MYTH & POWER IN AMERICA
by Kenneth King
Myth and the power of the hero are as primordial as the genome. Myths transcend space and time—they’re about the mystery of origins. After he passed Siren’s Island, Odysseus was traumatized by an irresistible six-headed monster, catastrophic whirlpool, and underworld ghosts.
Nationhood spawns its own myths—democracy, freedom, civil rights, and frenzied patriotism—that often camouflage a covert chauvinism. National myths blindside the populace about how power is actually gained and wielded; democracy still enforces hierarchy, class, and slavery.
In America, no one is more heroic or exemplifies the myth of power than the president (at least symbolically) as the atavistic torchbearer and consummate leader. Yet since the early 20th century American presidents have increasingly found themselves caught in strange and dangerous contestations of their sovereign power.
In myths the gods bestowed power; in history and politics it is acquired by chicanery, deceit, underhanded schemes, and sleight-of-hand corruption. Until scandal and public exposés rear their heads, the populace rarely finds out about politicians’ backroom deals and fevered compromises—the necessary finagling and contrivances required for wresting power. Despite a politician’s aura, and repeated at every election, the public gets snookered by illusory promises. Power mania and crime are blood brothers.
Death, the hero’s ultimate nemesis, has always been integral to the will to defy mortality and the forfeiture of authority. Heroes don’t, and can’t, realize that time will defeat them as it does everyone; hence myth’s raison d’être.
President Roosevelt’s myth was bolstered and reinforced by the nation’s bold recovery after the devastating 1929 stock market crash, Great Depression, and World War Two, followed by the heroic founding of Social Security. The only national media was radio, so Roosevelt was able to conceal his Achilles’ heel affliction (polio), which was terminated by a single self-inflicted gunshot to his head, carefully hushed up. American’s unrequited weapon of choice, guns, have been the country’s biggest dirty secret.
Myths are not only integral to history they reinforce and distort it. Guns founded America. The myth of the instrument of war and conquest has long been central and complementary to the hegemony of American power. Davy Crockett’s musket, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, the extermination of countless Indian tribes, Hollywood’s long affair with tawdry Westerns, and the mishigas over the Second Amendment continue to magnify the fiasco.
Automatic fire, the machine gun, invented in 1884, anticipated the next century’s world wars: Korean, Vietnam, Gulf, and Iraq Wars, and extended sieges in Afghanistan, Syria, etc. After Communism, the new bogeyman was terrorism. Guns and explosives became the military’s lethal weaponry whose mushrooming presence fostered a blowback syndrome—unremitting mass shootings by disaffected traitors out to destroy themselves and cause mayhem boomeranged on the nation in the 21st century. As much as they protect, weapons are magnets for violence.
Children’s toy guns, games, Hollywood shoot-’em-ups, and computer games have accelerated the insidious specter of assault mythology. Exploiting raw existential fears about safety and vulnerability, a shooter or terrorist can be lurking anywhere—in schools, malls, and houses of worship. When the numbers of guns exceed the national population, how much can laws, government regulation, or background checks accomplish?
For President Truman, guns and warfare were upstaged by atomic power. Dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then promoting Atoms for Peace by selling nuclear power abroad, sabotaged his presidential icon. At the same time, John von Neumann was spearheading the Digital Revolution by pioneering a computer that could calculate the superhuman factors required to engineer thermonuclear technology.
As the benign 1950’s president, General Dwight Eisenhower inspired national trust as a grandfatherly World War Two war hero officiating while the coast-to-coast expansion of TV, suburbs, supermarkets, and malls supercharged the nation’s heroic financial prosperity.
During the late 1950s the confluence of technology and media entangled with political machinations became increasingly unstable and unpredictable. Reality was compromised by the new power of TV, leveraged by the collision of the evening news and the sitcom, curiously pioneered by the three-camera format for I Love Lucy.
John Kennedy was a product of TV, advertising, consumerism, and the booming 1960s youth culture. Public relations engineered his image to fashion an outsized myth of affluence, glamor, global expansiveness, and space exploration—a man on the moon. Part of a new dynamic dynasty, he captivated and captured the American imagination and sold the Icon of Progress until his celluloid image combusted in a fusillade of bullets.
TV enabled JFK to defeat Nixon, before Nixon defeated himself. JFK’s funeral, a mega media event, transferred his mythic power to Jackie, who in her dramatic black veil reverently holding the hands of her two young children proved a more enduring icon. In the following decades, Jackie rarely spoke and had only to be photographed to command fascination.
TV was the big mythic game changer. The electronic broadcasting of streaming images collapsed distance and made events omnipresent, inducing instant satisfaction and political control. TV preceded and prepared the way for the digital, the instant transmissibility of information, made possible by computers. Instead of the literary myth of the Logos, the hyperborean gods were replaced by the surcharged immediacy of seductively hypnotic screens, often just as draconian if not more frightful. TV reduced the world to a carnivorous two-dimensional expendability.
The myth of power took a dangerous U-turn with Richard Nixon. His flaws were magnified by his every move; Vietnam didn’t help, nor Watergate, nor TV. His presidency was mired by a shattered trust; a dark legacy destroyed his icon. Nixon’s Achilles heel was maniacal control, combined with illegal crimes, alcohol, secret recordings, and late-night conversations with dead presidents.
Lyndon Johnson, a flawed southern bigot, bit the bullet of his predecessor’s assassin by accomplishing what JFK couldn’t; he managed to enact far-reaching social programs like Medicare and Medicaid, and in a tumultuous climate of civil unrest, riots, and police brutality, he signed the Voting Rights Act that outlawed segregation while mired in the Vietnam conspiracy. The Red Menace War involved an international drug smuggling operation that ended with the scandal of heroin being shipped home in the corpses of GIs.
Jimmy Carter, the benign peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, tried to resuscitate the icon of moral leadership but was undermined by the CIA’s internecine interference in foreign affairs. The 1979 hostage crisis, blowback from the US’s 1953 Iran oil coup manipulated by the insidious last-minute election subterfuge of George Bush and Ronald Reagan, upstaged Carter’s reelection. (Decades later Carter became an esteemed elder statesman.)
Image and Myth then needed firmer autocratic control, so by the 1980s the oligarchy or Deep State chose the easily manipulated Ronald Reagan, an addled puppet actor who mouthed whatever was scripted for him, while neoconservatives hit pay dirt manufacturing his Great Communicator myth. Reagan got caught in the embarrassing Iran-Contra scandal, the illicit but lucrative sale of drugs and laundering weapons to Central America and Iran, heady undercover intrigues. History upstaged itself before myth defaulted on credit default swaps, derivatives, and bogus equity schemes.
The Bushes became the Second American Dynasty, perhaps reminiscent of the UK’s Royal Family. Papa Prescott, scion of banking, industry, and espionage was a supporter of Hitler’s. George the First had the skullduggery imprimatur as CIA director—a seasoned insider who had conveniently been in Dallas on the day JFK was assassinated.
Baby Bush’s embarrassingly inept guffaws reinforced the horrific, catastrophic, and totally unnecessary Iraq War, a saga that reified Uncle Remus’ tale of being ensnared by a tar baby, at a cost of trillions. Shrub was reading a nursery story to children as 9/11 was engineered in plain sight.
War and Myth are inextricable. Another intractable decoy, manufactured consent promulgated by Bush II, was that 9/11 was planned in Afghanistan, a country without roads. Conveniently forgotten was the Bush and bin Laden families’ longstanding entwined business history; Osama bin Laden was on Baby Bush’s Harken Energy oil company board of directors, and a CIA asset. Like Vietnam, Afghanistan was a lucrative poppy kingdom. Bush and his more treasonable Vice President Richard Cheney were never tried for their war crimes, though candidate Barack Obama promised they would be.
Bill Clinton tried to co-opt the Kennedy myth of smooth Hollywood underhandedness steered by film industry directors while technology and computer stocks soared; but a cocaine addiction and uncontrollable libido undermined him. The New York Times Magazine ran a provocative feature detailing the twenty-eight or so Arkansas murders attributed to the Clinton machine.
During the 1960s, and before anyone suspected, Andy Warhol realized the sitcom and movies would morph into Reality TV. The allure of celebrity and advertising would infect politics and subvert myth like a baffling runaway thriller, and killer. Hypnotic TV serials like Dallas, Dynasty, The Lives of the Rich and Famous, and The Apprentice created a grandiose fascination with glamour, wealth, and power more outsized than penis envy, reinforcing the grand Oligarchic Dream.
The subprime mortgage scandal, vulture hedging, and extensive bank fraud, resulting in 2008’s financial meltdown, hobbled President Obama. Wall Street businesses, derelict banks and mortgage companies profited from runaway extortion schemes that defrauded 8.8 million people (10% of all US homeowners) of their property and equity. No one was ever held responsible, tried, or brought to justice. Then he and his Attorney General, Eric Holder, got caught in the cash-rich “Fast and Furious” gunrunning scandal that enabled Mexican cartels to buy illegal, untraceable firearms at the southern US border.
As Brexit threatened to implode the myth of the Royal Family, another Great Drama, the destruction of the US Presidency, was played out. Donald Trump, an idiot savant, used Twitter and inverted conspiracies to upstage the official media, perpetrating the toxic lure and lore of fake news. Trump sabotaged government by demanding obeisance: a seemingly Omertà-like loyalty from everyone around him, blindsiding the media. The National Rifle Association was his biggest supporter, to the tune of $30 million.
Trump managed to shore up a fortune after his disastrous casino bankruptcies and business failures made him a red herring for any bank, so he bankrolled his real estate empire to launder money in underhanded windfall ventures from Russian mafia oligarchs desperate to hoard and offshore their financial killings after the demise of the USSR.
Politics have become as toxic and violent as the fractured divisiveness and warring invectives increasingly reinforced by roughshod rhetorical firepower. When it reaches an uncompromising pitch, as it has, a new technique—or technology—is needed. No resolve will be possible until we acknowledge it.
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For Charles Darwin, evolution was a bottom-up paradigm, starting with protozoa that morphed into fish, which became reptiles, then mammals. Every paradigm camouflages itself with a myth supported by empirical, rock-solid causality.
Physicists, too, got caught in the teleological Big Business Big Bang myth, unable to realize, as Fred Hoyle knew, that the Universe was Steady-State, without beginning or end.
Now the paradigm is reversing again. We’re on the cusp of the Digital Bicameral Revolution—transhumanism. Ray Kurzweil understands that singularity—how the power of supercomputers, Internet, and AI neuro-technology will transform global consciousness and create a new, even more potent myth. AI expands and exceeds all cognitive and recombinant parameters of the top-down model, replacing it with synergistic plasma consciousness and intergalactic intelligence.
The late neurosurgeon and maverick author Leonard Shlain’s book The Alphabet vs. The Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image might be used as a primer for the Digital Bicameral Revolution. The electronic synergy of both neural hemispheres catalyzes a new expansive AI paradigm comparable to consciousness becoming synonymous with the Internet.
In 1936, Alan Turing conceived the prototype of a Universal ‘thinking machine,’ an enigma that has provoked scientists, scholars, and thinkers ever since. A machine that thinks would turn all our conceptions about the world upside down, reversing any epistemic about Reality. Bicameral engineering and AI have the capacity to transform the genome itself, hence the dilemma over CRISPR, genetic manipulation, and human mutability: the technology of the future.
Once we had heroes and statesmen, now we have fast food, pop culture, and expendable Reality TV celebrities, toxicity and pollution, exported globally. The dilemma is that humankind, being genetically programmed by myth, cannot yet realize that sovereignty has been replaced by the corporatocracy that is blindsiding them while undermining earth’s survival. Baby Bush and Trump’s maniacal, egregiously idiotic blather prove leadership must yield to the beyond-human: to computers.
Instead of a president, a supercomputer in the Oval Office would be far more beneficial, comprehensive, and proto-active, because the problems facing mankind are beyond human intelligence, even beyond genius. Computers can now accomplish what no human brain or government department can, calculating mindboggling facts and data and coordinating policies infinitely more quickly. Even though politicians refuse to give up the ghost, events might hopefully yet outstrip them. The end of politics may remain a pipe dream, but history has long been upended by unexpected events, hidden dialectics, upsurges, and breakthroughs. Digital algorithms and simulated wizardry may have already usurped the role of the hero.
October 15, 2020
© Kenneth King