The American Hero.

I recall watching a comedy sketch some years ago wherein the wife comes home to find Himself in the hay with another woman. When she enters the bedroom, the other woman jumps from the bed, hurries into her clothes and flees the scene. Meantime the wife is distraught and she begins crying with the usual; 'how could you?' and the 'where did it all go wrong?' palaver.  Her husband arises from the bed and rather casually dresses himself, completely blanking his wife's questions and tears, as though she wasn't in the room. He finishes dressing, makes up the bed, and retires down-stairs where he takes up a familiar post on his arm chair and begins to read the paper, as though nothing of any significance had just occurred.

Herself follows him down-stairs and into the sitting room, she spends a few moments staring at him in shock and confusion, to which he continues to quietly read his paper.  Shaken and upset she goes into the kitchen where she puts on an apron and some gloves and starts to prepare the dinner, her anger and tears melting into confusion. Some moments later he comes into the kitchen and asks her how was her day at work,  entirely oblivious to the preceding trauma. She replies with some typical response and the sketch ends with the pair sitting down to dinner as though absolutely nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. Undoubtedly my description does not do this somewhat mesogonisitic sketch much justice, however the humorous point being made is that reality, past, present or future, is what you make it, or in some cases what you insist it to be.

The American Philosopher Noam Chomsky has suggested that moral bankruptcy is so blatant in the administration of American politics that the institution does not bother to conceal the contradictions anymore; Invading Iraq without UN approval, the fantasy of weapons of mass destruction, control over the material resource of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and in time Syria, failing to sign up to Kyoto and in its dealings with Israel, and Industrial lobbyists.  All of it puts one in mind of the ostensibly faithful and yet entirely deceitful husband who has just left the arms of a harlot.

We westerners choose not to see the lust for oil, destructive consumption, and brute materialism that have undermined the noble ideals behind American Democracy, we are as willfully deluded as the cuckold wife.

Undoubtedly America itself has come to believe the hero-myth that has been relentlessly and universally promulgated by Hollywood for the past six decades. Just like; John Wayne, Mr Ingalls, Mr Walton, Mr Cosby, Sly Stalone etc etc, America can do no moral wrong. Wrongness in a truly moral sense is as impossible for America as it is for it's Big Screen personifications. It is as inconceivable that Mr Ingalls could be capable of true immorality, as it is inconceivable that the American administration is capable of true moral transgression, of lying or being deceitful.

As in an episode of Little House on the Prairie, if we are to witness Mr Ingalls engaging in an immoral act this would be met with the immediate assumption that either Ingalls is being controlled by an external force or influence, or (if he is acting independently and within his faculties), that he is acting for the greater good, the good of his family,  the good of his community, and the Christian God. These are the coordinates within which his character (and that of America) are defined, and all of these come before Ingall's own desires for himself.   As such his immorality can never manifest as a true immorality, and we willingly accommodate his 'immoral' behaviour with a temporary shift in our own moral boundaries.

In other words we the audience, with our knowledge and beliefs as to the character of 'The American Hero', we are willing to shift our moral standards in order to accommodate his 'breech', because we know or believe that he is acting for the greater good, because he himself, or the American hero is the personification of moral goodness. We merely wait with some nervous anticipation, for Hollywood to provide the necessary justification for Mr Ingall's temporary transgression, the justification that will set our minds at ease and return reality to its normal more familiar coordinates.

After years of unwitting media programming we ourselves have come to wholeheartedly  believe our 'American Hero' to be an important determinant of our contemporary reality construct. America has saved the world innumerable times already on the big screen. It continues to do so; in different spaceships, with different antidotes, and different faces behind the mask of the hero. America has saved us from; Aliens, Plagues,Dictators, Terrorists, Genocidal Maniacs, asteroids, saboteurs, assassins of the president, global-warming, global-cooling and global annihilation from an ever expanding myriad of potential sources.  In short America has saved us and itself from every imaginable danger, other than the most imminent and prescient danger of itself.  Indeed, having saved us a thousand times already, the majority of us are readily willing to hold his/her hand as our indefatigable hero leads us towards the abyss of ecological and social collapse.

When America invades Iraq, destroys global ecology, or follows the dictates of Israel, we know and believe that it commits these moral transgressions for the 'greater good' and as such it requires no justification, no forgiveness and no further delusion.

With catastrophe upon the horizon the world has no choice;  if it is to save itself it must unmask the American Hero and look further down the path to see where that hero is bringing us. The opposite will be achieved and the Hero Myth is only deepened by acts of violence against America. We must encourage revolution within America, we must encourage the American Hero to take off his own mask and see the truth of what he has become.