Part One

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. – George Orwell

I published an earlier version of this essay in 2014. Now, as we find ourselves inundated with lies, “alternative facts”, biased “fact checkers” and algorithm-manipulated news reports calculated to confirm our biases – all of which make some of us want to fall back upon familiar, “reliable” voices of traditional media – it seems even more relevant.

It’s easy enough to roll our eyes and make fun of rightwing politicians and their ignorant, racially coded statements, or to tell our friends, Did you see what Trumpus / Hawley / Cruz / McConnell / Greene / Miller / Carlson / Palin / Boebert, etc, said today? In-freaking credible! But it serves no purpose other than to entertain us. Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah and others do this five evenings a week, preaching to their choirs, and they do it better than we can.

It’s much more difficult, but potentially far more important, to identify the intentions of our media gatekeepers. Let’s think in terms of concentric circles.

Fox News, election-deniers, Breitbart and even more extremist, white supremacist bloggers are the outermost concentric circle of gatekeeping, where race-baiting and clownish entertainment masquerade as “news” or “opinion.”

The second, more inner circle is composed of CNN, MSNBC, the large daily newspaper chains and the major broadcast networks. There, manipulation of public opinion occurs in a subtler form. As Noam Chomsky has written,

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

This is not to say that mainstream media gatekeepers always deliberately lie, although many clearly do. The truth is that the vetting process, just as it does with politicians, produces a population of journalists who consume the same myths about America and its noble intentions that the rest of us do, and they are paid handsomely to repeat them to us. When an exasperated interviewer asked Chomsky if he (Chomsky) thought the man was lying, this was his response:

I don’t say that you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you are sitting.

I also include the vast majority of American historians in this list, from the early 19th century to the present.  Those historians – many of them racists and proponents of Eugenics – instructed our schoolteachers, and teachers instruct us. For an overview, read Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James Loewen.

We read American and world history through their – often, quite biased – lenses. Bias can mean emphasizing a conservative view of events. Or it can mean marginalizing alternative interpretations, such as they have done in crafting our national understanding of World War Two, for example,  or in their palpable disdain (and jealousy of) Howard Zinn. 

I shudder to think that in 200 years (if this culture survives), history students will be reading the likes of Henry Kissinger and Bill O’Reilly, or for that matter, Bill Clinton, to learn about America.

But I digress. Back to mainstream media, a practiced eye can discern three themes:

One: The “news” is merely the invitation to the real product, which is, of course, the commercials.

Two: “If it bleeds, it leads.” Violence – both the threat and the fear of violence, as well as our fascination with make-believe violence – make up the media sea that we swim in. The news reflects America’s unique love-hate relationship to it. As Archetypal psychologist James Hillman wrote, “harmless violence where no one gets hurt breeds innocence…the innocent American is the violent American. 

Three: The bizarre mixture of these two themes produces a third one. Since they first attacked the American continent, white people have found themselves on the receiving end of constant, daily messages that they should be very, very worried. From Native Americans to Black men to Mexicans to Asians to Irish and other immigrants to Germans to Russian and Chinese communists to Muslim terrorists to Iranians, and now, back to Russians and Chinese, only the objects of our fears have changed. And at the same time, we learn that everything is all right in our fantasized consumer paradise, that buying stuff cures our worries. This kind of thinking is called “schizogenetic”.

In simple terms, this lifelong exposure to mixed messages makes us uniquely crazy, and this has been happening for a very, very long time. See my essays Shock and Awe and The Outside Agitator.

But the innermost – and most insidious – level is composed of the center of opinion, the Ivy-League-educated liberal bastions of reason: the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and the Washington Post. These are precisely the sources that teach us the boundaries of acceptable discourse, outside of which lie the demons of fake news.  We need to single out the WAPO in this regard, because it is owned entirely by Jeff Bezos, signatory to a $600 million contract with the Central Intelligence Agency. But allegations of WAPO / CIA collusion go back many decades.

We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine…whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years.  –  David Rockefeller

These media sources have instructed educated Americans in a certain almost religious faith in reliable, objective news and history reporting. As Maximillian Alvarez writes:

The biases of unreliable narrators (newscasters, candidates, uncles) may be glaringly obvious. But often they’re much harder to see, especially in narratives that claim to be objective. They’re often hidden in the details, in the language used, in specific word choices, in the things a narrator chooses to emphasize and the things she chooses to leave out, in tone, etc. To get at that stuff requires what literature scholars call “close reading.”…every narrative manipulates (or at least tries to). The ones that pretend they don’t are the ones people should be suspicious of.

In this world, the gatekeeping intent is the same in its corporate world-view to the others. The best of the gatekeepers, however, deliver it in a more elevated form, to a more educated clientele, and it’s characterized by excellent prose, impeccable taste and soothing radio voices. Indeed, at this level, they convey their messages at least as much by style as by content. No shouting, name-calling, exclamation marks or all-capital-letters here!

Well-meaning, university-educated, independent-thinking, liberal Americans are almost literally seduced by the arrival of the glossier versions, where subtle messages of support for the American empire are digested along with Armani ads (Heavens! I’ve used the passive voice twice in one sentence!) that subvert the bad news with a more fundamental message: consume, or be left behind. In mythic terms: be glad you’re a hero and not a victim. As Jerry Falwell said, “This is America. If you’re not a winner it’s your own fault.” In this context, when we are free to turn the page, occasional images of poverty and suffering merely reinforce our sense of privilege.

We should recall that every one of these purveyors of rational, thoughtful discourse have consistently supported every one of the United States’ military invasions of Third World countries. For several years, they have been united in framing the “Russiagate”, and almost all of their allegations (reported as news rather than opinion) have been erroneous at best and pure propaganda at worst.

(I’m digressing again. The point is not that the Russian government may have attempted to influence American elections, but that such efforts absolutely pale in comparison to quite successful efforts by Israel, Saudi Arabia and, of course, the continuing and mostly unpunished Republican Party attempts to subvert the recent election, hack its voting machines, deny the final vote and prevent its certification. This was the real story of 2020, and also of 2016.

And do I really need to remind you that the U.S. has been destroying elections and popular democratic movements in dozens of countries every year since the end of World War Two?)

Even this week (May 2021), the purveyors of high, dignified, liberal thinking have published countless articles about why the U.S. should not withdraw its forces from Afghanistan. But they are so well-written!

It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. – William Carlos Williams 

Howard Zinn

Meanwhile, despite their reasoned arguments, trust in mainstream media has plummeted to an all-time low.  Although this has opened up a vast can of frightening rightwing and QAnon worms, in the long run it may be a good thing. Only when old, unsatisfying mythologies collapse and their priests are sent packing can we begin to imagine real news.

Part Two

Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black…The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. – James Baldwin

So let’s talk about an influential journalist and how to read him with the eye of a mythologist. David Brooks is a gatekeeper of the first magnitude. He has been called the sort of conservative pundit liberals like, one who “engages” with them and praises the “moderate majority” of Americans. He has shown contempt for Tea Partiers and Trumpus while occasionally supporting Barack Obama. Now that’s reasonable.

A few years ago a student of mine forwarded a recent NYT article of his: “The Spiritual Recession – Is America Losing Faith in Universal Democracy?”  because the article appeared to be about one of my favorite themes, the loss of myth and the struggle to find meaning in its absence.

While Brooks does offer some insightful comments, it’s critical to understand that he, like all insider gatekeepers, is writing from within the bubble of American Innocence and privilege. In doing so, he is implying that all “reasonable” readers share his basic assumptions. He is inviting you and all NYT readers to join him in a comfortable space where none of those assumptions will be endangered.

But some of us who watch from outside of the bubble have realized that we must do more than pontificate about politics and culture, even about myth itself. We have to learn to think mythologically in order to extricate (liberate, if you prefer) ourselves from the flawed mythologies that no longer serve us, and the ways in which they reinforce our sense of who we are. No wonder Tucker Carlson and his ilk are so desperate to make fun of “woke” people.

Once we begin to see how much our understanding of politics is controlled by storytellers — candidates, journalists, speech writers, history textbooks, movies, televangelists, national monuments – we begin to get more suspicious. unnamed.png?w=426&h=222&profile=RESIZE_710xWe remember, as Hillman wrote, “…that peculiar process upon which our civilization rests: dissociation.” Only such a dissociated stance – precisely the one that Brooks offers us – can enable us as individuals and as a nation to go on drooling over those Armani ads while our military (abroad) and our militarized police (domestically) continue to wreck biblical violence upon the Others of this world.

Thinking mythologically helps us to identify the voices of the gatekeepers. Such voices (formerly the priesthood, now the New York-based media) set the limits of acceptable debate and subtly reinforce what Joseph Campbell called the sociological level of myth, which is composed of the narratives that validate the existing social order. Brooks does this in his first two paragraphs by implying that “the dream of the beautiful collective” (he means “socialism”) is antithetical to “universal democracy,” and later by stating categorically that “capitalism is necessary.”

I am not arguing that socialism is a panacea. Our problems go way beyond such (quite necessary) considerations of how wealth should be created and distributed equitably. I’m simply pointing out that our responsibility as mythologists is to deconstruct such skillful writers as Brooks and identify their real agendas.

So when he writes, “Americans felt responsible for creating a global order that would nurture the spread of democracy,” we need to understand that he is referencing one of the most fundamental assumptions of the myth of American Innocence, that America has a divinely inspired, Christ-like mission to save the world, one that requires a military empire with hundreds of bases. Accepting that statement, ten generations of American parents have offered their sons as willing sacrificial offerings to Ares, the god of war. And they have willingly ignored the suffering that the empire has inflicted: We had to destroy the village in order to save it.

It was no accident that Brooks wrote this article just as the debate about attacking Iraq yet again was heating up in the media. The “loss of faith” he laments is the willingness to blindly support our leaders in yet another crusade for democracy in the Middle East.

For more on Brooks’ agenda, see “Highly Placed Media Racists,”  By Steve Rendall and “Sing in Unison, David Brooks Tells Black Athletes”, by Adam Johnson, in which Brooks advises them not to kneel when the National Anthem is played because their political activism might be counterproductive. With this patronizing advice, he reprises a sixty-year-old liberal nostrum: “We support your aims but not your tactics.”

Here’s another essay of mine on the subject of gatekeeping: The Ritual of the Presidential Debates

Part Three

If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged. – Noam Chomsky

That’s a provocative quote, and it has serious implications. Is Chomsky being literal? If we take it at face value – culpability in the bombing of over forty sovereign nations since the end of World War Two, murder and torture of literally millions of civilians and indigenous people, CIA drug running and assassinations, environmental destruction and global warming – then anyone in government, military or corporate capitalism who knowingly took part in such activities shares the responsibility. And the storytellers, anyone of influence in education, religion, the history profession and especially “journalism” – who abetted such activities by subtly justifying them is also responsible.

Knowing that I write about how fear of the Other is a major theme in American myth and politics, a friend recommends another of Brooks’ NYT articles: “On Conquering Fear”. It references the Passover prayer book (the Haggadah) and offers “subtler strategies and techniques to conquer fear.”

Brooks tells us that in the Moses story, Hebrew married couples were immobilized by fear of Egypt’s Pharaoh. But by “challeng(ing) each other to see beauty in the other,” they “began to sense unexpected possibilities.” Once people started speaking to each other and telling stories to each other, they generated alternate worlds. Storytelling became central to conquering fear. A story isn’t an argument or a collection of data, he says. It contains multiple meanings that can be discussed, questioned and reinterpreted (and that’s exactly how we need to respond to Brooks).

Later, at the critical point when the Israelites face the crossing of the Dead Sea, they begin to sing – not in celebration, but to overcome their fear. Their “climactic break from bondage is thus done in a mood of enchantment.” So “the sophisticated psychology of Exodus” teaches that it is sometimes wise to confront fear “obliquely and happily, through sexiness, storytelling and song.”

miriam-and-women-dancing.jpg?w=1022&profile=RESIZE_710x

I sincerely praise Brooks for a fine article. In this age of heightened – and manipulated – fear, we could all appreciate this message. Perhaps the only way to transcend the paranoid imagination is by turning toward the creative imagination through art and ritual.

But we can’t consider what this article says without acknowledging what it doesn’t say. This is my responsibility as a mythologist to you as the reader. Then it becomes your responsibility to think mythologically, to train yourself to identify the subtle ways in which media gatekeepers continuously manipulate our dominant narratives to revive the myth of innocence. So let me unpack it, if you don’t mind.

First of all, consider the massive irony that an article about facing fear was penned by a persuassive media giant who has supported all of the American empire’s military adventures with all the usual fearmongering and has written countless other articles that have helped to ratchet up the level of fear in the culture. The media watchers FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) include Brooks in their list of “Highly Placed Media Racists.” Why? Because his “reasoned, moderate” essays often reference outright, unreconstructed bigots.

If his article has any wisdom to offer, remember the old joke that even a broken clock is right twice a day. Now let’s look at the text of the article, which constantly refers to the myth (remember that there is no actual archeological record for it) of the Exodus. I offer two points to consider:

One: the people in his story who experience fear are the Israelites, not the Egyptians. Stories of Jewish fear are familiar to us, quite justified from Roman to medieval persecutions to the Holocaust, all the way to the current moment when antisemitic (as well as anti-Asian) crimes are peaking once again.

However, the article, published during the debate about Iranian nuclear weapons (a debate that never mentioned Iranian fear of Israel’s nukes) subtly reinforces the dominant media theme of Israelis and their constant fear of Arabs, especially Palestinians. Yes, I know that Egypt and Saudi Arabia are currently Israel’s allies, and Iranians are not Arabs. But we are talking about images, not objective truth. We’re talking about narratives that, like almost all foreign policy issues, are constructed for domestic consumption, not for Iranian diplomats, but for fundamentalist voters in Red states and Jewish donors in blue states.

I’m not nitpicking here. This toxic narrative is a constant in our media, and it completely inverts reality. What is reality? The actual, overwhelming fear of Israeli violence that all Palestinians experience, every single day of their lives. It’s an ongoing form of bone-crushing, cumulative, epigenetic trauma that in our society can only be compared to the similar anxiety felt by all Black men driving cars who encounter the police.

Let’s be clear about this. Inverting reality is one of Brooks’ primary functions as a gatekeeper. Can you imagine him telling a story with the same “anti-fear” theme, but with Palestinians as the subjects?

And, before I’m accused of being a self-hating Jew, let me remind you that this is not really about Israel. It’s about Israel’s function as a surrogate for an American foreign policy that has remained remarkably consistent for fifty years, regardless of who has been President. And it’s about mythic narratives, including the remarkable similarity between the myth of American innocence and the myth of Israeli Innocence.

My second point repeats one of the primary themes of my book. The grand tale of American exceptionalism — that America is the one nation divinely ordained to bring freedom and opportunity to the rest of the world — was originally born in Biblical terms. The seventeenth century myth likened the Pilgrims to the Israelites. The English Church and Crown represented Pharaoh and the Native Americans became the Philistines (which, by the way, is the Arabic word that modern Palestinians use to describe themselves: Philistina). Fear of those Native Americans, whether real or constructed, became the most basic factor in the American story.

In this manner America offered its original sin and contradiction to the imagination of the world. Our tales of liberation were bound up from the start with the original Hebrew invasion of Palestine.

The quest for liberation from fear justified that Biblical conquest and served as the template for Euro-American colonial aggression. In the “either-or” context of monotheistic narratives, it is a simple series of steps from difference to slavery to fear to escape to journey (a journey that has no initiatory significance) to arrival (rather than homecoming). But the steps continue: to invasion to conquest to colonialism to exclusion to ghettoization and eventually and inevitably to genocide.

In the process, some victims of history become perpetrators of the same crimes that had been done earlier to them, passing on the trauma to other people and the guilt to their own children. God commands and the invaders obey. Or do invaders create new myths to justify their crimes? Just what do you suppose happened to the indigenous population of Jericho once “the walls came a-tumbling down?” The Israelites, so recently liberated from slavery themselves, proudly tell us:

And we captured all his cities at that time and devoted to destruction every city, men, women, and children. We left no survivors. (Deuteronomy 2:34)

Is this myth? Ancient history? Irrelevant? I re-post this essay about a week after hundreds of extremist Israeli Jews marched through Jerusalem shouting “Death to Arabs!”, attacking and wounding over 100 Palestinians. And speaking of gatekeepers, note how CBS chose to report the event: “Officers injured, 40 arrested in Jerusalem as hardline Jewish group and Palestinians clash with police during Ramadan.”

This religious rationalization of genocidal violence, the narrative of the Israelite conquest of the Holy Land, written at least a thousand years before the advent of Islam, became the ideology behind the crusades, colonialism, the invasion of the Americas and all of the subsequent wars of American history. Ironically, the 1948 conquest of Palestine took much of its energy from American “manifest destiny,” which, as I have shown, was itself modeled upon the Israelite conquest of the Philistinas.

But Brooks tells us that the Israelites feared Pharaoh. Again, we have to focus on what he doesn’t say: how sometimes we come to identify with our own oppressors, how the victims of Nazi barbarism became barbarians themselves. In Auschwitz and other death camps, the SS recruited many Jews as overseers who brutally controlled behavior among the prisoner population – until they themselves were sent to the crematoria. They were called “kapos,” a term that David Friedman, Trumpus’ ambassador to Israel, used to insult American Jews who dare to criticize this nation’s long-term, massively expensive ($3 billion / year) support of Israeli apartheid.

Am I nitpicking to remind you that Brooks neglects to mention that centuries after the Children of Israel escaped destruction by Pharaoh (and slaughtered the population of Jericho), their descendants would kill exactly 504 Children of Gaza through aerial bombardment in the summer of 2014? Or that, when they ran low on ammunition, Barack Obama quickly re-supplied them? Or that eight months later, not one of the 9,000 houses completely destroyed in that attack had been reconstructed?

I know, I know. Why focus on the negative? Of course, there’s no need to bring this dark stuff up in the context of a truly uplifting story. But do we have the privilege not to do so? The mandate of Depth psychology is clear: we must become conscious of the fullness of reality, both the awe and the terror. It tells us that the victims of history cannot conquer fear simply by singing or by projecting its source onto other victims.

Either we all face our fear or none of us can.

Brooks continues: “Eventually, the Israelites are able to cope with fear. This makes them capable of loving and being loved.” I say: May it be so. May we all take his advice. May Brooks take his own advice.

He concludes his article: by “challeng(ing) each other to see beauty in the other,” they “began to sense unexpected possibilities.” I say: We cannot truly see the beauty in each other unless we can see it in all the Others of the world. I say: May we all realize that our fear of the Other mirrors our fear of recognizing our deepest selves. May our collective, creative imagination make art out of our fear and our grief.

Hafiz says:

Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I’d like to see you in better living conditions.

Antonio Machado says:

What was your word, Jesus?

Love? Forgiveness? Affection?

All your words were one word: Wakeup.