth of American uniqueness and American greatness are intertwined. 

For a while, there was a quote floating around the net that said something to the effect that “conservatives love America like a child loves its mother.”  For some of this I’m drawing on the work of thinkers like George Lakoff and Drew Westen.  American conservatives are, by and large, people who see the world in strict father terms.  From that perspective, myth plays an integral role in organizing society.  When the history channell used Howard Zinn’s books as the basis for The People Speak, a conservative reviewer at World Net Daily decried it as:

The History Channel’s airing of the “The People Speak” last night marks the public coming-out party of a movement that has been in place since last year to teach America’s schoolchildren a “social justice” brand of history that rails against war, oppression, capitalism and popular patriotism.

And then quoted Zinn himself in a section entitled A new approach to patriotism:

Zinn writes, “A high-school student recently confronted me: ‘I read in your book “A People’s History of the United States” about the massacres of Indians, the long history of racism, the persistence of poverty in the richest country in the world, the senseless wars. How can I keep from being thoroughly alienated and depressed?’

“It’s a question I’ve heard many times before,” Zinn writes. “Another question often put to me by students is: ‘Don’t we need our national idols? You are taking down all our national heroes – the Founding Fathers, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy.’ Granted, it is good to have historical figures we can admire and emulate. But why hold up as models the 55 rich white men who drafted the Constitution as a way of establishing a government that would protect the interests of their class – slaveholders, merchants, bondholders, land speculators?”

I read Zinn’s comment and it strikes me as eminently reasonable.  But for a great many Americans, his words are just this side of heresy.  If you believe the Constitution is a sacred document, then suggesting that the people who wrote it might not be eminently admirable is troubling. 

Interestingly, Zinn captures one aspect of the experience of the mythic – a willingness to take it appart, to examine myth to get at the facts underneath it.  His example of the person asking “But don’t we need these idols?” is a perfect example of another approach.

The “attack on popular patriotism” the conservative reviewer was bemoaning is problematic for him precisely because Howard Zinn’s approach to histroy is iconoclastic in the sense of smashing icons.  If you regard popular and patriotic myths as means of establishing boundaries and sustaining the social order, you will of course object to those who smash your historical icons.  You don’t know want to know, for example, that JFK was a serial adulterer or that Eisenhower spent the latter half of WWII shtupping his “secretary.”  You’d rather keep the myth intact even at the cost of factual truth.

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