American Fear
In the Martin Scorcese film Gangs of New York, there is a scene where the 19th century criminal villain and gang leader Bill the Butcher sits down next to his young protege and reveals the philosophy that allows him to rule over the chaos of the Five Points slum. He is draped in the American flag as he delivers his speech.
"Do you know how I've lasted this long?" he asks, then answers his own question.
"Fear. Through the spectacle of fearsome acts. A man speaks ill of me, I cut out his tongue. He steals from me, I cut off his hands. A man rises against me, and I cut off his head, stick it on a pike, and hoist it up for all to see."
He pauses.
"Fear. That's what preserves the order of things."
If hope for the future is the guiding light of the American vision, the light shining from the torch held in the hand of the Statue of Liberty, if hope- of finding a place to belong, a piece of the pie, a refuge from oppression and poverty- is what the American dream is about, than surely its shadow-side is fear.
Fear of the hope being broken. Fear that the mold of the past hasn't in fact been broken at all, and that the ancient traditions of slavery and warfare and aristocratic family rule and freedom-smothering religious doctrine haven't been broken. That America is not an exception to history. This fear is perhaps a fear that fear is still what drives us, and not hope at all.
America loves its gangsters, its immigrant visions realized on the screen by the likes of Scorcese and Coppola. There's a flash of recognition there, that what the gangster feels is what our nation feels in its heart. Behold the gangster, feel with him if you can and understand well these feelings: that him and his family are more important than society's rules... that nobody will look out for your interests but you... that loneliness and isolation that comes from being at the top and self-absorbed and still unsatisfied... and something more savage, that what won't be given fairly must be taken by force.
In California and in Pennsylvania, in Idaho and in Cleveland, in Virginia and in Texas, there are young American boys of all races, all desperate to prove themselves to the world. We learn cruelty and the pecking order on the schoolyard, and racism, sexism, and classism too. Sometimes it turns bloody.
Would it be fair to say our culture is obsessed with masculine grandiosity? From the big trucks and bigger burgers of everyday suburban life, to the big bankrolls and bigger guns of urban rap fantasies, to the big hats and bigger cowboy boots of the "rugged frontiersman" cowboy? We elevate the black man who proves his worth with an AK-47 to icon status because he titillates our sense of fear. That's the immigrant song we want to keep hearing, because that's how we feel. Martin Luther King is fine to name streets after, but the militant Malcolm X has more immediate archetypal power in 2005.
"God hates fags" the fire-and-brimstone hate ministry of Pastor Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church, may be closer to America's heart than many of us want to admit. There's got to be more to it than mere religious pomposity. Why do we hate pansies so much? Do we fear them because they fail to participate in the cherished American game of "tough guy"? Is the physical openness of the homosexual that is so terrifying?
Checking the FAQ on Westboro Baptist Church's website, "godhatesfags.com" is revealing. It rightly claims traces its roots back John Calvin's puritanism, its preaching of hatred towards "fags" as well as "adulterers," "idolators," Jews, Muslims, "heretics," and "apostates," as part of a Christian tradition that once was dominant in the United States. It's also a gospel of fear: this is not God the merciful, God the forgiving, God as love. This country was founded by men who believed in God the terrible, God the violent avenger, God who metes out deadly punishment to those who break his laws. God who demands fear and trembling, abject obeisance, not the God of the Enlightened philosophers who wrote the Constitution, but the God of those who burned witches at Salem, a God who wants his followers to submit reason and intellect and inquiry to mindless worship and doglike obedience.
How is it that the dream of the 60's and 70's with its flower children and progressive rock ballads and yearning for peace and enlightenment fade away so completely... for me its a memory before I was born (in 1979) told to me by pop culture, but when I look around I see something that makes me nostalgic all the same.
As Hunter S. Thompson said after looking out at his imaginary high-water mark where the crest of hope and change broke and then receded, the problem with Tim Leary's consciousness expansion was that it failed to warn the young adventurous Americans of the "grim, meathook realities" that would be amplified by the drug experience. The past bit us in the ass.
Either way, the counterculture was coopted by the men with the money. And while that happened early on, the longer it went on, the more this coopted counterculture reflected the ideals of the men with the money, and the more it catered to those aspects of us that best suit their needs. Enter the slick salesman, the carpetbagger, the carnival barker.
I see visions of the N'Sync boys literally dancing in a shower of dollar bills, muscled thugs preaching the gospel of fast cars and fast money, cookie cutter whiteboy rockers filled with the petty, private angst of mommy & daddy's divorce proceedings.
Why would we walk around with shirts and hats and truck emblazoned with the words
NO FEAR
unless we were absolutely filled with it, and absolutely desperate to confront it?
Unless we were tortured by the fear that we've abandoned any semblance of authenticity. Afraid of the prospect that the hope for the future we learned was the founding impulse of our nation has become a lie used to sell us things we don't need, and worse, that will harm us.
We're still Puritans, too. We have the Gnostic fever that spurs us to divide the world into flesh and spirit, work and pleasure, the sacred and the profane, the church and the nightclub- to divide things into dualistic halves where never the twain shall meet.
Thats why when we party, we do it with such reckless abandon. When we go after sex, its with a fervor thats built to fuck away the shame. We pursue vice twice as hard to convince ourselves we're liberated from the Puritan mentality that hounds us, and forbids the things that we crave.
Most of the time, we fail to realize our dreams of liberation. We run back to the established terrain of the familiar, the Job, the Church. No drug laws will be reformed, no land for the landless, no unjust foreign Wars will be stopped, public transportation built, jobs saved, ect, ect, pick your cause, ad infinitum. The dream of social change is crushed and we run back and cower in fear and trembling beneath the black whip of power, because we recognize the terror of what our society has wrought- something so ossified and inflexible that to revolt against it is to stand in the path of a frieght train, to be crushed by an institution so steel, so heavy, so mass, that it would be as if one were swept aside like an insect without a thought of remorse and barely even a recognition.
"Do you know how I've lasted this long?" he asks, then answers his own question.
"Fear. Through the spectacle of fearsome acts. A man speaks ill of me, I cut out his tongue. He steals from me, I cut off his hands. A man rises against me, and I cut off his head, stick it on a pike, and hoist it up for all to see."
He pauses.
"Fear. That's what preserves the order of things."
If hope for the future is the guiding light of the American vision, the light shining from the torch held in the hand of the Statue of Liberty, if hope- of finding a place to belong, a piece of the pie, a refuge from oppression and poverty- is what the American dream is about, than surely its shadow-side is fear.
Fear of the hope being broken. Fear that the mold of the past hasn't in fact been broken at all, and that the ancient traditions of slavery and warfare and aristocratic family rule and freedom-smothering religious doctrine haven't been broken. That America is not an exception to history. This fear is perhaps a fear that fear is still what drives us, and not hope at all.
America loves its gangsters, its immigrant visions realized on the screen by the likes of Scorcese and Coppola. There's a flash of recognition there, that what the gangster feels is what our nation feels in its heart. Behold the gangster, feel with him if you can and understand well these feelings: that him and his family are more important than society's rules... that nobody will look out for your interests but you... that loneliness and isolation that comes from being at the top and self-absorbed and still unsatisfied... and something more savage, that what won't be given fairly must be taken by force.
In California and in Pennsylvania, in Idaho and in Cleveland, in Virginia and in Texas, there are young American boys of all races, all desperate to prove themselves to the world. We learn cruelty and the pecking order on the schoolyard, and racism, sexism, and classism too. Sometimes it turns bloody.
Would it be fair to say our culture is obsessed with masculine grandiosity? From the big trucks and bigger burgers of everyday suburban life, to the big bankrolls and bigger guns of urban rap fantasies, to the big hats and bigger cowboy boots of the "rugged frontiersman" cowboy? We elevate the black man who proves his worth with an AK-47 to icon status because he titillates our sense of fear. That's the immigrant song we want to keep hearing, because that's how we feel. Martin Luther King is fine to name streets after, but the militant Malcolm X has more immediate archetypal power in 2005.
"God hates fags" the fire-and-brimstone hate ministry of Pastor Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church, may be closer to America's heart than many of us want to admit. There's got to be more to it than mere religious pomposity. Why do we hate pansies so much? Do we fear them because they fail to participate in the cherished American game of "tough guy"? Is the physical openness of the homosexual that is so terrifying?
Checking the FAQ on Westboro Baptist Church's website, "godhatesfags.com" is revealing. It rightly claims traces its roots back John Calvin's puritanism, its preaching of hatred towards "fags" as well as "adulterers," "idolators," Jews, Muslims, "heretics," and "apostates," as part of a Christian tradition that once was dominant in the United States. It's also a gospel of fear: this is not God the merciful, God the forgiving, God as love. This country was founded by men who believed in God the terrible, God the violent avenger, God who metes out deadly punishment to those who break his laws. God who demands fear and trembling, abject obeisance, not the God of the Enlightened philosophers who wrote the Constitution, but the God of those who burned witches at Salem, a God who wants his followers to submit reason and intellect and inquiry to mindless worship and doglike obedience.
How is it that the dream of the 60's and 70's with its flower children and progressive rock ballads and yearning for peace and enlightenment fade away so completely... for me its a memory before I was born (in 1979) told to me by pop culture, but when I look around I see something that makes me nostalgic all the same.
As Hunter S. Thompson said after looking out at his imaginary high-water mark where the crest of hope and change broke and then receded, the problem with Tim Leary's consciousness expansion was that it failed to warn the young adventurous Americans of the "grim, meathook realities" that would be amplified by the drug experience. The past bit us in the ass.
Either way, the counterculture was coopted by the men with the money. And while that happened early on, the longer it went on, the more this coopted counterculture reflected the ideals of the men with the money, and the more it catered to those aspects of us that best suit their needs. Enter the slick salesman, the carpetbagger, the carnival barker.
I see visions of the N'Sync boys literally dancing in a shower of dollar bills, muscled thugs preaching the gospel of fast cars and fast money, cookie cutter whiteboy rockers filled with the petty, private angst of mommy & daddy's divorce proceedings.
Why would we walk around with shirts and hats and truck emblazoned with the words
NO FEAR
unless we were absolutely filled with it, and absolutely desperate to confront it?
Unless we were tortured by the fear that we've abandoned any semblance of authenticity. Afraid of the prospect that the hope for the future we learned was the founding impulse of our nation has become a lie used to sell us things we don't need, and worse, that will harm us.
We're still Puritans, too. We have the Gnostic fever that spurs us to divide the world into flesh and spirit, work and pleasure, the sacred and the profane, the church and the nightclub- to divide things into dualistic halves where never the twain shall meet.
Thats why when we party, we do it with such reckless abandon. When we go after sex, its with a fervor thats built to fuck away the shame. We pursue vice twice as hard to convince ourselves we're liberated from the Puritan mentality that hounds us, and forbids the things that we crave.
Most of the time, we fail to realize our dreams of liberation. We run back to the established terrain of the familiar, the Job, the Church. No drug laws will be reformed, no land for the landless, no unjust foreign Wars will be stopped, public transportation built, jobs saved, ect, ect, pick your cause, ad infinitum. The dream of social change is crushed and we run back and cower in fear and trembling beneath the black whip of power, because we recognize the terror of what our society has wrought- something so ossified and inflexible that to revolt against it is to stand in the path of a frieght train, to be crushed by an institution so steel, so heavy, so mass, that it would be as if one were swept aside like an insect without a thought of remorse and barely even a recognition.
posted by justin at 12:58 PM
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