Democratic View: Mythmaking in America

I started elementary school in Ithaca at what may have been the height of American mythmaking. Reading lessons featured a white, suburban, two-parent household from which Father went off to an unnamed job while Mother stayed home in her apron.

Social studies taught us the heroism of “discoverer” Christopher Columbus and the attraction of America as a melting pot into which you could pour your misfit culture and emerge baptized in the American Way.

We studied the Cold-War-defying tropes of American myth — Manifest Destiny, pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps, rugged individualism and the American Dream. The message was constant and universal: With hard work and a good attitude, anyone could succeed.

As late as 1995, 99 out of 100 U.S. Senators gave the thumbs-down to a set of national history standards that toned down the myths and tried to teach a more balanced view of America’s role in the world.

The one senator who voted in support of the standards explained that he simply did not think the Senate’s disapproval was strong enough. In a major battle of the American Culture Wars, traditionalism won.

I think it is possible to divide the 2020 electorate into two factions: those who still buy into postwar American mythologizing versus those who are, if not entirely deniers, at least skeptics.

Some skepticism is based on education. College or a thoughtful reading list may introduce you to ideas that push back against the traditionalist view of American history. Some of that is based on privilege. If you have the money to travel abroad, you may see with your own eyes where America fits into the landscape.

Some of that is based on experience. If you are an immigrant or a person of color whose life belies the myths, you may be understandably dubious.

The young brain is open to new information, particularly information that creates a narrative in which the learner finds a place. If you don’t find a place in the narrative, you may feel excluded or otherized. You may even rebel against the narrative itself.

In my first-grade classroom at the long-gone Hayts School on West Hill, my teacher went around the room on Mondays, asking who had gone to Sunday school the day before. That did not teach me about diverse experiences; it taught me to lie. It placed me outside a narrative that my teacher had constructed about normal American children.

I had a fourth-grade teacher at Cayuga Heights who embodied American mythmaking. Any day, weather permitted, the whole class marched outside to play baseball. We sang American folksongs on Fridays.

We learned about heroes from George Washington to Paul Bunyan, without really differentiating between historical and fictional. If this teacher had been my sole source of instruction, I would have a very different worldview today.

As an adult, I have met parents who dread having their children learn things differently from the way they learned them. When parents express concerns about a school’s failure to support family values, they often mean that the school is teaching outside the boundaries of the parents’ American narrative.

As Megyn Kelly moves out of New York City to rescue her kids from “far-left schools,” her decision reflects that gap between home and school culture.

If your childhood drilled into you that America is number one, “America First” makes sense to you. If you were told that the civil rights movement removed barriers for Black people and made us all equal, you may be mystified by Black Lives Matter.

As Tom Cotton rises on the floor of the Senate to condemn The New York Times for referring to the traditional first Thanksgiving narrative as a caricature and myth, his fury reflects the gap between traditionalism and skepticism.

Imagine how painful it must be to have one’s worldview regularly mocked and belittled.

Now imagine how painful it must be to live in a nation whose traditional narrative ignores, misrepresents or marginalizes you.

A monoculture is easier to govern. The common mythology created by early textbook authors strove to create a monoculture for our already diverse nation. Those stories and songs and poems are entertaining, but I am leery of the American capacity for mythmaking that enables QAnon conspiracies to become mainstream or imposes Biblical End Times narratives on our foreign policy.

If you swallow myths unthinkingly, the crazy will go down smoothly. At a time when our sources of information are a Venn diagram with zero overlap, mythmaking has become dangerous and divisive.

This is my last column for Tompkins Weekly. We moved to Madison County as the pandemic began, and now I’m a blue dot in a red region, just as I was when I moved to Dryden in 1991.

I wish I were leaving on a more upbeat note, but these are troubling times. I am not sure how to reconcile the two halves of our electorate when our views of America are so different. As for me, I believe in my country’s possibilities rather than its perfection, and I will continue to fly my flag with that hope in my heart.

Kathy Zahler is the former Director of Communications for the Tompkins County Democratic Committee. See the committee website at www.tcdemocrats.org.