Preacher: Well, you see men like yourself you thrived upon the continuance of segregation, violence and disease. Now that Messiah has returned all is pure. You’re in the shit house.
Lone Ranger: Well then, I’ll make trouble. Because I’m geared for it. And I must have a ‘Thank you, Masked Man.’ That’s why I always ride off and never wait for ‘thank you.’
– Lenny Bruce, “Thank You, Mask Man” (1968)
My JSTOR searches brought up a textbook by American Studies Doctor Heike Paul.1 I’m titling this entry after the chapter I’m using,2 a title we’ll refer to as, “Agrarianism” here. The text not only brings up the “Little House” books with which I started this series, but it gives my foregoing research a wider perspective – It begins the analysis of works of fiction with the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, of whom I had written on this blog, then it discusses dime novel Westerns…
[e]ven more widely read than Cooper’s [books. These] Westerns, which became an unprecedented phenomenon in publishing and consumer culture in the second half of the 19th century[3]... prominently included dramatic scenes of violence as a major part of their attraction[3]. Somewhat paradoxically, these texts projected rugged individualism and outstanding heroism in a format that relied to a large extent on standardization, serialization, and mass consumption…
Paul describes the demonization of the “savages” and the “torture porn” quality with which the authors narrate their heroes’ victories over them, and points out that…
The fact that these mass-produced and mass-consumed fantasies do not hide or feel the need to explain the white violence that they describe points us to the tacit dimension of the myth of the West in hegemonic discourse: “This is how the Western produces what we might call its ‘mythology effect’ – with the presumption that the West already exists as shared knowledge, with an absence of detail that insists on familiarity”[3]. This “familiarity” is grounded in the unquestioned acceptance and successful naturalization of the fundamental ideological premises of frontier discourse, which above all include the assumption that white people’s usurpatory presence in North America is justified at all.
“Agrarianism” then examines Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows of 1883-1916 – “one of the largest and most popular entertainment businesses in the world.” This performance dramatized a white hero who had “mastered” the techniques of the “savages” and regularly outperforms them in the service of his empire country.
Getting back to filmed Westerns, Paul quotes teacher and textbook writer John Cawelti that they…
...present... for our renewed contemplation that epic moment when the frontier passed from the old way of life into social and cultural forms directly connected with the present. By dramatising this moment, and associating it with the hero’s agency, the Western affirms the act of foundation. In this sense, the Western is like a Fourth of July ceremony.[4]
She further paraphrases Cawelti that …
the function of the Western is to ritualistically affirm the hero’s integrity and innocence despite his acts of violence against what hegemonic discourse represents as “savages” or “outlaws;” while some Westerns explore the moral dilemma of innocence and aggression in more ambiguous terms, Westerns by and large still are “fantasies of legitimated violence” and “moralistic aggression”[4]
She then quotes historian Richard Slotkin, connecting this aggression to our aggression overseas…
The invocation of the Indian war and Custer’s Last Stand as models for the Vietnam war was a mythological way of answering the question, Why are we in Vietnam? The answer implicit in the myth is, “We are there because our ancestors were heroes who fought the Indians, and died (rightly or wrongly) as sacrifices for the nation.” There is no logic to the connection, only the powerful force of tradition and habits of feeling and thought.[5]
… and she shows the connection in actions as recent as the naming of previous President Obama’s operation to defeat Osama bin Laden, “Geronimo.”
Paul has a more recent text that discusses The “romance of extraction,” a subject intimately connected with this series – I’ll discuss this subject in my next entry.
Joker (John Wayne): I wanted to see exotic Vietnam, the jewel of Southeast Asia. I, uh, I wanted to meet interesting…and stimulating people of an ancient culture … and kill them.
– Full Metal Jacket (1987), quote from idyllopus
1I thought this title would be better for this post than the one I’ve been using – I hope my readers forgive the discrepancy in the menu, where it will take its place where we would expect “Prosperity Gospel, False Dialogue, Historical Analysis & Literature, 6” to go. I should also explain my choice of reference here. According to the blurb on one of her texts available in Google Books, the author …
Heike Paul (Prof. Dr.) is chair of American studies at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and director of the Bavarian American Academy in Munich. She is project leader of the Global Sentimentality Project and spokesperson of the research training group on »The Sentimental« at FAU. In 2018, she received the Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation.
Although she has no entry in Wikipedia, as of the time of writing (10/31/23, 7:42am EST,) her name brings up several entries. The most interesting is as a speaker at the Futures of American Studies, an institute formed at Dartmouth as a forum for those from a variety of disciplines who are interested in current critical debates in American Studies to dialogue. The book, of which the entry title is the chapter heading, is: The Myths That Made America: An Introduction to American Studies. The book yields 374 results on Google Scholar, and its author’s name yields over 1,000. Lastly, Dr. Paul’s work, especially her most recent text, harmonizes perfectly with the themes of this series.
2Chapter VI Agrarianism, Expansionism, and the Myth of the American West
The Myths That Made America: An Introduction to American Studies, 2014, pp. 311-366 (56 pages)
3 Citations for this passage are a bit confusing. It looks like Dr. Paul’s reference is to pages 6, 2 and 33 of Bill Brown’s Introduction to Reading the West: An Anthology of Dime Westerns, (1997). I should point out here that Paterson and Rand, as pointed out earlier in this series, used the same myth-making technique – insistence on shared “familiarity” – as that to which the second block quote refers.
4 Cawelti, John G. The Six-Gun Mystique. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1975, pp. 73 and 85.
5 Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1998, p. 19.
Seeker247365v2 