False Consciousness of the American Narrative

Narratives are important to people. Most obviously humanity uses mythologies to explain creation and our grand purpose, but we also rely on narratives to define much more—family values, religion, and the country we live in. Through the songs we sing, idioms we know, and shared interpretations of history, societies develop culture. And predictably over time this culture changes, but the narratives remain largely the same.

I think becoming an adult is largely a process of discovering the falsity of our narratives and designing new ones that we want to live by. This occurs for most individuals, but it’s antithetical to the nature of a country or nation.

The narrative of the United States that I was raised to believe in had two parts:

America is a benevolent super-power in the world that has a responsibility to root out evil globally.

In America, you can believe anything you want and behave however you like, as long as you and your ideology don’t physically harm anybody.

The Iraq War has severely weakened any argument that the United States is a benevolent power internationally. In the eyes of seemingly every non-American I’ve talked to, the Iraq War was started by George W. Bush to change politics in the Middle East and gain control of more oil. The price for this has been hundreds of thousands of civilian lives (the vast majority not actually killed by American soldiers of course).

I think this analysis of the Iraq War is too simple, but I think it’s closer to the truth than, say, Operation Iraqi Freedom.

In this time, the idea that the United States has a global responsibility has also lost support. According to Pew Global Research’s December 3, 2009 article, 49% of Americans think the US should “mind its own business” in international affairs, up from 30% in 2002. People like Thomas Friedman are arguing for “nation-building at home.” Obama had to appease this shift in public opinion with his Afghanistan strategy. His escalation of troop levels was packaged with a promise that they would come home in less than two years.

And while America has never been as welcoming to immigrants as our mythology would lead us to believe, I am still shocked when I read statements like that of former presidential candidate Tom Tancredo in his message to a convention of Tea-Partiers:

“People who could not even spell the word “vote,” or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House, [and his] name is Barack Hussein Obama.”

I suppose it’s a relief that Tom Tancredo didn’t include homosexuals in his hate message.

Our narrative is very far from reality. For me this creates something of a quagmire because I was quite a fan of the country I was raised to believe in, which increasingly puts me at odds with the country I actually was raised in. I’m a sort of patriot without a nation.

I wish America were a more benevolent global power, the kind that would be investing in education and scientific research instead of invading foreign countries. I wish we used whatever mandate of global responsibility we possessed more selectively, and with more wisdom. And I wish that fewer people in my country were xenophobic, racist, and hostile to other faiths and worldviews.

The narrative we wrote for ourselves was morally ambitious and naïve; no country on earth could achieve it. Still, it’s sad that the reality is so far from the fiction, and too few people even see the difference.