Barry Spector's Blog

To really understand our stubborn and increasingly dangerous attachment to the myth of American Innocence, we must become familiar with our heritage of what I have called the paranoid imagination, which combines eternal vigilance, relentless anxiety and literalistic religion with contempt for the erotic and tolerance for sadistic treatment of the weak or marginalized. Why these last two features? Because what we will not allow ourselves to desire becomes a vector of judgment, fear and hatred of those people and groups whom we perceive as being willing to enact those desires.

Another characteristic of the paranoid imagination is our obsessive voyeurism. We like to watch, and we especially like to watch our heroes, those who embody our highest ideals, punish our villains – those who invert those ideals. American life, popular culture and politics reveal an endless litany of fascination with the so-called violent and sexually unrestrained behavior of “the Other.” And we seem to like nothing better than seeing the Other suffering for their moral transgressions. I write about the paranoid imagination in much greater detail in Chapter Seven of my book, Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence. 

Archetypal psychology has made us familiar with the concept of the Shadow, that vast range of our unconscious minds that we will not acknowledge. But it also suggests that every curse has a corresponding blessing. Very often, below our traumatic fear and contempt for the Other lies envy, and even deeper below that is the universal drive to achieve authentic psychological integration. This is both the great longing and the worst terror of those millions of white Americans who still carry the formidable burden of our Puritan heritage.

Denying our unacceptable fantasies, we condemn them to the dark regions of the mythological underworld. We identify ourselves and our nation as cultured, hardworking, peaceful, rational, Apollonian and, above all, innocent of all evil intentions. This is white privilege: the willingness to see those desires not in ourselves but in people of color across the world, whom we define as primitive, Dionysian, lazy, dangerously irrational and (this is the core of the projection) unable or unwilling to restrain their impulses, unlike us.

Another fundamental aspect of American Innocence is the myth of progress, which I address in Chapter Nine. We believe that we must keep moving upwards and onwards, or risk re-gressing. But a lifetime of pushing ourselves to conform and achieve has its costs. Hence the universal appeal of periodically – and safely – trans-gressing conventional moral and behavioral standards. We see this theme in the common film trope (think Marx Brothers) of sticking it to our bosses, teachers and social superiors. This is clearly one of the attractions, by the way, of Trumpus rallies (I’ve invented this word to remind myself that Trump serves the myth of innocence by enacting it for all of us, and in that sense, we are all Trump-us).

The terrible personal and cultural strain of repressing one’s emotions and fantasies – of delaying gratification, of tamping down our passions, of pursuing advancement in the relentless rat race of capitalism, of putting up with ignorant managers and sadistic bureaucracies – always threatens to burst out past our internal censors into consciousness and wreak havoc with convention. This is one of the reasons why many traditional societies institutionalized regular periods of carnival, so as to literally blow off the excess steam before it causes an explosive “return of the repressed.” Chapters Four and Ten of my book explore this theme in greater detail.

The body knows all this, and the body understands metaphors and mythic images, even if the mind does not. As Carl Jung wrote, the gods never died; they went underground and resurfaced as illness in the body, in the body politic and in the soul of the world. Dionysus, the god of wine, madness and intensity, constantly lurks at the edges and boundaries of our rational and predictable lives, beckoning us, for our own good, to take an occasional walk on the wild side. But we typically settle only for the minimum, the toxic mimic of the real thing, allowing Dionysus and the other divinities into American life in ways that keep ourselves barely alive yet hungry for real nutrition. Like the mythic Tantalos in Hades, we are tantalized, dimly perceiving the soul’s food almost within reach. But our eating muscles – our capacities for thinking mythologically – have atrophied, even as our need grows. Psychologist Robert Johnson saw this as a defining characteristic of our age:

… we hear a screech of brakes and a crash…Cold chills go up and down our spine; we say, “How awful!” – and run outside to see the accident. This is poor-quality Dionysus…what happens to a basic human drive that has not been lived out for nearly four thousand years.

This need for intensity and ecstasy is both personal and collective. Chapter Ten is an extended discussion of what I call five styles of poor-quality Dionysus. This is how we unconsciously search for what anthropologist Victor Turner  called communitas, the group experience of liminal space, where social and ego boundaries relax and people sense that “everyone’s in this together.” It may occur spontaneously in situations such as shared grief, the funerals of major celebrities, religious pilgrimage, rock concerts, club dancing, sports venues, horror movies and, most recently, political spectacles. It lies behind Marx’s vision of the classless society and other utopias in which men drop their perpetual competition for status. Communitas is the social and ritual space of transformation, when we can potentially drop an immature, outdated or dysfunctional identity and become who we need to be.

A twisted form of communitas also occurs (see below) when we go to war, and when a large-scale environmental disaster or pandemic threatens the entire community.

If there ever was a time in the modern history of our country when we were all in this together, this is the moment. – Bernie Sanders, 3/12/20

If we were honest, we’d admit to a sense of relief and even festivity when disaster hits, because it often brings a refreshing sense of potency, community and purpose. Both the problem and the response become clear. We skip work and speak intimately with neighbors we normally ignore. Something important has grabbed our attention: the opportunity to relax our painfully rigid social boundaries. Dionysus Lusios, the Loosener, has arrived in his non-alcoholic form, getting us drunk with excitement and temporarily unifying us. “I” become we. Something overrules my conditioning against any cooperation that doesn’t serve my personal interests; I’m glad, in more ways than one, to help.

But we cannot institutionalize authentic communitas. We can only discover it, briefly enter it and lose it, because it is a very temporary gift of Dionysus. And, since few of our modern attempts to create it result in significant initiatory change, we endlessly repeat our attempts to achieve ecstasy and turn them into addictions. Whether we find a brief hint of it in church or forget ourselves in a bar fight, the haunting sense of loneliness returns.

Increasingly, we have only second-hand experience of communitas. “To go from a job you don’t like,” writes Michael Ventura, “to watching a screen on which others live more intensely than you… is American life…”  Electronic media have become our immediate environment – not the land, not people, but images of the land and people. For three generations now, tens of millions have retreated from social engagement to spend their evenings alone or with their spouses in front of a television or computer, or in taverns dominated by the ubiquitous TV. And in only one generation, we’ve become all too familiar with the image (in coffeehouses and waiting rooms, on trains, at bus stops) of people staring at their smart phones rather than speaking to each other. But we know intuitively how diminished our lives have become when we hear these words of Rumi: “RUN from everything that’s comfortable and profitable!”

We have set aside certain very specific places to escape this life (perhaps half-life would be more appropriate) for a while. As I wrote here, for nearly 300 years in New Orleans (one of the very few American cities, along with Santa Fe and San Francisco, that were originally settled by Catholics), Mardi Gras has served this function for an America whose value system has never fully allowed the mind to connect joyfully with the body. Because of this dilemma, Protestants in particular are filled with a longing that rarely achieves even temporary satisfaction, except through the brief, communal sense of innocence achieved in fundamentalist religion – and vicarious violence: we like to watch.

But every day, current events present opportunities to take an honest look at what we have allowed our lives to become, to acknowledge that we have hardly begun to understand the catastrophic consequences of our unwillingness to confront our national darkness. James Hillman said:

The more innocence you have, the more violence you constellate. And you can’t get rid of violence by returning to innocence. You just repeat a cycle…These are deep themes of our culture…We came with innocence in mind…But our movements were filled with violence. The earth of the United States is filled with (the) blood of what we killed in order to make it our paradise…Other peoples are always aware of what’s in the soil. But innocence keeps us from even looking at it…From the Greek perspective, what’s in the soil is constantly looking at you…They would call it “blood guilt.”

Part Two of this essay is here.

 

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. – Andre Gide

Slowly I would get to pen and paper, make my poems for others unseen and unborn. – Muriel Rukeyser

I don’t like to say this, but I have to admit that pretty much everything is more complicated than it seems. There are so many ways to look at anything. They are all valid, and  perhaps we need them all. As historians we have to be literal, and so we ask, what actually happened? As psychologists we are concerned with relationships (internal or external), so we ask, why did it happen? Could it have happened differently? James Hillman insisted on a polytheistic psychology that can reflect the polytheistic nature of our souls and the fact that we are all multiple personalities. So as mythologists we ask where am I – right now – in this story that constantly repeats itself? What part of it – what specific image – is roiling my emotions right now?

Do we admire Franz Jägerstätter’s self-sacrifice? Depending on our perspective – that is to say, depending perhaps on the emotional issues that drive us – we may well observe that he was sacrificing more – much more – than his own life, and we will react accordingly. Regardless, if we pay attention to how our own souls move, we realize that A Hidden Life, like any great work of art, has thrown us into an emotional turmoil that can only be resolved not with answers but with more questions.

Questions like: Who am I? By what circles of relationship do I define myself? What would I do for a cause, for an abstract ideal? For what reason – or which people – would I lay down my own life? For what cause or which people would I step into the fire of sacrifice, aware that my act might well be an utter waste? Do I have any faith that such an act might well have impact on others unknown and even unborn?

Or: What part of my own consciousness, what belief systems, what identity have I yet to sacrifice in order to die into a greater self, the self that my ancestors have been waiting for me to manifest? Why exactly have I entered this world? What unperformed sacrifices would I regret if I were to die today?

We are right where we need to be – in the realm of profound mysteries, where as physicist Niels Bohr wrote,

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

As I mentioned above, no member of any of the thousands of indigenous religious systems that existed prior to the advent of monotheism could ever support this willingness to sacrifice one’s body for an idea – to literally, physically die. Of course, I can’t prove such a statement, but everything I’ve ever read or learned from living representatives of such cultures reinforces it. And here is another level of mystery: much of these oldest wisdom in the world coincides with the 20^th-century insights of Archetypal Psychology. I remember a scene at a men’s conference about 25 years ago. Malidoma Somé spoke at length about the traditions of his Dagara people, especially in terms of the symbolic death of the childlike or heroic ego that is necessary during initiation. When he finished, Hillman rose to say, “This is exactly what I have been trying to say for years!”

In these times when this beautiful world is in such terrible danger, we all need to grow – to remember what we all once knew – the capacity to think mythologically. Then, as I write in Chapter One of my book,

…We perceive meaning on several levels simultaneously, aware that the literal, psychological and symbolic dimensions of reality complement and interpenetrate each other to make a greater whole…There is no reason to assume that indigenous people cannot do this. Actually, it is we who have, by and large, lost this capacity. The curses of modernity – alienation, environmental collapse, totalitarianism, consumerism, addiction and world war – are the results…

For tribal people, to explain is not a matter of presenting literal facts, but to tell a story, which is judged, writes David Abram, by “whether it makes sense… to enliven the senses” to multiple levels of meaning…and myth is truth precisely because it refuses to reduce the world to one single perspective.

So in a sense we are back where we started. Of course, self-sacrifice amounts to nothing more than suicide – on one level.

And again, we must take note of the synchronicities. I mentioned above that the Gestapo executed Otto and Elise Hampel on April 4th, 1943 (another source says they died on the 8^th). That same week, Franz was nearby, in another Berlin prison. On the 2^nd of the month, Bulgaria informed the Germans that its 25,000 Jews would not be turned over to German control. On the 5th, the Gestapo arrested war resister and Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer (he was executed shortly before the end of the war). On the 9th, the S.S. murdered 2,300 Jews in the Ukrainian Ghetto of Zbrow.

Fred Korematsu’s court appeal was pending. In Budapest, Oskar Schindler was in contact with the Jewish resistance. On the 17th, Hungary refused (temporarily, it turned out) to deliver its 800,000 Jews to the Germans. On the 19th, the Gestapo executed fourteen Germans associated with the White Rose anti-Nazi resistance (in February they had showered the atrium of Munich University with anti-Nazi leaflets). On the same day, the Belgian resistance liberated 233 Jews from an Auschwitz-bound train. On the 19th, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto began their famous uprising.

Were the sacrificial acts of the Hampels and Franz Jägerstätter emblematic of a great turning point in the war? Is it possible that their deaths did not occur in a moral vacuum? Speaking of turning points, biochemist Albert Hofmann accidentally ingested LSD for the first time on April 16^th, 1943.

This quote from George Elliot appears in the last frame of A Hidden Life:

…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

 

And most of them marched willingly into the sacrificial cauldron. The only difference was that now they did it for the Fatherland, rather than for the Father in the sky, although theologians of all stripes encouraged them.

Curiously, it was at precisely this moment that the new field of psychology began to speak of the “martyr complex” in terms of what we now commonly understand to be a desire to emphasize, exaggerate and create a negative experience in order to place blame or guilt on another person. But perhaps they were not looking at what was right in front of them, the religious roots of this malady. My etymology dictionary states that this “exaggerated desire for self-sacrifice” first appeared in print 1916. On July first of that year, after a week-long bombardment, several hundred thousand British troops rose out of their trenches at dawn on the Somme River to attack the German trenches. Within two hours, 60,000 of them were casualties, 20,000 of them dead.

This of course is the dark side of Hero mythology. On the other hand, we have countless examples of people who stood against real evil and were willing to sacrifice their lives for the greater good – not necessarily for an abstract concept, even one such as “freedom” – but for actual, living people. Each of us has our own list. Mine would include other Germans who resisted Nazism and the Muslims in that same war who risked everything to protect their Jewish neighbors. My essay Kind of a Circle tells one of those stories.

We all admire American anti-war and Civil rights activists, and we ought to praise our whistleblowers, from Daniel Ellsberg to Ed Snowden, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou, Reality Winner and Chelsea Manning, and journalists such as Julian Assange for the same reason. Here is Mario Savio’s ‘bodies upon the gears’ speech from 1964.  And even this week, two Oakland mothers who took over an empty house asked for support and hundreds turned out to put their bodies on the line. We all have our lists of those we admire for sticking their necks (or other body parts)  out. How about those people who donate kidneys to save a life? The list goes own.

It does get a bit sticky, however, when we consider those throughout the past century who went on hunger strikes – and many of them died – to force the wider world to pay attention to their causes. Again, some might ask, what did they accomplish? Did anyone notice?  Even this week, two asylum seekers in ICE custody have been on hunger strike for over seventy-five days. Have you noticed?

It gets even stickier when we consider individuals such as the Buddhist monks who immolated themselves to protest South Vietnamese government in the early 1960s, or the Hindu practice of Sati. A Wikipedia article describes this widespread phenomena here.

During the Great Schism of the Russian Church, entire villages of Old Believers burned themselves to death in an act known as “fire baptism”. The example set by self-immolators in the mid 20th century did spark numerous similar acts between 1963 and 1971…Researchers counted almost 100 self-immolations…In 1968 the practice spread to the Soviet bloc…Since 2009, there have been, as of June 2017, 148 confirmed self-immolations by Tibetans, with most of these protests (some 80%) ending in death….A wave of self-immolation suicides occurred in conjunction with the Arab Spring protests in the Middle East and North Africa, with at least 14 recorded incidents.

Sometimes we need to reconsider some of these images. Father Greg Boyle, the “real Christian” I referred to above, who created Homeboy Industries to put former gang members to work, has reframed the contemporary urban phrase of deep friendship I’d take a bullet for him into Nothing stops a bullet like a job! 

But why do we celebrate and venerate – in thousands of stories and films – one very particular kind of heroism? For context, we have to take another digression, this time into American mythology. And we have to acknowledge that for well over a century, American popular culture, disseminated by Hollywood, has overwhelmed indigenous and local storytelling nearly everywhere to become, for better or for worse, world mythology. While we remember Joseph Campbell’s foundational text, The Hero With A Thousand Faces, we need to understand how the American story completely inverted it. Chapters Seven and Nine of my book address this theme in much greater detail, but here is its essence.

The classic hero enacts the three-part initiation theme found in nearly all cultures. Born in community, he hears a call, ventures forth on his journey and returns, sadder but wiser, with the gifts of insight and knowledge. The community welcomes him home, with the old wisdom that each generation must endure these trials in order to remake culture and keep it fresh.

By contrast, the American hero comes from elsewhere, entering the community only temporarily and only to defend it from malevolent attacks. Its leaders, who are weak, incompetent or corrupt, often betray him. Though he cares about them, he is not one of them.

Often his identity is a secret; he may wear a mask or bizarre costume. He is without flaw but also without depth. He is not re-integrated into society, and in recent versions, the community itself is not fully re-integrated. The Other – Terror – is now a permanent threat. “If the function of the enemy is to represent uncontrollable human desire,” writes James Gibson, “then he must constantly be reincarnated in some form or other.”[i]

Classic heroes often wed beautiful maidens, enact the sacred marriage (hieros gamos) and produce many children. But the American hero (with few exceptions such as James Bond and comic antiheroes) doesn’t get or even want the girl. Even Bond remains a bachelor. Often the hero must choose between an attractive sexual partner and duty to his mission. Some (Batman, the Lone Ranger, etc.) renounce marriage altogether, preferring a male “sidekick.” John Wayne (in almost all of his roles), Hawkeye, the Virginian, Superman, Green Lantern, Spiderman, Rambo, Sam Spade, Indiana Jones, Robert Langdon, John Shaft, Captains Kirk, America and Marvel and dozens of others: all are single. They may be divorced or widowed, but they are all unattached to the feminine principal. In this essentially Christian story, their sexual purity ensures moral infallibility, but it also denies both complexity and the possibility of healing.

Indeed, sexual impurity corrupts Eden. The hero often enacts his savior role in disaster films (Earthquake, Towering Inferno, Tidal Wave, Jaws). In these films, the sexual license of certain (usually female) characters seems to trigger the destruction, and they die first. Nature responds with a moral cleansing. The pattern was set in the Old Testament: only the pure and faithful escape. The first victim in Jaws (one of cable TV’s most popular re-runs) is a sexually provocative woman. The final scene, in which the hero (who is married but who has refused to make love to his wife) destroys the giant shark, perfectly recreates the 4,000-year-old story of Marduk’s killing of Tiamat. Once again, the hero vanquishes the feminine serpent.

The classic hero endures the initiatory torments in order to suffer into knowledge and renew the world. This old, pagan and tragic vision recognizes that something must always die for new life to grow, and that this is a symbolic process, not necessarily a literal one. But the American hero cares only to redeem (“buy back”) others. Born in monotheism, he saves Eden by combining elements of the sacrificial Christ who dies for the world and his zealous, jealous, omnipotent father. The community begins and ends in innocence. And though this hero may be willing to sacrifice himself in order to restore innocence to the community, he usually doesn’t actually die. But he does leave when his work is done. Even if his heroism does result in his death, he returns like Christ to “a better place,” his father’s house.

The hero’s superhuman abilities reflect a hope for divine redemption that science has never eradicated. Only in our salvation-obsessed culture and the places our movies go does he appear. Then, he changes the lives of others without transforming them.

I can’t emphasize these insights too strongly. The redemption hero, whom Americans admire above all others, has inherited an immensely long process of abstraction, alienation and splitting of the western psyche. He gives us the model, wrote James Hillman, “for that peculiar process upon which our civilization rests: dissociation.” He is utterly disconnected from relationship with the Other, whom he has demonized into his mirror opposite, the irredeemably evil. Since he never laments the violence employed in destroying such an evil presence, he reinforces our own denial of death. His appeal lies deep below rational thinking.

This hero requires no nurturance, doesn’t grow in wisdom, creates nothing, and teaches only violent resolution of disputes. His renunciation justifies his furious vengeance upon those who cannot control their appetites for power or sex, and this clearly has a modeling effect on millions of adolescent males in each new generation. Defending democracy through fascist means, he also renounces citizenship. He offers, write Jewett and Lawrence, “vigilantism without lawlessness, sexual repression without resultant perversion, and moral infallibility without… intellect.”

His work is too important for the trivial distractions of relationship with real people such as his wife and children because his true allegiance is to the father gods of the sky. Again, the pattern was set two thousand years ago when Jesus returned to his father, leaving the tomb empty. Yes, we admire Franz Jägerstätter as a perfect exemplar of that mythic narrative, as one who died for, perhaps as Christ. But many of us are parents and grandparents. And we all had, even for the briefest of times, a father. Franz went to a better place, but he left his children here.

So – The final scenes of A Hidden Life unfold, the credits role, and we sit in the still-darkened theater weeping. This much is certain. But why are we weeping? I won’t lie: I heard the voice of John Lennon:

Mama don’t go!
Daddy come home!
Mama don’t go!
Daddy come home!

Is this old, irrelevant stuff? Shira Lander describes an adult study session she conducted at a synagogue on the subject of martyrdom. She asked the participants how the subject made people feel.

Most were unsettled by the images, and even were repulsed by the idea of martyrdom—all except the rabbi, who declared with confidence, “I think I would have to choose martyrdom if faced with apostasy. How could I fulfill my role as a model of faith for my community if I didn’t? That’s part of being a rabbi.”

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass,
And by the streamers of white cloud,
And whispers of wind in the listening sky;
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s center.
Born of the sun, they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor. — Stephen Spender

As readers, film and TV viewers, students, churchgoers or any other patriotic consumers of our national mythologies, we have long been conditioned to support, praise and even to emulate that vast pantheon of heroes who put themselves in harm’s way to defend the innocent. In the extreme, we venerate those few who are willing to simply die for an ideal. This is one of the major themes of my book, Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence.

Like almost every man my age, I grew up on John Wayne and Fess Parker’s Davy Crockett, who is last seen dying for freedom at the Alamo, and it’s not easy to remove those images and stories from one’s subconscious. It was easy, however, to forget that Davy’s family was back in Tennessee, and that John Wayne rarely even had a family.

For me, as a grandfather to three girls, the big question as I watched A Hidden Life was: Is one’s spiritual purity worth the suffering of others? I can’t speak for anyone else in the audience, but I was pleading with Franz: Sign the goddamn pledge! Think of your family!

Ultimately, however, along with my grief for them – and for our planet – I was angry at Franz. Yes, you could suggest that my reaction has something to do with my own psychology. But where would that get us? James Hillman said that we have psychology only because we no longer have mythology. To understand what conditioned his decision to refuse the pledge despite knowing the harmful consequences to himself and to his loved ones, we have to look at the history of European religion from a mythological perspective, as I do in Chapters Six and Ten.

For democracy, any man would give his only begotten son. – Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun

Roman generals declared, Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Partria Mori, that it was “a sweet and noble thing to die for your country.” This statement may be self-evident to true believers, but for those of us who no longer subscribe to such a belief system, who sit outside the bubble of other people’s myths, we ask: Why would anyone sacrifice his life for his country, or for any other abstract concept such as a religion?

Joseph Campbell taught that Europeans and their American descendants have lived in a “demythologized world” since Christianity began to lose potency in the 12th century. Now, we rarely take notice of the price we pay for living in such a world. Can we even imagine those times when culture and nature together really did hold and protect our ancestors? We live dispirited lives, since we long ago rejected the “spirits” who connected us to this immense and incomprehensible universe. We stand exposed to old, patriarchal conditions – raw opposition between irreconcilable polarities. We still have myths, even if we are rarely aware of them, but they no longer nourish us.

With great respect to Campbell, it seems to me, however, that myth has been breaking down for much, much longer. What remain, exposed like archeological layers, are immensely old stories: the myths of father/son and brother/brother conflict, and the literalization of initiation rites into the brutal socialization of children. I argue in my book that the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son so as to glorify his god is the foundational myth underlying all of western civilization, that the story actually describes the breakdown of symbolic initiation into literal child sacrifice, and that a thousand years later, the death of Christ on the cross solidified this narrative for a new era.

We do not deny some of the great advances in human thinking such as the Alphabet that the Hebrew tradition bequeathed us. But these gifts came with consequences. Well before the Christian era, the Hebrews began to offer something new – history – as a literalization of myth. It was a culture-wide, top-down movement to no longer interpret the old stories as multi-layered social dreams intended to invite everyone to grow their souls, but as literal, chronological truth. Whereas the pagan world had long understood the words of Sallustius (This never happened, but it always is), people throughout the region now heard, This actually happened, and it happened once. It was the first movement from education (to draw something out of young people that already exists in them) to instruction (to stuff pre-determined information into their empty heads).

And we must admit that they also were the first to glorify people who preferred to die rather than change their thinking. Shira Lander writes: “Most scholars consider the Hasmonean traditions preserved in 2 and 4 Maccabees as representing the earliest Jewish strata of martyrology, although there are many earlier examples.”

Maccabees tells of the first martyrs to Roman persecution – not just those who fought, but those who refused to break Jewish law. Sure of going to Heaven, they went uncomplaining to their execution, unknowingly setting an example for future centuries of Christian martyrs:

And when he was at the last gasp, he said, Thou like a fury takest us out of this present life, but the King of the world shall raise us up, who have died for his laws, unto everlasting life.

A century later, the siege of Masada by Roman troops ended in the mass suicide of 960 rebels – or at least this is what Josephus, the sole chronicler of the event, recorded. Since archeologists have disputed his account, we must ask if this literally happened, or whether the evolving narrative of Jewish martyrdom required such a story. It doesn’t really matter, since the area is now one of Israel’s most popular tourist destinations and, more importantly, it shores up the myth of Israeli innocence. 

In any event, such narratives began to have enormous emotional resonance, and both Jews and Christians (and later, Moslems) compiled catalogues or lists of martyrs and other saints. Some scholars consider these martyrologies to have been vehicles through which Jews and Christians competed for adherents and negotiated their conflicting claims to ultimate truth. To this day, the faithful venerate their memories, celebrate their feast days, name places of worship, schools and hospitals after them.

Many secular states, we should note, do the same with their war victims regardless of their religious convictions. This is a major way in which nationalism perpetuates itself, saying in effect, they died so that you could live in freedom. You must be willing to do the same. Gervase Phillips writes:

The word martyr itself derives from the Greek for “witness”, originally applied to the apostles who had witnessed Christ’s life and resurrection. Later it was used to describe those who, arrested and on trial, admitted to being Christians. By the middle of the second century, it was granted to those who suffered execution for their faith. Christians were not alone in their admiration of those willing to die for their principles. The philosopher Socrates was unjustly condemned to death in 399 BC for “refusing to recognize the gods”…There was, however, a striking difference between Socrates and those martyred in the arenas. The philosopher hoped for, but was not sure of, an afterlife. The martyr, however, was very certain of an afterlife (and) of salvation and reward in heaven.

In the early centuries of the Christian period, as the age of mythological thinking reached its end, it became more difficult to think in terms of the symbolic processes of initiation and rebirth. And the holy text that emerged out of this period omitted the few metaphors of the sacred Earth that had been allowed into Hebrew scripture. As a result, wrote Paul Shepard, the New Testament is “one of the world’s most antiorganic and antisensuous masterpieces of abstract ideology…”

The zealots who wrested control of the church believed that Christ had literally returned from the dead, and that metaphoric interpretation of his life was unacceptable. Theirs was a religion, write Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, of “…outer mysteries without the inner mysteries…”

In the late second century, they prohibited women from participating in worship. Soon, schisms developed over fine points of dogma, and rival sects attacked each other in furious jihads, even as the Roman state was still persecuting them. Soon enough, when Christianity became the official state religion, they attacked pagans with the same ferocity.

Here, we can apply some social-psychological insight. Christianity grew up within a heritage and in an atmosphere of violence. Like other traumatized children, it became a perpetrator of abuse, and early on it became obsessed with death.

Absolutely nothing attributed to Jesus in the Gospels suggested anything about his death as a sacrifice. Saint Paul, however, changed Christianity’s central focus from the old mythic image of the birth of the Divine Child to his death; in his vision the Aqedah – the story of the binding of Isaac – was completed only with Jesus’ sacrifice and resurrection. A religion of love devolved into an obsession with suffering. It taught that Christ’s sacrifice had occurred once, not as part of an unending cycle. The western world now understood myth literally, as actual history.

And since the idea of one unrepeatable sacrifice excluded any metaphorical or psychological interpretation of Christ’s death as sacrifice of the ego, it resulted in the suppression of initiation rites. Christians came to believe that Jesus, unlike Dionysus and other earlier gods, had died not as the cycle of creation but as penance for humanity’s bad behavior. This subtle yet significant difference shifted the emphasis from the tragedy of the human condition to the innate sinfulness of human nature. Eventually the initiation of adolescents was transformed into the ritual purification of infants who by their very nature were such threats that it was necessary to protect the community from them.

Having died for the sins of the world, Christ became the ultimate, if willing, scapegoat. Men left society (and women) to defeat their own sinfulness. To this day, the monks of Mount Athos in Greece still refuse to allow the presence of female animals onto their sacred grounds.

Eventually, some of these men even pursued martyrdom. In the late second-century, Arrius Antoninus, proconsul of current-day Turkey, was provoked by “the whole Christians of the province in one united band.” He obliged some of them and then sent the rest away, saying that if they wanted to kill themselves there was plenty of rope available or cliffs they could jump off. Later, Ignatius longed to suffer, “but I do not know whether I am worthy”, and Cyprian imagined the “…flowing blood which quenches the flames and the fires of hell by its glorious gore”.

Martyrdom would eventually evolve into one of the most emotive terms in the English language. It became the highest ethical virtue that every believer must be prepared to emulate, a shared tradition of the Abrahamic religions – in Hebrew, Kiddush Ha-Shem (sanctification of the divine name); in Arabic, shahada (witness). But let’s be very clear about how radical this belief was. Leonard Shlain, in The Alphabet and the Goddess, put this astonishing demand into its proper context:

Until the Christian martyrs, there does not occur anywhere in the recorded history of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, Greece, India or China a single instance in which a substantial segment of the population accepted torture and death rather than forswear their belief in an ethereal concept.

This is the legacy of monotheism. No Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, Confucian, Pagan or member of any of the thousands of indigenous religious systems before or since could possibly understand this willingness to die – or to slaughter one’s own child – rather than to change one’s mind about an idea, or to even to pretend to do so. Bruce Chilton, in Abraham’s Curse, adds:

Uniquely among the religions of the world, the three that center on Abraham have made the willingness to offer the lives of children – an action they all symbolize with versions of the Aqedah – a central virtue for the faithful as a whole.

And as we all know, the meaning of the word “martyr” gradually changed. Abraham’s knife became a soldier’s sword in Christian iconography. Dying as Christ (around 100 AD) became dying for Christ (500), which became killing for Christ (1000), or for Allah. And a thousand years later, give or take a decade or two, the Western world’s relationship with its deity and its understanding of myth and, yes, its contempt for its own children has produced the ultimate descent into literalism: dying for Allah and simultaneously killing as many innocent non-believers as possible.

The tyrant dies and his rule is over; the martyr dies and his rule begins. – Soren Kierkegaard

This is the logical outcome of the disappearance of mythic consciousness and initiation ritual. For thousands of years, men had symbolically killed the child-nature in their boys to invite their full participation in the adult world. But with the crushing of paganism, a literalized myth (the sacrifice of a child for the glory of his father) came to predominate. It was a very old myth, but now Europe was about to feast on the bodies of its young.

With the inexplicable advance of Islam, however, Christianity confronted a new and immensely powerful Other that questioned its assumptions of universal superiority. The Church responded by distracting its nobles from killing each other and enlisting their energies in crusades of conquest and extermination against the infidels. A new figure emerged: the warrior-monk, pledged to both chastity and eternal warfare. It became glorious to die even in defeat because it would be a martyr’s death.

The Crusades mark the first merger of what I have called the paranoid and predatory (link) imaginations. Pope Urban offered the soldiers both remissions of sin (now, violence was a ticket to paradise) as well as an incentive to martyrdom. The result was a scale of atrocities that still puzzles historians, who, writes Chilton,

…have not factored in the sacrificial dimension of Urban’s appeal. Self-sacrifice, more than self-interest, is the hidden hand guiding this strange and relentless history…Crusading was a license, not only to kill, but also to…indulge other appetites, absolved in advance.

Every good deed brings its own punishment. – James Agate

Sometimes the spirit comes through me. I’m not saying this out of pride. I’m simply observing that one when is committed to his art – in my case, writing about historical, political and cultural issues through a mythological lens, when one asks to be a conduit for other voices – when one tries to pay attention – then one had better be prepared for synchronicities. One had better be prepared to drop what one is doing, to sacrifice some trivial pleasure or responsibility, and just listen.

Or watch. The other night, having already planned to see Terrance Malick’s new film A Hidden Life, I discovered the 2016 film Alone in Berlin on Netflix and watched this dramatized true story. A middle-aged German husband and wife, grieving for their son who’d been killed in the war, can no longer passively accept the authority of the Nazi death cult. They leave some 200 handwritten, anti-war postcards all over the city until the Gestapo arrests them. Having offered up their son to the State (in reality it was her brother, but that doesn’t matter), they ultimately sacrifice themselves. Indeed, the film’s ending is a bit ambiguous. Perhaps they want to get caught; perhaps their protest, dangerous as it is, is not enough.

Otto and Elise Hampel were sent to the guillotine in Berlin on April 4^th, 1943.

The next day, somewhat shaken by that film, thinking of people who really had sacrificed for their principles, I went for a hike in Oakland’s Mountain View Cemetery, where a series of random (?) turns took me past the grave of Fred Korematsu, who had refused to cooperate with the government’s internment of his fellow Japanese-American citizens and had fought for decades to clear his name and secure compensation for them. Synchronicity.

Then, knowing what I was in for (it’s nearly impossible to see a movie these days without already knowing about its plot), I went to my local theater and watched A Hidden Life, another true story of passive resistance to the Nazis.

Franz Jägerstätter is no urban sophisticate but a devout Catholic farmer living an idyllic life in Austria’s Tyrolian mountains. His village lies below towering peaks shrouded in mist, with green hills rolling to distant horizons. Deep, intense green fills every frame. He and his wife Fani, even after having produced three daughters, are deeply, sensuously in love. In voiceovers he muses, “I thought we could build our nest high up in the trees…Fly away like birds.” Even though the war, its horrors and its moral choices will soon reach them, Fani says, “It seemed no trouble could reach our valley.”

I won’t lie; from the first images I was weeping. I’ve been to the Tyrol, and the area certainly is gorgeous. But the film immediately, repeatedly and quite deliberately presents images of such overwhelming natural beauty (later to be contrasted with the meanness of people and institutions) that I fell into a trance, as poet Mark Nepo says, “of wonder and grief”.  It seemed clear (to me at least) that the filmmaker was intent on forcing viewers – me – to confront not simply the imminent loss of this fairy-tail family love nest. I was well aware that it was the first week of 2020, that this year may well be our last chance to reverse global warming, that there may well not be a future. We are all on the very edge of losing this beautiful world.

Franz’s faith is absolute. In this age of pedophile priests, racist evangelicals who look forward to the End Times and televangelists who declare you-know-who to be “the Chosen One,” we are a bit shocked to realize that Franz is a real Christian. (By the way, here’s a link to a contemporary American real Christian).

Or perhaps – with all this lush scenery, these intensely verdant meadows and gently flowing waters, all this planting and harvesting, all this much-more-than-Christian sensuality, all this dancing, playing, touching, kissing, caressing of animals, rolling on the grass, filling the hands with the fertile earth, with the mothers of all mountains in the background – perhaps, just below the surface, these people are true pagans (paganus: hill people). It’s not too much of a stretch to suggest that they are devout Catholics in nearly the same way that syncretistic Haitian vodouisants or Brazilian Candomblers are.

But Franz gradually concludes that he cannot remain a moral person and also serve in Hitler’s death machine or even sign an oath of allegiance to the Fuhrer, as all Austrian men are required to do. By saying, “No,” Franz, like the Hampels, knows that he could lose everything. This is why Malick spends so much of this very long film dwelling on the family’s profound love of nature and each other. There really is so much at stake, for them and us.

Their Eden eventually becomes a social hell. Franz’s refusal to just go along calls down scorn and condemnation upon his family, because he has forced everyone else in the village to confront the roots of their own identities. Some may be afraid to publicly agree with him, while others quote Hitler, screaming about the evils of immigrants and foreigners in a place where there seems to be none of either. They brand him a traitor, spit on Fani and throw mud at their daughters. Once Franz is transported to prison in far-away Berlin, the other farmers refuse to help Fani with the back-breaking labor of tending the land and livestock. When her cow dies, she and her sister must pull a plow through her field by themselves. What a metaphor.

She ultimately makes her own choice to support his decision, but only after after months of emotional conflict in which everyone in the film, from his mother and his closest friends (who become ex-friends), to his fellow prisoners, his guards, his lawyers and even his judge, plead with him to take the oath. Everyone agrees that his resistance won’t change anything and will come at too high a price for him and his family. And there is a way out: he can be a conscientious objector and serve as a medic in a hospital, if he will only sign. Everyone has their own argument:

The Bishop: “You have a duty to the fatherland. The church tells you so.”

The villagers: “Pride! That’s what it is, Pride!” Your mother will die un-consoled.”

A fellow prisoner: “You can’t change the world; the world is stronger.”

A sadistic guard: “I can do anything I want to you! No one will notice!”

His judge: “Nature has not noticed the sorrow that has come over people.”

His priest: “God doesn’t care what you say, only what is in your heart.”

Fani: “I need you.”

By the end, after Fani’s heart-wrenching final meeting with him in the prison has failed to persuade him, the only man in the film to support him, her father, admits, “Better to suffer injustice than to do it.” Franz, like the Hampels, goes willingly, if with deep sadness, to the guillotine.

A few historical notes: The municipality of Sankt Radegund at first refused to put his name on a local war memorial and the state did not approve a pension for Fani until 1950. Eventually, several books and films made their names known, and the Vatican beatified Franz in 2007. Fani died in 2013, age 100.

You can read dozens of reviews of A Hidden Life here.  Most are of interest only to other film reviewers and serious film buffs, but a couple of writers observe its religious dimensions. Peter Ranier writes:

Most of the famous religious-themed Hollywood movies…are biblical epics functioning as star-studded illustrated guidebooks to sacred texts… “A Hidden Life” is the antithesis of those epics. It’s an attempt to make the movie itself function as a religious experience. It has a powerful sense of the immanence of life. Franz’s stance is a deeply moral one, but his morality is based on his religious precepts. This is what differentiates “A Hidden Life” from so many Hollywood movies where people, without any religious underpinning, fight for what is right.

Barbara Vandenburgh:

“A Hidden Life” is less a story than an experience, a spiritual journey made accessible through light and sound. Malick doesn’t transcend cinema. He sanctifies it.

But it’s the film’s moral dilemma that throws us into such torment. Why, ask so many characters (and viewers), should Franz do the right thing if it changes nothing? What is the value of an unwitnessed sacrifice? More on that later.

The Iran Negotiations have been a Circus and a Charade (July 2015)

Part One

Are you celebrating Barack Obama’s deal with Iran? It is certainly a good thing, but have you had the same experience that I’ve had over several years? Has it occurred to you that this business has seemed particularly loony – even for the madhouse of American politics?

The system is broken. We can see this in countless examples, from corrupted voting machines to mass apathy to exclusion of alternative parties to Donald Trump and a presidential primary campaign that has already raised $400 million. We laugh about it while watching Stephen Colbert and John Stewart capturing each day’s latest crazy statement by the crazy candidate of the day…laughing, as they used to say, to keep from crying.

And we can see it in the diplomatic sphere, especially in the Iran nuclear negotiations, which have been characterized by the stench of mendacious bloviating, grandstanding, preaching to the choir and absurd political theater from the very start.

I will grant you that we can never know the true intentions of the Obama administration, nor can we have any idea of the subtleties of the diplomatic arts. We do know, however, that this administration, like all before it, has one primary strategy in all affairs: to dominate world markets in service of the American empire. We know that its practical intentions differ only slightly from those of its most right-wing critics, and for 65 years that has certainly included the threat of unilateral nuclear attack.

This whole project has relied on fundamental aspects of American mythology: our national insistence on willful ignorance and innocence, with a subset of manipulated fear that has enriched generations of arms merchants.

The charade had been going on for quite a while (see below), when our basic moral intelligence (I’ll be forced to use this word “intelligence” quite a bit) was insulted by a pair of bizarre events. In February Benjamin Netanyahu preached to a compliant choir of Republican Senators, warning them to reject the negotiations – knowing full well that his own intelligence agency, the Mossad, had contradicted him. 

Shortly afterwards, 47 Senators, in a media circus that some in an alternative universe might label as treason, attempted to undercut Obama’s ability to negotiate by actually writing to the Iranians and warning that they would do everything they could to wreck any agreement. In effect, the Republicans took the same position as the worst reactionaries among the Iranians.

This was only the most recent craziness. Do you remember John McCain years ago imitating the Beach Boys with “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran?”  A presidential candidate received hardy applause  when he joked about bombing another country. Of course no one thought he was serious – and isn’t that part of the madness?

Netanyahu was not the only politician who knew quite well that Iran posed no nuclear threat, and here we come to the fundamental lie behind this entire project.

The United States has 16 separate intelligence agencies, and all of them agree that Iran gave up any intention of building a nuclear capability over ten years ago. You won’t find this fact easily in either government statements or the media, which naturally prefers to amplify the “threat” of a Nuclear Iran. But you can find it in the conclusions of a National Intelligence Estimate of November 2007 (NIE), issued unanimously by all those intelligence agencies:

We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program…it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005.

Actually, you can find this information even in the “reputable” media, if you look hard enough.

Of course politicians obfuscate. Of course diplomats veil reality in the pursuit of their goals. But stop and get serious: for its entire existence this administration (and the media, and every single politician in Washington, including the most extreme of the hawks), have known perfectly well that Iran posed absolutely no threat to the American people. Still, the U.S. made crude attempts to plant fake “intelligence” about an Iranian bomb just as it had about Iraqi weapons.

Ray McGovern is a former long-time CIA analyst who had top security clearance and briefed several American presidents. After quitting in disgust, he formed the ironically and aptly named organization, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.  He reports that the Senate Intelligence Committee (never known for its dovishness) itself reported in 2008 that

In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even nonexistent.

In sum, writes McGovern, the “intelligence” was not mistaken; it was fraudulent.

The only question we should ask about any administration’s intelligence reports going all the way back to Eisenhower – and we can ask this question about any public statement they have ever made about foreign policy – is was it outright fraud, or was it “mistaken?”

[December 2017: The recent Ken Burns documentary on the Viet Nam War begins and concludes with the narrative of “mistake.” Others, including every veteran I’ve ever known, lean toward “fraud.”]

Do you really think that the fraud ended when Obama took office? McGovern adds: “An equally important fact ignored by the mainstream media is that the key judgments of that NIE have been re-validated by the intelligence community every year since” – that is, including every year of the Obama administration.

Even the shameless warmonger George W. Bush wrote (in his memoir):

But after the NIE, how could I possibly explain using the military to destroy the nuclear facilities of a country the intelligence community said had no active nuclear weapons program?

Think about that statement. A former president actually admitted his disappointment (or that of his generals) that his spies could find no justification for attacking another nation! Perhaps Obama will be that candid once he retires. The truth, of course, did not prevent Bush or Obama from continuing the sanctions.

Professor Yakov Rabkin notes that the U.S. and Israel invented the Iranian threat, which became a staple in Western media. Do you remember Netanyahu brandishing crude drawings of the bomb at the United Nations in the winter?  That was nothing new. His business is paranoia. He has been predicting this massive, immediate danger for at least eight years. As far back as March 2007,

…the Israel Project, a Washington-based constituent of the Israel Lobby, distributed an “Iran Press Kit” to over 17,000 media professionals and 40,000 pro-Israel activists in the United States.  It claimed that Iran is about to acquire nuclear weapons: “The Nuclear Clock is TICKING … and time is running out.”

Back to our story. Imagine for a moment an American President who tells the truth. A president who, all along, could have called a press conference and responded to the war mongers with, “Bullshit. We know and they know that the Iranians are not a threat.”

Not one progressive Democrat, not Bernie Sanders, not Elizabeth Warren, not Barbara Lee has called out the President on this glaring lie that underlies the entire concept of “Iran” in the American paranoid imagination.

All through the years of the Iran negotiations, Obama, like Netanyahu, had knowingly based the charade on our old mythic assumptions of exceptionalism that few Americans (if they pay any attention at all) ever question – that we have the right to enforce our interests in regions thousands of miles away because we have a divine mandate to spread freedom across the planet and play the role of world policeman.

All media, from Fox to Pacifica, repeated the tale without ever questioning the basic assumption that the U.S. had nothing but the most noble of intentions, that America was heroically – once again – only attempting to do “good.” Only in America can pundits and elected leaders regularly, openly, with straight faces, discuss our assumed right to engage in “regime change” – a euphemism for violently overthrowing the leadership (and, in countless examples, the democratically elected leadership) of a sovereign nation.

One corollary of the myth, deeply embedded in our Puritan psyches (and seen most clearly in the conquest of Hawaii) was that those who act from the noblest of intentions – those who come to do good – also often end up doing quite well, thank you very much. Do you remember that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was originally titled “Operation Iraqi Liberation” before someone in the State Department noticed the embarrassing acronym and changed the war’s name to “Operation Iraqi Freedom?” Imagine having the power to “name” a war…

Part Two of this essay is here.

Consider some of the essential components of the myth of American Innocence:

1 – Our popular narratives of extreme violence, both real and fictional, are always justified by the need for a hero, an exceptional man who is willing to sacrifice himself (but rarely does) to protect the innocent community from the irrational, evil desires of the “Other.”

2 – Like the mythical god Apollo whose arrows killed from a distance, American violence is not an intimate affair. Whether it comes from the barrel of a gun, the rockets of a fighter jet, airborne tankers dropping defoliants on peasants, a B-52 carpet-bombing entire regions from five miles off the ground or the joystick of a computer that directs drone-fired missiles flying over another continent, it is perpetrated from a distance.

3 – The denial of death. This characteristic distance is one of the factors that allow Americans to de-sensitize themselves to the reality of death. In addition, a constant diet of TV crime shows and superhero movies allows us to believe that violence isn’t real, or that, despite our fears, it only happens elsewhere. Hence our disillusionment and punctured innocence when the Sandy Hooks of the world happen to us.

4 – A perpetual war economy, at least since the end of World War Two. Why does America go to war so often? Do Imperial politics fully explain the fact that the U.S. has attacked over forty countries since 1945? Ultimately, our American stories convey an even deeper level of mythic reality. At the core of all western culture – yet expressed in its purest form in America – is the myth of the Killing of the Children. Our greatest secret – the most sacred knowledge, so sacred that it is taboo to ever discuss it – is that the American Empire must periodically sacrifice large numbers of its own children in foreign wars in order to shear up the cracks that appear in our national sense of innocence and white privilege. They die, we are told, to protect freedom. In fact, they die because we want them to die.

5 – Unprovoked attack. Since by definition American violence must stem from the noblest of motivations, our actions are always re-actions to nefarious attacks from the Other, who hates us out of purely evil intent. Hence, no movie cowboy ever strikes the first blow. Similarly, no American President ever strikes at the enemy without first having been attacked. In these narratives, the Other always strikes first, with a “sneak” attack. At the very least, he is preparing to attack, or merely capable of doing so. That, in our myth, is justification for American “pre-emptive” violence.

6 – With four hundred years of these stories deeply woven into the American psyche, we are well-primed to ingest each new one. Among the countless examples, think of “Remember the Maine,” the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, 9-11, “weapons of mass destruction”, Iranian nukes, Syrian barrel bombs. But think also of the thousands of movie, TV and comic book villains who without exception strike the first blow, often from behind. They don’t play fair. They use “chemical weapons,” which – despite our own use of them – we deem as so terrible that they must be punished. Indeed, every action of the American empire requires such provocations, because otherwise, cracks would quickly appear in the myth and Americans would begin to question the essence of our identity.

This essay is about one of those stories. In 2005, Admiral James Stockdale died, almost universally revered as a genuine American hero. Most Americans knew him as Ross Perot’s 1992 vice-presidential running mate. An older generation remembered him as America’s highest-ranking prisoner-of-war in the Viet Nam war, a man who suffered extreme beatings and torture for seven years but never revealed classified information or spoke ill of his country. After his release, he received the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Few of us, however, know about this other story:

A very public person, Stockdale gave many interviews about his military service, and he was quite candid about his participation in the Gulf of Tonkin incident of 1964 that gave President Lyndon Johnson the excuse to begin the invasion of Vietnam. Stockdale had led the fighter squadron searching for the North Vietnamese boats that had allegedly fired upon an American ship.  Stockdale admitted, “I got so low I had salt water on my windshield and there’s no boats out there!” (All quotes are from from this interview.)

So Stockdale knew very well that the President was lying when, the next day, Johnson announced that the U.S. was responding in force to this unprovoked North Vietnamese “aggression.” Either Stockdale said nothing to his superiors or he was commanded not to speak about the event.

Stockdale had been raised to be a hero but had been too young to see action in Korea, and he didn’t want to miss his chance for glory.  The next day, when other pilots were about to take off to bomb Haiphong Harbor, Stockdale (as he revealed many years later) pulled rank, demanding that he be allowed to lead the raid. When asked if he wanted defensive weapons loaded on his planes in addition to the bombs, he answered:

 

No, there’ll be no action out there against us today except the flack…I could have said, Hell, no. This is Pearl Harbor; we’re going to attack a country that’s not waiting for it… I didn’t say any of that and it’s just as well.

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution?

They had already signed it and Johnson had withheld it. Now I don’t know what happened to it… I laughed to myself. I didn’t put it on the air but I said, Here we go. I’m starting a war under false pretenses… August 5th, 1964, and I was the guy that did it. I wouldn’t have missed it but – so anyway I don’t argue about the Vietnam War legitimacy or anything like that.

Here is a most remarkable admission. Of course the war would have started anyway, even if Stockdale had spoken up or refused to go on the mission. Months later, Johnson proclaimed, “We must love each other or die” as he secretly prepared to escalate the conflict into a major war.

But just imagine: a single person, a single point in time, a single decision to drop the bombs.  Just following orders. And eleven years later, three million Vietnamese — and perhaps another two million Laotians and Cambodians — were dead. Do such actions fit the definition of “war criminal?”

A year later Stockdale was shot down over North Viet Nam and his prisoner-of-war saga began. Several best-selling books, the Medal of Honor and millions of votes came his way.

His behavior in the prison was exemplary; he probably saved the lives of many of his co-prisoners. Americans came to see these men, most of whom who had been shot down while bombing North Vietnamese cities, as victims of cruel communists, the “Others” who would later be the stock villains of Sylvester Stallone movies. To this day, most Americans think of those pilots as victims, and of the 58,000 American dead as the only casualties of the war.

But who really were the victims: the 1,300 POWs, the hundred thousand veterans who committed suicide after returning, five million dead Asian peasants or an American society that still refuses to grieve for that war or for the wars we have prosecuted since then, each of them idealistic crusades to rid the world of evil, yet each of them begun “under false pretenses?”

When their idealism collapsed, so did their lives. Finally realizing that the C.I.A. was intent only on destroying all he had believed in, Frank resigned – and quickly drank himself to death. Similarly, after Stalin’s crimes came to light, Al, whose own idealism had kept him from acknowledging what had been obvious for years, experienced a similar loss of innocence. He quit the party, but he struggled for the rest of his life with a cocaine habit.

These are deeply mythic issues that point back to the betrayal on the cross at Calvary and even further back, to what I consider Western culture’s foundational myth, the willingness of Father Abraham to sacrifice his son in order to glorify his God.

But Frank, Al, Ron and Danny are real people; only their names have been changed. Still, their stories are real mysteries. It appears that one son took on his father’s curse and the other didn’t. Ron became a clinical psychologist, taught at Stanford and raised a family, while Danny became a talented but emotionally troubled poet. The two men never met but they were undoubtedly present together at many of the iconic events of the 1960s and 1970s. Danny, however, like his father, descended into drug addiction. In later years he was a well-known participant in San Francisco’s poetry scene, before dying of an overdose. He is still highly regarded among the post-Beat poetry generation. Ron has spent most of his career working in veterans’ hospitals, serving survivors of America’s tragic crusade in Viet Nam.

I relate these stories because they illustrate some of the themes of my book. Our cultural evolution has primed us to come to awareness of our identity through two forms of experience. The first is the gradual process of learning the stories that tell us who we are. The second is abrupt breaks in that self-knowledge. Those breaks can be accidental; or older representatives of culture may deliberately create them in order to propel the initiates into new identities, to challenge them to step up and accept more mature rolls in the community. The first form of experience we used to call myth, and the second we called initiation ritual. For much more on this topic, see Chapter Five of my book.

Modern life, however, is characterized by the absence of both of these traditional patterns. Consequently, whether we know it or not, we all exist close to a line beyond which is the terrifying suspicion that we have no solid identity, that anything goes, while life lacks all meaning. As a result, much of what we do and believe and tell each other about ourselves amounts to unconscious efforts to cling to a sense of meaning, thin though it may be.

Ideology

Modernity compensates for its loss of myth and initiation rituals with consumerism and the culture of celebrity, as well as through deep, emotional commitment to an ideology, whether it is religious, nationalistic or political – and finally, through substance abuse. Thus, when Frank and Al lost their faiths and couldn’t find other ones to replace them with, they each searched for it in substances that may have temporarily recreated the joy of singing some identity-confirming anthem among their brothers-in-arms.

My book argues that these are all forms of addiction, as well as attempts to re-establish our sense of innocence, and that the crusading impulse toward re-making the world is a specifically American version, formed by our Puritan heritage. But, as Hillman taught, when that innocence (or if you prefer, grandiosity) is punctured, a cavernous well of meaninglessness may open up.

In a mythologically literate culture, where real elders are capable of guiding one through the suffering of authentic initiation, a young person’s experience of the loss of innocence can be – is intended to be – an opportunity for deepening into the sorrowful knowledge of maturity. Few modern people, however, can endure that disillusionment without succumbing to the overwhelming impulse to replace one addiction (ideology) with another (a substance). After all, it is no accident that our word for strong alcohol is spirits (“inspiration; breath of life”).

Tribal people knew that the only way the world can be re-made is when individuals are willing to experience loss (even the loss of identity), to look into the abyss and to return to their communities with a deeper sense of their own gifts, with the dark knowledge of both their own wounds and their unique blessings. But this requires real community and real ritual.

Perhaps there may be no loss of innocence – personal or national – and no deepening into maturity without the experience of some form of betrayal. In Chapter Twelve I write:

Now, all creative acts have political implications. Poet Dianne Di Prima writes, “The only war that matters is the war against the imagination.” Another poet, Frances Ponge, says that genuine hope lies in “…a poetry through which the world so invades the spirit of man that he becomes almost speechless and later reinvents a language.” We are required to collapse so deeply into the mournful realization of how much we have lost that we become speechless. Only from that position can new forms of art and language arise that might break the spell of our amnesia. Then it is possible for us to speak and act without being throttled by belief systems riddled with unconscious forms of violence…

Like the Hindu deities, the actors in the new myths…will ask not for belief, but to be entertained…The world would still be a “vale of soul-making,” as Keats wrote, but we would no longer believe that is fallen. Indeed, we wouldn’t believe anything, in the religious sense of something being unalterably true…Imagine millions of Americans no longer needing to interpret Biblical poetry as literal fact. “Belief” would return to its German roots where it is connected to love and cherish, something closer to “entertaining possibilities.” Christ himself could join those suffering gods who preceded him. Without the model of and belief in a god who sacrifices himself to redeem others, we would begin to redeem ourselves.

Neither Frank Adams nor Al Zelig grew up in such a world. Neither one could have known, as Rumi wrote in the 13^th century:

When school or mosque, tower or minaret get torn down,

Then dervishes can begin their community.

For it is not until faithfulness turns to betrayal

And betrayal into trust

That any human being can become a part of the truth.

Later Years

Ideologically opposed as they were, both Frank Adams and Al Zelig had built their entire identities upon what turned out to be thin veneers of belief. Generations before, both of their families had spurned organized religion. But, as James Hillman taught, all Americans are “psychologically Christian… we are each…like it or not, children of the Biblical God. It is a fact, the essential American fact.”

What does Hillman’s curious statement mean? I interpret it as a lament that in this demythologized world, we are all essentially uninitiated persons who have long forgotten the indigenous capacity to think metaphorically. As such, we tend to use literalized, polarized, “either-or” terminology. We are all monotheists at heart, and our default mode, even as educated liberals, is to fill the holes in our creative imaginations with belief systems of one form or another and to demonize opposing points of view. And it is a simple temptation when we lose faith in one system to quickly replace it with another.

We have been conditioned over the centuries to reduce the multi-layered mystery of world and self to the simplistic dualisms of monotheism: whatever isn’t aligned with our god must necessarily follow his opposite. Here is a clue: if your people consider their story to be literally true and other people’s stories are “myths,” then you and your people are thinking literally. Other mono-words share the brittleness of one correct way: monopoly, monogamy, monolithic, monarchy, monotonous.

As monotheism triumphed, it transformed difference into “otherness,” as a threat to be eliminated. But in our bones, we still have the vestigial memory of an original, creative, animist, pagan imagination that appreciates diversity and welcomes all gods and all emotions, including humor. Hillman insisted, “The Gods don’t require my belief for their existence, nor do I require belief for my experience of their existence.”

So it seems to me that If solutions to our great social and environmental crises emerge, they will originate outside of the monoculture’s arrogantly monocular view, from people on the edges, people who, in Caroline Casey’s words, “…believe nothing; entertain possibilities.”

As soon as the generals and the politicos

can predict the motions of your mind, lose it.

Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn’t go.

– Wendell Berry

The danger – and the opportunity – that belief offers us is to lose it, to lose faith, to become disillusioned. For some of us, as Hillman wrote, this tragic blessing happens through betrayal.

All of the grand, over-arching, ideological mono-liths of our Judeo-Christian tradition, from the Crusades to the Inquisition, to American Puritanism to Nazism to radical Islam have utilized betrayal and the fear of betrayal for their own ends. But perhaps the utopia symbolized by international communism is the saddest story of our past century, where the lives of Frank and Al, and millions of believers like them, intersected. Unfortunately, like all the ideologies that came before, communism accepted the primacy of means over ends, that any crimes whatsoever were acceptable if they furthered the “cause.” Adam Kirsch writes:

By the late nineteen-thirties, Western intellectuals who sympathized with Communism had already proved themselves capable of accepting a great deal of killing in the name of the cause…(They) usually justified Stalinism’s crimes as the necessary price of building a socialist future, and of defending it against a hostile capitalist world. Walter Duranty, the Times’ correspondent in Moscow, excused the three million famine deaths that were caused by the push to collectivize Soviet agriculture, writing that, “to put it brutally—you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

The twin shadows of belief are betrayal and martyrdom. Indeed, Christianity became the first religion to make martyrdom a demand of faith. Leonard Shlain put this process into historical context:

Until the Christian martyrs, there does not occur anywhere in the recorded history of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, Greece, India or China a single instance in which a substantial segment of the population accepted torture and death rather than forswear their belief in an ethereal concept.

Even as deeply idealistic men like Frank and Al – communists, anti-communists. socialists, liberals, labor activists, anarchists, fascists, anti-fascists, monarchists, Catholics and poets – were sacrificing themselves on the arid fields of Spain between 1936 and 1939, Stalin’s show trials were destroying thousands, perhaps millions of lives. Their alleged crimes: betrayal of the cause. One of these believers in intellectual orthodoxy was Arthur Koestler, who in his disillusionment would go on to write Darkness At Noon, Dialogue With Death and The God that Failed. Kirsch continues:

Koestler…did not become a Communist “by a process of elimination.” Rather, he compared the experience to a religious conversion. “The whole universe falls into pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle,” he wrote. “There is now an answer to every question.”

Soviet Communism in its heyday served many people around the world as a secular religion. Today, although Marxist ideas and the label “socialist” have been resurgent on the left, the enormous influence once exerted by Communism now seems a distant phenomenon. To its adherents, Communism was not just a party identification but a complete theory of life and history, which dictated both personal and political morality. And it was the conflict between that morality and ordinary moral instincts—which condemned things like lying and killing, which the Party often demanded—that provided the dramatic focus of “Darkness at Noon”…every political creed must eventually face the question of whether noble ends can justify evil means. As Koestler saw, this problem reached its pure form in Communism because its avowed aim was the noblest of all: the permanent abolition of social injustice throughout the world. If this could be achieved, what price would be too high? Maybe a million or ten million people would die today, but if billions would be happy tomorrow wasn’t that worth it? A Communist revolutionary, Koestler writes, “is forever damned to do what he loathes the most: become a butcher in order to stamp out butchery, sacrifice lambs so lambs will no longer be sacrificed.”

Frank’s belief system was no different. He saw close up how anti-communism was as much a system of mass murder as Stalin’s was, but he justified his crimes because of his noble ideals. His politics, like Al’s, had been an all-encompassing faith; psychologically they were no different from other fundamentalists. And each inevitably became disillusioned. Perhaps eventually each of them might have agreed with Koestler: “A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.” But each in his way experienced the dark reality behind his passionate commitment when he felt betrayed by those he had served. I would imagine that they each felt, even in their agnosticism, that God himself had betrayed them.

The Adams’ are an old New England Yankee family. After attaining a Law degree from Yale (as both his father and grandfather had done before him), Frank Adams signed up to fight fascism in World War Two. He joined the Office of Strategic Services, America’s first national intelligence service. Most of its members came from conservative backgrounds, but quite a few, like Frank, were liberals and true believers in the Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

As a government agency, the OSS was unique in American history. Many of its top leaders were Ivy League graduates, while among its most effective operatives on the ground – and behind enemy lines – were communists and veterans of the Abraham Brigade which had recently fought fascism in Spain. Richard Harris Smith’s book OSS – The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency  is a fascinating narrative of how the 11,000 members of its intelligence and sabotage units engaged in many of the unheralded but critical episodes of the war while negotiating bizarre coalitions of right-wing monarchists and left-wing revolutionaries in every country in Europe and the Far East.

The 2006 film The Good Shepherd  describes the OSS’s idealistic origins and its dark transformation into the criminal CIA.

But all that came later. Frank served honorably, and at war’s end he felt that America was indeed fulfilling its destiny to defend freedom and bring opportunity to the world. There was only one problem – he believed (I will be using this word a lot) in the idea of American exceptionalism, that America always did right, and always for the right reasons, and that even when it didn’t this was because of human mistakes. And he naturally believed in one of its main corollaries, that the Evil Other was determined to subvert America’s ideals, for no reason other than its own depravity.

And in Frank’s time, once Germany and Japan had surrendered, the Other appeared to be the cancer of international communism that threatened democracy everywhere. So, when the O.S.S. transformed into the Central Intelligence Agency, Frank continued his career in covert operations as a willing soldier in America’s anti-communist crusade. For a while, his belief in the CIA’s mission kept him from realizing that it was purging all the liberals and was functioning to destroy popular movements for self-determination everywhere, from Italy, Greece and Iran to Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The Zeligs

In the first decade of the twentieth century, the Zelig family, like millions of others, escaped anti-Semitic pogroms in Eastern Europe and immigrated to America, which they considered the beacon of democracy and freedom. But they never forgot their socialist ideals (honed before the Russian revolution), and they were politically active in their new home, New York City. By social class, ethnicity, politics and their sheer newness, they were the exact opposite of the Adams – but they were also true believers. As a 15-year-old in 1937, Al Zelig stood on street corners raising money for that same Spanish Republic that so many New York Jewish progressives were fighting for, some of whom would later join Frank Adams’ OSS.

Both progressives and conservatives held the notion of progress, along with freedom, as their highest ideal. As I write in Chapter Nine of my book, Madness at The Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence:

Socialists also believed in progress. Freedom, writes (Robert) Nesbit,

…became inseparable from “membership in some collective or community…and from the creation…of a new type of human being.” The religious expectation that had driven men for centuries shifted to socialism’s secular dream without losing intensity. Marx put the golden age at the end of history rather than at the beginning. Communism would be “the solution of the riddle of history.” Its universally compelling appeal had overtones of the Book of Revelation. People everywhere sang the words of The Internationale: “Tis the final conflict.”

In Spain, members of the International Brigades sang it in twenty languages. Spain, like no other time or place in the twentieth century, was a place of possibility, where people crossed borders, sacrificing their futures not for religion or to glorify their fathers, but simply to make a better world. For many, Spain still symbolizes what might have been. And, like any war between brothers, including America’s, the Spanish Civil War evokes the conflict between unreconciled parts of the psyche, for which we may substitute Frank and Al. Neither of them went to Spain, but the shadow of that tragedy hangs over this story.

Years later, Al and his wife joined the American Communist Party, as fully committed to their vision of the future as Frank Adams was to his. Frank’s son Ron, born shortly after the war, spoke Spanish, ironically, as his first language, because he lived his first four years in Peru, where the C.I.A. had stationed his father. Al’s son Danny was born the same year and, like Ron, was a post-war child steeped in his parent’s idealism.

Parallel Childhoods

1953 was a critical year for the two families. Both McCarthyism and the Hollywood Blacklist were at their heights. Under the banner of resisting Communism, the American empire was crushing dissent at home and extending itself across the world.

Tehran, Iran, August 19th: Ron Adams, age six, sat in the front seat of a car holding a metal box as his father drove through the city. Ron learned later that it contained thousands of dollars in cash that Frank and his CIA cohorts were distributing to corrupt politicians and thugs. This map shows their whereabouts.

Directed by another OSS alumnus, Kermit Roosevelt, they were in the process of overthrowing Iran’s elected government and installing a brutal monarchy that itself would not be overthrown until the Islamic revolution of 1979.

In the following year, the CIA would overthrow another democratically elected government in Guatemala, leading to decades of civil war and genocide against the Mayan people.

As I write in Chapter Eleven:

Imagine America entering the liminal period of 1953-1955. Imagine it as a time during which the empire reached its apogee (the current madness being merely a last gasp), when the seeds of its collapse first sprouted. The U.S. had a position of security that was unparalleled in human history, with absolute control over the Western Hemisphere and both oceans. Its economy and culture dominated the world. And yet anticommunist hysteria was running wild.

In April 1953, President Eisenhower barred gays from all federal jobs. In June, the government executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The Korean War ended in stalemate in July, just as the Cuban revolution began. In August, the C.I.A. overthrew Iran’s government. Kinsey’s second volume, on female sexuality, appeared in the fall. War of the Worlds left viewers staring fearfully at the stars for signs of the next incursion by The Other, while Shane presented the lone Redemption Hero in his most classic form, literally riding off into the sunset. In December, the first issue of Playboy with nude pictures of Marilyn Monroe arrived.

In May 1954 the French surrendered at Dien Bien Phu (Viet Nam). Ten days later, the Supreme Court made its decision in Brown vs Board of Education, jump-starting the Civil Rights Movement. In June, Congress added the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, and the C.I.A. overthrew another democracy in Guatemala. Three days later, Viet Nam was divided, marking the official beginning of America’s involvement. In August, as the C.I.A. defeated the insurrection in the Philippines, Congress made membership in the Communist Party a felony.

Consider that last fact: it was now a crime to join a political party in America.