The Cry for Myth (11 page)

In the settling of this land the pilgrims and pioneers and explorers, even the forebears of the Hollywood gunmen like Clint Eastwood who took the law into their own hands, were pictured as believing in divine righteousness or its synonym, manifest destiny. The myth of the lone pioneer borrowed power from the classical myth of Odysseus, whose own heart had become the battleground for the strife of the gods, as the frontiersmen portrayed in this country are the expression of the destiny of America. Lord Byron interrupted
Childe Harold
to rhapsodize about Daniel Boone and the American wilderness, in which Boone is pictured as innocent, happy, benevolent, not savage but simple, in his old age still a child of nature “whose virtues showed the corruptions of civilization.”
*

There was a sense of destiny in the western desert, or if you were religious, a sense of the presence of God wherever the desert might be. Hence Jesus went into the desert for forty days
and nights; Buddha did the same, and many a hermit has gone into the solitary desert to commune with himself and God. The desert of the West is what Paul Tillich called the “holy void.” It is a myth into which one sinks, and whether or not it is holy or anxiety-producing depends upon you, the individual viewer.

The fact that Satan (or Mephistopheles or Lucifer) was originally God’s co-worker casts light on the strange identification of people in America with the evil figures, say Jesse James or Bonnie and Clyde or the train robber called the Grey Fox, whom all the townspeople including the school band turned out to cheer as he was taken off to the penitentiary. Even now when children sing the western song, “He robbed from the rich/And gave to the poor,” it is part of their identification with the myth of Robin Hood, a mythical medieval outlaw who robbed for the sake of the poor.

One of the curious things about the myth of the Wild West
is
that the west was reputed to have a healing power. Theodore Roosevelt, a sickly teen-ager, went west to develop his physique, to find himself psychologically, and to build himself into a courageous man. In the Horatio Alger myth, as we shall see in “Luke Larkin’s Luck” (see
Chapter 7
), the “evil” family, the members of the aristocratic Duncans, were sentenced by the judge to go west to rebuild their honesty and integrity.

Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, Mike Fink, Calamity Jane, even Custer and Buffalo Bill, not only were our personal heroes but also stood for the myth of the healing power of the new land. These mythic heroes were quite conscious of their function as God’s agents appointed to civilize the west—Buffalo Bill believed that he stood between civilization and savagery.

The myths of American freedom can also be used for very different effects. A young man in therapy described how his family had come from the Old World as homesteaders and moved as immigrants to a farm in South Dakota. Nobody would speak to this homestead family for the first four years. As a child he and his siblings took the bus to school, where they were also ostracized. His family was Catholic, and when he
harmlessly asked another child which church the latter attended, the other child’s mother drove a horse and buggy later that afternoon four miles to his house to rebuke his parents noisily for their son’s prying into others’ religion. His older brother got into fights because he was mocked in school; his older sister dropped out of the unhappy environment in her eleventh year and went to another school, but she seems not to have gotten over the neurotic difficulties the previous ostracism left.

The Statue of Liberty does not “lift her lamp beside the golden door” for all immigrants. The fear of ostracism is often present in the crowds of immigrants who moved into Minnesota and northern Wisconsin and Michigan. As children most of us—to our profound later regret—spoke of immigrants as Bohunks and Polocks, and in the cities they were Dagoes and Kikes. The romantic air with which we surround our Statue of Liberty covers up the fact that we generally hear of the successful immigrants like Andrew Carnegie and Edward Bok and other immigrants who became great.

LONELINESS IN AMERICA

Our most powerful and pervasive myth, which has had an amazingly widespread influence in this country and wherever radio is heard throughout the world, is that of the lone cowboy and the west.
*
We recall the
Lone Ranger
, introduced by the overture to
William Tell
(the hero of a similar myth in his own
country of Switzerland). The program went into its nightly adventure, in which the Lone Ranger wore camouflage to show that he would continue to be unknown. With Tonto, his faithful helper, the Lone Ranger galloped ahead to redress some wrong. At the end of the program, his identity still unknown, the Lone Ranger galloped away into the lonely evening again. This myth merges loneliness and the myth of the west. The loneliness seems a kind of cultural inheritance, with our lone ancestors, the hunters, the trappers, the frontiersmen, all of whom lived a life of relative isolation and bragged about it.

Chronicled by an endless number of films, the myth of the lonely cowboy was made to order for Hollywood and the American mood. The background was the western mountains in their scarlet and purple against the endless ochre of the desert sand. In the films the courage of American frontier men and women dared all. The women who were saved—or saved themselves—from villains were delicate southern beauties or rugged frontier women who could chop wood and shoot with the best of the men. And there was the final lone shootout between the hero and the villain. Westerns illustrate the love for repetition that Freud mentions; we seemed to have an endless appetite for seeing the same theme over and over again as an authentic myth.
*

When Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state, was asked by Oriani Fallaci how he explained “the incredible movie star status” he enjoyed, Kissinger replied that it came from “the fact that he had always acted alone.” Kissinger was referring to his role as a “lonely cowboy” in flying from Lebanon to Jerusalem to Cairo, not by horseback but by diplomatic jet. “Americans like that immensely,” he said.

Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into town … with
his horse and nothing else. Maybe even without a pistol…. This cowboy doesn’t have to be courageous. All he needs is to be alone to show others that he rides into town and does everything by himself. Americans like that.
*

This early loneliness would seem to be connected, as a kind of cultural inheritance, with our lone ancestors, the hunters, the trappers, the frontiersmen, all of whom lived a life of relative isolation and bragged about it. But now it is not physical loneliness that we in the twentieth century are troubled with. In this age of radio and television no one is far from another person’s voice at every moment. We noted the loneliness of Deborah in
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden;
even though people were around her all the time she felt completely alone and had to construct her own gods. We are often considered a country of joiners; we join everything from Rotarians to Kiwanas clubs to fraternities and sororities and women’s societies of all sorts. This perpetual joining, I propose, is
a reaction-formation, a device for covering up the competitiveness and the loneliness underneath
.

Some people come for therapy simply because they are unbearably lonely. We therapists are now seeing more and more patients who seek help because they are driven to find someone who will listen to them with no stake in it except to wish them well. Again like Deborah in
Chapter 1
, in our day of instantaneous communication by electronics and satellites, more patients than ever have never experienced anyone who would genuinely listen with only his or her welfare in mind. One joins Lennon and McCartney in their Beatles’ song: “All the lonely people—where do they all come from?”

The loneliness goes deeply into our American mythology. On the turnpikes in New York or Houston or Los Angeles, many drivers look as though pursued by an inner loneliness hurrying some place but never knowing where that place is. Their expressions have a forlorn quality as though they had lost
something—or rather as though
they
were lost. Or they act as though they were pursued by guilt, or by what memories of violence, or by what frantic hope? What is lacking in people’s attitude in our day is a sense of peace—quiet, deep, relaxed peace.

The loneliness is one expression of our rootlessness.
*
Many people in our day, separated from tradition and often cast out by society, are alone with no myths to guide them, no unquestioned rites to welcome them into community, no sacraments to initiate them into the holy—and so there is rarely anything holy.
The loneliness of mythlessness is the deepest and least assuageable of all
. Unrelated to the past, unconnected with the future, we hang as if in mid-air. We are like the shades Odysseus meets in the underworld, crying for news about the people up in the world but unable themselves to feel anything.

Part of the cause of this loneliness is our lack of historical roots in America and our continual moving, so that we rarely give ourselves time to put down roots. When we are pressed, we pack up and take the plane or car or train to some other place. De Tocqueville records his surprise that the American, on building a house in which one naturally expects him to live and to enjoy, no sooner gets the roof on it than he puts it up for sale and is off to some new place.

We lack the sense of history that Europeans feel. On walking out of doors, a French villager immediately sees a cathedral which connects him with history of centuries ago; his rooted ness is obvious in his eyes and mood, and it is a real assuagement of loneliness. Whether he ever goes to the church or
believes what its representatives teach is irrelevant, the great edifice stands there connecting him with myths of centuries of the past. But in America we pride ourselves on building skyscrapers to tear down in a hundred years or less. While the European moves mostly in
time
, the American moves mainly in
space
.

VIOLENCE AND LONELINESS

The loneliness is expressed in our being a violent people at the same time as we are very democratic. The violence in America, even in our twentieth century, is easy to see but hard to admit and explain. With our “Saturday night specials” we murder fifty times as many of our fellow countrymen as the Swedes or the British; indeed, our homicide rate is much greater than any civilized nation outside of Central America. We “nice” Americans regularly identify with the pioneers who massacred Indians according to the will of God under a new name, manifest destiny.

We make heroes out of gangsters. In the movies we identify with the criminal; during Prohibition, Dillinger, public enemy number one, was a kind of hero, and other gangsters are heroic now as they are played by Clint Eastwood. The overwhelming violence on the television screen has become hackneyed, but whether or not it breeds violence in young viewers, it certainly ministers to the feeling that we can depend upon no one but ourselves. We are surrounded by potential enemies, which makes us feel we ought to consider wearing bulletproof vests and must never relax our guard. Indeed, one reads in the newspaper that a contemporary minister in Texas wears a bullet-proof vest during his sermons since he, standing alone in the pulpit, makes an easy target for an assassin’s bullet.

Hence loneliness and the denial of it, or the escape from it
,
are such important myths in America
. Children can escape it by watching TV, adolescents cover it up by constant partying and episodic sex, middle-aged people repress it by the marriage-divorce merry-go-round. Hence encounter groups are so important in America; anybody can announce a new “growth” group and persons will flock to it to be taught the new techniques of living and loving spontaneously, unaware of the contradiction in the very phrase “techniques of spontaneity.” For we were all brought up, so goes the myth, on the subconscious equivalents of Paradise at Plymouth Rock and tales of the magic success on the frontier, and we find nothing to take their place except repeating the old shibboleths.

THE SEDUCTION OF THE NEW

From the beginning we early Americans pushed westward, always discovering something new. We named our states
New
York,
New
Mexico. The myth of the new was always beckoning to us. God must favor us, we believed, for every day new discoveries greeted our hunters and frontiersmen, our trappers and our miners; a lush countryside invited us in every direction. Ore was later to be discovered in the mountains, the forests on the hills kept a steady stream of the riches of lumber pouring upon us—all climaxed by the literal discovery of gold in California in 1849. No wonder in America we love any
new
technique; one kind of computer is pushed off the market by the invention of a
new
one; any new brand of aspirin or vitamin is grabbed up with insatiable appetite. The proliferation of cults and gurus, which occurs especially in our west, is the expression of new religions, new ways of life, new heavens, and new techniques for reaching these heavens, all summed up in the phrase “New Age.”

This helps explain why the different kinds of psychotherapy
took off like rockets in this New World in contrast to the merely studied interest they received in Europe, although every early form of therapy—Freudian, Adlerian, Jungian, Rankian, Reichian—had been discovered in Europe. The representatives of new forms of therapy developed by Homey, Fromm, Alexander, Fromm-Reichmann, and others also came literally to these shores as emissaries from Europe. How we lapped up these new approaches to therapy! On all sides, we wanted the
new
.

In the field of therapy this became the myth of the changing self: we in America want to find a new self, a new set of expectations. The most important moral implication of this myth is that the typical American does not come to therapy to be “cured” but rather to find a
new
life, to
change
into a different way of living.