DREAMING FUNDAMENTALISMS INTO THE MYTH OF AMERICA

DREAMING FUNDAMENTALISMS INTO THE MYTH OF AMERICA:

THE INTERCONNECTEDNESS OF CHRISTIANITY, AMERICANISM,

MILITARISM, AND THE MAGIC OF THE PEP RALLY

By

JEREMY BUESINK, B.A.

A Major Research Project

Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree

Master of Arts

McMaster University

© Copyright by Jeremy Buesink, August 2011

MASTER OF ARTS (2011) McMaster University

(Cultural Studies and Critical Theory) Hamilton, Ontario

TITLE: Dreaming Fundamentalisms into the Myth of America: The Interconnectedness of Christianity, Americanism, Militarism, and the Magic of the Pep Rally

AUTHOR: Jeremy Buesink, B.A. (McMaster University)

SUPERVISOR: Dr. Susan Searls Giroux

NUMBER OF PAGES: v, 80

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the nationwide ‘pep rally’ that broke out after the news that Osama bin Laden had been murdered became public. In doing, the essay demonstrates that what legitimizes the privileging of patriotic repression of thought in America, which this pep rally in many ways exemplifies, is a fundamentalist nationalistic ethos that submits to the dogma of the American Dream and the ideal of American Exceptionalism, in turn provoking self-righteous murder and self-destructive American policy. Furthermore, the apocalyptic-utopianism of the founding Puritans which has a prominent place in dominant American discourse intertwined with the dogma of the American Dream and the ideal of Exceptionalism, works to influence a militaristic socio-cultural paradigm of perpetual combat and the celebration of the harsh division of winners and losers, the saved and the damned. Yet, when Americans took to the streets the night of bin Laden’s murder, they participated in an activity that provides the affective blessed assurance of fundamentalist Americanism which promises community and provides an illusion of stability, but in doing so, both requires and privileges anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism rather than nuanced realities and the actual underpinnings of the symbols of American morality. For the fundamentalist Americanist worldview, territorialized around the Puritan-descended notion of the American Dream—which dictates ‘proper’ Americanism within a paradigm where the drive for property, land, and acquisition is a drive for purity, absolutism, and virtue—the logic of militarization, the logic of apocalypse, steers the ship while the pep rally calms the sea.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to Dr. Susan Searls Giroux, my supervisor, for her wonderful and gracious guidance and insightful commentary as this project took shape.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I... Introduction...Apocalyptic-Utopianism...’Fundamentalizing’ Americanisms...............1

II... The Pep Rally...Facts and Fundamentalisms...Idealizing Murder..............................10

III... The American Dream...Antinomian Puritans...The Unholy Alliance........................40

IV... Mythical History...Essentialist Americanism...The Backward Gaze........................70

V...Conclusion...Winning...Righteousness...Romance......................................................79

Bibliography......................................................................................................................81

I. Introduction...Apocalyptic-Utopianism...’Fundamentalizing’ Americanisms

The nationalistic ethos of fundamentalist Americanism is a logic that treats

supposed American values and a distinctly American morality—at the centre of

which lies the dogmatic moral barometer of the American Dream—as sacrosanct.

Fundamentalist Americanism finds its roots in fundamentalist Christianity, roots

that are deeply intertwined and still highly influential despite the supposed shift in

(Western) modernity from religious authority to a more progressive secular

authority, a shift that is highly dubious and vastly overstated particularly in

America. As Andrew Bacevich, Professor of International Relations at Boston

University, bluntly states, “The United States of America remains today, as it has

always been, a deeply, even incorrigibly, Christian nation.”1 Normative Christian

values permeate the socio-cultural American landscape—consider money,

government, sexuality, laws and punishments, and the public religiosity of

Presidents past and present. Moreover, the notion that secular authority is more

progressive, more modern, more prone to rationality than dogma, is often taken

for granted as well, for secular authority is also prone to regressive, reductionist

fundamentalist reliance. Judith Butler, who argues that secularism frequently

carries religious content, suggests too that “secularism has a variety of forms,

many of which involve forms of absolutism and dogmatism that are surely as

1 Andrew Bacevich The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 122.

problematic as those that rely on religious dogma.”2 In other words, secularism,

whether or not it can be teased apart from normative religious values, still

frequently provokes fundamentalist logic, though I am arguing here that in

America secularism is deeply intertwined with Christianity, dogmatised by

Christianity. Indeed, because of the legacy of, and pervasiveness of, normative

Christian values in America there exists a privileging of fundamentalist

Americanism in dominant American discourse. To be sure there are differing

strains of fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Americanism but where

they converge ideologically is at the stance of certainty, of purity, of moral

right(eous)ness. This moral superiority insists that if something is ‘properly’

American or ‘properly’ Christian than on that basis alone it is right.

Fundamentalism is defined by faith rather than evidence and certainty rather than

self-reflexive rationality despite the paradoxical glitch that faith presupposes

unknowing and fundamentalism is a worldview that quite simply and

unflinchingly insists it knows.

This essay examines characteristics of America’s Christianized mythical

history that work to indoctrinate the population through the pervasive infusion of

the fundamentalist Americanism at work in America exemplified in the

nationwide celebrations that took place on the night of Osama bin Laden’s

murder. The current climate of militarization and free market fundamentalism

2 Judith Butler Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2010), 122.

wherein neoliberal and neoconservative interests converge at the stance of purity

despite overwhelming contradictions, are further evidence examined here of the

affective-ness of fundamentalism that renders logic and reason burdensome. The

first sections explore American and Christian fundamentalism, and these

fundamentalisms in convergence, with specific focus on the celebrations of bin

Laden’s death and the fruition therein of the pervasiveness of the militarized

apocalyptic logic that drives and is driven by these fundamentalisms. The

following sections examine more closely the religious and mythological

underpinnings of this celebration and of these fundamentalisms: the legacy of the

founding Puritans, the American Dream, the neoliberal-neoconservative alliance,

and the frontier myth that perpetuates Theodore Roosevelt’s enduring paradigm of

nativist Americanism. In doing, I engage in particular with the work of Wendy

Brown, Chris Hedges, Andrew Bacevich, Susan Jacoby, Richard Hofstadter,

Judith Butler, David Harvey, and Noam Chomsky. The contention of this essay is

that the religiously inflected ‘nature’ of America’s mythologized history,

informed by the fundamentalist Christianity of the founding Puritans, the

subsequent frontier myth of Manifest Destiny, and the centrality of the American

Dream to American identity, in turn informs the rhetorical melding of more

pervasive Christian fundamentalism, militarism, and neoliberal economic and

social policy in America that becomes intelligible, in part, because of affective

workings of fundamentalist Americanism which provide to the faithful the

illusion of stability. Moreover, while the American Dream functions

ideologically under the longstanding presumption of egalitarianism, of

opportunity for all, the reality is that it divides the nation into few ‘winners’ and a

vast majority of ‘losers’—especially as the Dream is realized in neoliberalism—

while the religiously inflected notion of the chosen and the damned, the virtuous

and the immoral, intensifies the polarity between wealth and poverty, success and

failure. Yet, the celebration of blind patriotism and demonstrative faith in

America’s righteousness through the practise of affective fundamentalist

Americanism—exemplified nationwide the night of bin Laden’s murder—

provides illusory salvation for all who proclaim faith in starred and striped

ideology.

Precisely what it means to be an American and act in a distinctly

American manner informs a national preoccupation—particularly on the political

right—with three intertwined principle concerns: the patriotic correctness that

adheres to dogmatic frameworks not only influenced by Christianity and the

American Dream’s dark economic undercurrent that champions fiscal heroism as

virtue is presumed to accompany material gain, but also by the logic of masculine

militarization—a logic that is also paradoxically bound to fundamentalist

Christianity. For example, regarding the latter, the unconditional nature of God’s

love takes a dramatic turn (but not an isolated one) in the pages of the Book of

Revelation wherein a utopian triumph follows the mighty destruction required of

God’s apocalyptic vision wherein eternal grace is provided for some of humanity

and eternal damnation for the vast majority. Due to the destruction required of the

apocalypse, provided by God, Satan, angels, demons, nature, and human

participants,

[t]he apocalyptic fantasy calls on believers to turn their backs on the crumbling world around them. This theology of despair is empowered by widespread poverty, violent crime, incurable diseases, global warming, war in the Middle East and the threat of nuclear war. All these events presage the longed-for obliteration of the Earth and the glorious moment of Christ’s return.3

Similar apocalyptic ideals are typologically tied to Americanism, a legacy

produced by the founding Puritans. Bacevich writes, “America was to become, in

John Winthrop’s enduring formulation of 1630, ‘as a city upon a hill,’ its light

illuminating the world. Present-day Americans beyond counting hold firm to

these convictions.”4 The New World was to be an enlightened nation of proper

Christian faith, and all who were not properly ideologically and theologically in

sync with these utopian desires were deemed the corrupted Other—a belief held

by many Christian fundamentalists to this day. Many Americans who do not

necessarily profess belief in the Christian aspects of Winthrop’s vision

nonetheless cannot escape its pervasive influence and its place in dominant

American discourse thereby still holding firm to utopian aspects of this vision.

Despite perhaps seeming counterintuitive, apocalypse and utopianism are not

contradictory terms. The myth of the apocalypse entails tribulation and triumph,

3 Chris Hedges American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (New York: Free Press, 2006), 187. Emphasis added. 4 Andrew Bacevich The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 122.

chaos and order. Like the holy trinity, apocalypse and utopia exist as one entity.

University of Houston Professor, Lois Zamora, argues that it is this “creative

tension, the dialectic, between these opposites that explains, in part, the myth’s

enduring relevance.”5 And this myth emerges in forms other than strictly biblical.

Zamora asserts that “apocalypse, one of our most basic yet least understood

myths, has always been essential to America’s conception of itself.

[...Apocalypse is] a myth of radical transformation, a myth of transcendence, [...of

] the absolute antithesis of good and evil, light and darkness” despite, mutually

containing violence and peace, chaos and order.6 Due to a predominant social

historical viewpoint steeped in the romance and mythology prompted by the

utopian vision of the founding Puritans and their subsequently ‘righteous’

endeavours, the apocalyptic subtext of America’s New World ambitions produces

more than a penchant for framing Americanisms in fundamentalist terms.

The distinctions of un-American, anti-American, and American,

territorialized around the intertwined discourses of militarism, fundamentalist

Christianity, and the American Dream, (wherein no less than wealth, poverty, life,

death, and heaven and hell are at stake), are frequently linked to a legacy of

perpetually reified rhetorical tropes regarding exceptionalism, destiny, modernity,

and progress. And this perpetually reified rhetoric influences a pervasive anxiety

5 Lois P. Zamora, “Introduction” The Apocalyptic Vision in America (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1982), 4. 6 Ibid, 6, 98.

pertaining to essentialist ideals regarding the essence of the American (and so too

the un-American) thereby further provoking the tendency towards

‘fundamentalizing’ Americanisms. Fundamentalist Americanism, is sustained by

collective, and importantly, selective amnesia and is secured in the confident

belief in the virtue of moral absolutism and self-righteous anti-intellectualism and

therein anti-rationalism. Citing Richard Hofstadter’s influence on the topic of

anti-intellectualism, Susan Jacoby describes anti-intellectualist activity in

America by the following terms: “In today’s America, intellectuals and non-

intellectuals alike, whether on the left or the right, tend to tune out any voice that

is not an echo. This obduracy is both manifestation of mental laziness and the

essence of anti-intellectualism.”7 And, as Richard Hofstadter argues, “[American]

anti-intellectualism is, in fact, older than our national identity, and has a long

historical background. [...] I am disposed to believe that anti-intellectualism,

though it has its own universality, may be considered part of our English cultural

inheritance, and that it is notably strong in Anglo-American experience.”8 As

such, although Jacoby argues that anti-intellectualism affects both the political left

and the right, I argue that its pervasiveness benefits the political right and the

normative American values of the white, the Christian, and masculine that are the

locus for American fundamentalism.

7 Susan Jacoby The Age of America Unreason (New York: Vintage Books, 2009), xx.8 Richard Hofstadter Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 6.

In accordance to the authority of an idealized, militarized, and

masculinised American mythology, in which the Puritan exodus, the frontier myth

of Manifest Destiny, and the American Dream play vital roles akin to the roles

that the Eden myth and the violently instituted restoration of the Armageddon

play in fundamentalist Christianity, fundamentalist Americanist faith has come to

secure meaning in perpetual competition, perpetual combat, in winning, in

pursuing the mythical narrative of the utopian triumph that follows the chaos of

apocalypse—convictions that have turned America into a warrior nation bent not

only on the destruction of Others but on its own self-destruction as well. For

example, as Bacevich correctly identifies in Washington Rules: America’s Path to

Permanent War, the consensus is widespread in America for a worldwide military

presence, armed forces configured not for defence but for global power

projection, overt or covert, anytime, anywhere, that persists despite a record of

recurring failure. Meanwhile, domestically, the self-destructive bent is evidenced

by the proliferation of the neoliberal faith in free market fundamentalism that has

restricted the freedom of the masses in favour of the freedoms of few, a utopian

project that can only, according to David Harvey, “ultimately be sustained by

resort[ing] to authoritarianism.”9 He writes, “The sanctity of contracts and the

individual right to freedom of action, expression, and choice [essential to

guarantee individual freedoms] must be protected. The state (which is

9 David Harvey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 70.

increasingly relying on private contractors) must therefore use its monopoly of the

means of violence to preserve these freedoms at all costs.”10 However, as Jacoby

suggests, “there are ways of trying to strangle ideas that do not involve

straightforward attempts at censorship or intimidation. The suggestion that there

is something sinister, even un-American, about intense devotion to ideas, reason,

logic, evidence, and precise language is one of them.”11 Therein is the anti-

intellectualist bent that allows Americanist fundamentalism(s) to work whilst a

society’s demise takes place with their apocalyptic vision intact. And vital to the

affective investment in American fundamentalism is the celebration of

mythologized and Christianized vision of military might that cuts across the

ideological spectrum but which favours the political right. This affective

celebration of American militaristic right(eous)ness was displayed with fervour

and gaudiness on the night that Osama bin Laden’s murder was confirmed.

10 Ibid, 64. 11 Susan Jacoby The Age of America Unreason (New York: Vintage Books, 2009), 6.

II. The Pep Rally...Facts and Fundamentalisms...Idealizing Murder

When the news of the death of Osama bin Laden was released on 1 May,

2011, it effectively instigated a nationwide patriotic pep rally that saw baseball

fans chanting ‘U.S.A.’ en mass and found students taking to the streets with their

starred and striped banners held aloft. The following is an excerpt from Penn

State student Haley Blum, editor of the USA Today college blog:

The ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ broke out every couple of minutes in different parts of the crowd, creating mixed-up musical canons of U.S. pride. Even the toilet paper rolls flying across the sky, getting tangled in the tree branches lining the street, seemed like an eloquent expression of the beauty of our country’s freedom. All I kept saying was, ‘This is amazing.’ And it was. [...] At one point, the Boss’ ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ blasted from speakers. [...] It felt like I was at the most patriotic ‘AMERICA F*** YEAH!’ concert ever. And it probably was. But after witnessing this whole beautiful, patriotic mess, I started analyzing it. Were we taking this too far? What about the possibility of retaliation attacks? [...] Who is going to clean up the street, lined with the makeshift confetti and other assorted trash, tomorrow? (Sometimes I think too much about things…). At the end of the night, I am in awe. [...] and I don’t know any of the answers to the questions above. [...] But, right now, I do know that I’ll always remember feeling like a part of an amazing, joyful whole. The impulsiveness of every tweet, chant and confetti toss was attached to an intense emotion that might defy any sort of rational post-riot (er, celebration) analysis. In the moment, we were just proud to be Americans.12

Haley’s participation and her posting are by no means anomalous. The

nationwide celebration of bin Laden’s death, which included singing “We are the

Champions” en mass at ‘Ground Zero’, was a blatant, gaudy, and misguided

12Haley Blum, “Osama death celebration: Penn State brings it to the Canyon,” USA Today College, accessed May 6, 2011, www.usatodayeducate.com/.../blog/osama-death-celebration-penn-st.

display championing righteous destruction. It played out in front of the television

cameras, was posted on YouTube, blogged about, and championed on the eleven

o’clock news as though it was the celebration of a sporting championship rather

than a celebration of death that at its core idealizes murder under the banner of

American freedom. Haley’s commentary captures beautifully, and disturbingly, a

spirit of blind patriotism that refuses to acknowledge moral and political

complexities—the nationalistic ethos of fundamentalist Americanism that

provides the illusion of stability whilst paradoxically propagating a state of

perpetual crisis. Her reasoning, or, by her own admission the necessary lack

thereof, demonstrates the pep rally’s affective Americanist workings as it

encourages, requires even, illusion with regard to the actual underpinnings.

Emotion is celebrated over substance, passion over intellect, unquestioning

loyalty over reflexivity.

The event that Haley refers to as a concert, a riot, and then a celebration, I

call a ‘patriotic pep rally’ because it summons patriotic spirit by provoking a herd

mentality induced in an anti-intellectual anti-rationalist moral vacuum. Or, to put

it another way, it calls upon a ‘spirited’ patriotism that epitomizes the anti-

intellectualism necessary to manage a fundamentalist faith. Moreover this spirit

of Americanism that was represented nationwide after bin Laden’s death is devoid

of many of the values that are professed to be at the heart of the ‘traditional’

sources of Americanist pride. Despite America’s belief in itself as a beacon of

freedom and a society of law and order, fundamentalist Americanism is capable of

drastically limiting freedom. For example, it appropriates freedom in

‘exceptionalist’ ways in order to make malleable the law and order for which it

supposedly champions. Indeed, the superficial aspects of the pep rally work to

negotiate this tension through affective action, through participation that works

purposefully to supersede the need for reasoned analysis. The patriotic pep rally

and the affective action therein resembles what is at work in many fundamentalist

churches on Sunday in terms of confident moral superiority to be sure, but also,

and especially, in the affective use of emotive technique in praise and worship, in

prayer and song, in alter calls, baptisms, and in invoking the presence of the Holy

Spirit that one may experience when it manifests itself internally and that one may

then in turn perform accordingly. Hymns, speaking in tongues, summoning a

‘childlike’ faith, this all appeals to emotion, to the commands of inner conviction

rather than, or indeed to eliminate, reasonable doubt. For doubt, and the

questioning therein, is blasphemous, disloyal, of weak faith. At its most basic

level, the pep rally mentality resembles fundamentalism, functions with

fundamentalist characteristics, and encourages fundamentalist logic, in order to

invoke gut-level truth, inner conviction, based on unstable outward signifiers

selectively chosen. That Haley references Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” as a

patriotic rallying cry is also terribly apt for it completely decontextualizes the

song’s chorus from the verses that surround it. Springsteen’s song is actually

about the complexities of being an American citizen in a militarized society; it is

about the implications of what it means to be born in the U.S.A. when the war in

Vietnam is raging, the draft acts as a death lottery, and the war veterans that do

make it back home do not have jobs to return to. Ronald Reagan (no stranger to

fundamentalism) was guilty of a similar misappropriation when he chose Bruce’s

little ditty as his 1984 campaign song. Nevertheless, all of this fails to register

with the students and others who gleefully celebrate America’s self-appointed

right to kill with impunity. The song’s ambivalence is trumped by militarism,

absolutism, patriotism, nationalism, populism, righteousness, blessedness, even

the inherited chosen-ness of the founding Puritans. It is relieved of its nuance in

order to champion muscular Americanism. And while our blogger Haley attests

to having some reservation, anxiety, and uncertainty about the ‘America Fuck

Yeah’ pep rally—thereby acknowledging, or at least indicating towards the

perpetual crisis that underlines the illusion of stability—she decides that over

thinking matters only increases anxiety and gets in the way of proper patriotism.

Osama is dead: scoreboard. America is righteous in victory—legalisms,

consequences be damned as the patriotic spirit of Americanism trumps, well, all

else.

The ‘America Fuck Yeah’ pep rally’s patriotically demonstrative anti-

intellectualist aspects of fundamentalist faith , not to mention the gratuitous

vulgarity of its ideological commitments and the obscenity of their material

consequences, are no anomaly but part of a tradition of normalized ritualized

activity that celebrates military might during halftime at sporting events, sings

“God Bless America” during a seventh inning stretch, recites the pledge of

allegiance in school, and takes part in Fourth of July barbeques, all rituals that

work to Americanize everyday activities like eating apple pie or freedom fries.

These rituals work to indoctrinate, and they share characteristics with the

Christianization of daily American life that is a top priority of many

fundamentalist Christians, and shares its legacy with the founding Puritans.

Moreover, not only do these rituals work to Americanize everyday activities, but

everyday activities work to militarize Americanism. Movies, television, video

games, networks news, they all frequently perpetuate the militarism that is

inseparable from fundamentalist Americanism. Indeed, much of the media

coverage in the United States regarding the bin Laden murder resembled the

sentiment at the pep rally:

The headlines in the final editions of The Washington Post and The New York Times on Monday both referenced Mr. Obama’s statement that ‘justice has been done.’ Among the tabloids, the New York Post went with ‘Got Him!’ while The New York Daily News wrote ‘Rot In Hell.’ The celebratory tone of the early [network news] coverage was bolstered by live shots of spontaneous cheering sections of people near the White House and near ground zero in New York. Geraldo Rivera of Fox Newswaded into the youthful celebrants near the White House and declared that ‘a major victory has been scored by the good guys against the baddest of the bad guys.’ Mr. Rivera’s comments were eventually drowned out by the mostly male crowd singing ‘Hey hey hey, goodbye.’13

Not only is much of the media openly supportive of the celebration but are

participating with the anti-intellectualist bent that dismisses both the nuances and

13 Brian Stelter, “U.S. Networks Scramble on News of Bin Laden’s Death,” The New York Times, accessed May 6, 2011, http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/u-s-networks-scramble-on-news-of-bin-ladens-death/

glaring non-subtleties of this event. Jacoby writes, “First and foremost among the

vectors of anti-intellectualism are the mass media. [...Moreover,] the variety of

entertainment, given that all of the media outlets and programming divisions are

controlled by a few major corporations, is largely an illusion.”14 As such, the

dominant reaction to bin Laden’s death in the imagination of the nation is one of

celebration, victory, patriotism, and anything else may be thought of as dissention,

un-American. Butler argues,

Nationalism works in part by producing and sustaining a certain version of the subject. We can call it imaginary, if we wish, but we have to remember that it is produced and sustained through powerful forms of media, and that what gives power to their version of the subject is precisely the way in which they are able to render the subject’s own destructiveness righteous and its own destructibility unthinkable”15

The destructive righteous/unthinkable destructibility binary is certainly on display

at the patriotic pep rally. It is a death rally Americanizing self-righteous murder

in the name of freedom. Indeed, our blogger writes of toilet paper being an

eloquent expression of the beauty of her country’s freedom on the night of their

enemy’s murder. While this tempts me to praise the aptness of such an analogy, I

wonder what freedom it is that she is referring to exactly, the freedom to kill with

impunity? Haley simply does not address this freedom with any further depth,

nor does the celebration as a whole; indeed, that, to some degree, is the point of

the celebration, hence ‘America Fuck Yeah’. But consciously addressed or

14 Susan Jacoby The Age of America Unreason (New York: Vintage Books, 2009), 18. 15 Judith Butler Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2010), 47. Original emphasis.

otherwise it is a ‘freedom’ that encapsulates celebrated militarism, unbalanced

and unchecked self-righteous militarism, as an imperative facet of America’s

unthinkable destructibility. Noam Chomsky writes,

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a ‘suspect’ but uncontroversially the ‘decider’ who gave the orders to commit the ‘supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole’ (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region. [...] The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes ‘Jew’ and ‘Gypsy.’16

The patriotic pep rally is a ‘God Bless America’ moment that whitewashes violent

historical truth, while simultaneously celebrating and proclaiming the sanctity of

this murderous truth. It is the pure and simple affective blessed assurance of the

right(eous)ness of a militant America.

America’s global military footprint is vast and American policy makers

frequently adhere to a long tradition of stubborn non-self-reflexivity and a pattern

of purposefully naïve posturing in the face of conflict in order to justify

purposefully unethical policy under the guise of supposed altruism. In other

16 Noam Chomsky, “My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death,” World News Daily: Information Clearing House, accessed May 7, 2011, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28045.html.

words, they do not fancy themselves the instigators of conflict. Rather, America

has a long history of exerting its force in terms of military policy and distinctly

Americanized morality policing under a guise of purity which functions both

because of a pattern of dehistoricization and decontextualization as well as in a

dehistoricizing and decontextualizing manner. As Hedges argues, “Questioning

the nationalist line, or an attempt to address historical injustices committed by us

against our foes, is branded unpatriotic, intellectual treason.”17 This is anti-

intellectualism in action: non-questioning, non-self-reflexive, accepting of

tradition and reified discourse as truth. Militarism and freedom are of course

intertwined throughout American history, but militarism as freedom is akin to the

apocalypse that utopia requires for its fruition in Christian mythology. The

militarised paradigm in America implies that not only does freedom not exist

without military might, but freedom, as the pep rally demonstrates, is military

might.

Properly contextualizing America’s murderous foreign policies would

dispel its righteousness just as simple analysis of Springsteen’s tune would reveal

that it is not championing the muscular Americanism it is being appropriated for

at the pep rally. Bacevich writes, “Precisely because American purposes express

the collective interests of humankind, Washington expects others to view U.S.

military power, the Pentagon’s global footprint, and an American penchant for

17 Chris Hedges War is a Force that Gives us Meaning (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), 47.

intervention not as a matter of concern but as a source of comfort and

reassurance.”18 (Although importantly Bacevich’s statement should read

‘American purposes purport to express the collective interests of humankind’, for

as he phrases it, it expresses precisely the kind of ideological certainty that

American policy manufactures by decontextualizing conflict.) He continues,

“The good intentions inherent in the credo of American global leadership render

the triad of principles [which he dubs the ‘sacred trinity’ of America’s global

military presence, global power projection, and global interventionism] defining

U.S. military practice benign.”19 As such, a global military presence is

“ostensibly essential to the defence of American freedom even in places where the

actual threat to American freedom is oblique or imaginary.”20 These policies and

practise work to manufacture certainty and consent, or perhaps a better word for

the latter, obedience—all facets of fundamentalist thought—by making Others a

perpetual, or perpetually potential, threat and as such disposable, ungrievable,

their destruction moral, righteous. As Hedges argues, “War is a force that gives

us meaning,” and America, in permanent war, has become reliant on the meaning

therein.21 Butler writes,

War sustains its practises through acting on the senses, crafting them to apprehend the world selectively, deadening affect in response to certain

18 Andrew Bacevich Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), 23. 19 Ibid, 23, 14. 20 Ibid, 22.21 Ibid, 47.

images and sounds, and enlivening affective responses to others. This is why war works to undermine a sensate democracy, restricting what we can feel, disposing us to feel shock and outrage in the face of one expression of violence and righteous coldness in the face of another. To encounter the precariousness of another life, the senses have to be operative, which means that a struggle must be waged against those forces that seek to regulate affect in differential ways. The point is not to celebrate a full deregulation of affect, but to query the conditions of responsiveness by offering interpretive matrices for the understanding of war that question and oppose the dominant interpretations—interpretations that not only act upon affect, but take form and become effective as affect itself.22

The patriotic pep rally works to redirect affect in response to certain things—

therein celebrating supposed American values in an event that disregards

supposed American values—activating instead the un-nuanced realities of a

fundamentalist American response. And in the celebration of death, of violence,

of vengeance (regardless of whether or not the participants are conscious of the

fact that this is precisely what is being celebrated), the pep rally is a disturbing

demonstration of the realities of the utopian-apocalyptic underbelly of

fundamentalist Americanism, of the logic that renders the destruction of enemies

of the faith a righteous pursuit of American policy.

When approximately three thousand American civilians were murdered in

the 9/11 terrorist attacks, one of the American responses was to murder over one

hundred thousand Iraqi civilians. This is self-righteous idealized murder in

action. This is protecting a utopian vision by providing the Other’s apocalypse.

George W. Bush was presented with this question: “It took two wars, it took

22 Judith Butler Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2010), 51-52.

thousands of lives, American lives, billions of dollars, you could say it took

Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and government eavesdropping and waterboarding.

Did it take too much?” In response Bush simply declared, “We didn’t have an

attack. Three thousand people died on Sept. 11th and I vowed that I would do my

duty to protect the American people.”23 ‘We didn’t have another attack...I

vowed’, end of story, certain, reductive, declarative. This is not merely exercising

self-defence or defending some vision of freedom or truth. This is committing the

nation to violence, committing the American people to the vow of one

fundamentalist Christian man. This normalizes Americanist extremism. The

perpetuation of an illusion of America as a bulwark, a super-power, an empirical

symbol of strength and permanence in order to quell the actuality of pervasive

uncertainties is a function of its hegemonic fundamentalisms, and in all its

rhetoric of purity it is terribly profane, giving cause for overkill of action in order

to defend its dogma. Bin Laden was considered an enemy of American freedom,

America’s most wanted in the War on Terror, capturing him just would not cut it,

not after all the money and resources spent to hunt him down; the blood lust was

simply too strong. His death is symbolic and the celebration is a perverse and

profane collective declaration of America’s sacredness founded in the profanity of

righteous murder. It too normalizes extremism. But Christian fundamentalism

and American fundamentalism must bow to the authoritarianism of their dogma

23 “Decision Points: Bush Interviewed by Matt Lauer Part 1 - Dateline NBC - 11/08/2010,” accessed March 7, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wAdMwhedek.

thereby making enemies of all opposed whilst simultaneously and paradoxically

making reasoned analysis and critical insight into its dogma a deplorable pursuit,

a pursuit that betrays the certainty that fundamentalism utilizes strategically to fill

the void that it is built over and against.

Human beings share in common the characteristic of lack, unknowing,

uncertainty, void. We fill this void with language and narrative and discourse in

order to secure meaning, but when we assume that meaning is static, secure,

certain, pure, we refuse to recognise that humankind is bound together, rather

instead we create and subsequently reify and enforce separation based in

fundamental differences. These fundamental differences do not predate us, but

are created by us. We are folded into discourse upon birth—black, white, boy,

girl, Christian, Muslim, these are not fundamental unchanging truths. As Sartre

states in his summation of existentialism: “existence precedes essence, or, if you

prefer, [...] subjectivity must be the starting point.”24 But fundamentalism bows to

essentialist truth; it rallies around essentialist truth rather than acknowledging the

possibility that our discourses are created upon and against void. As such,

fundamentalism is a strategy of fear and anxiety. Fundamentalism is a fragile

worldview but is treated as absolute, thus defended with fervour.

Fundamentalism inevitably attains an arsenal of essential truths to be defended,

truths that are at the core of meaning, the stability of individual and collective

24 Jean Paul Sartre “Existentialism.” Conflict and Cooperation: Documents on Modern Global History. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 378.

identity. There is seldom much depth to a fundamentalist stance before the cracks

emerge. But because fundamentalism is a strategy of fear and anxiety, it

functions with a refusal to look at the nuances, the possible cracks in its ideology.

Indeed its embrace of affective illusion is a refusal to need to look at the cracks.

It requires blind spots of its dogma but denies their existence. It glosses over the

cracks in favour of a supposedly secure worldview, a secured identity in the face

of the terror of unknowing. But this effort to suppress the anxiety of unknowing

in turn creates a pervasive anxiety about anything and everything that threatens

this worldview, thus ‘knowing’ must be defended with militant fervour for that

which threatens to reveal the cracks is unequivocally an enemy of the faith.

Fundamentalist faith, as Hedges argues, “remove[s] the anxiety of moral choice,

the fundamental anxiety of human existence. This is part of [the] attraction.”25

Anxiety is quelled by mutating faith into knowing despite that knowing

effectually negates the need for faith.

Christian fundamentalism is based in the belief of biblical literalism, the

belief that the Bible, including the horrific apocalyptic predictions found in the

Book of Revelation that pass for perfect justice, is the literal Word of God, and as

such it entails adhering to the task of attempting to reconcile as good and moral

truth the holy Bible in its entirety. For to question the truth of a single biblical

passage is to question the validity of the entire Bible, thereby giving over cosmic

25 Chris Hedges American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (New York: Free Press, 2006), 187.

assurance to destabilizing unknowing: “‘Grant one error in the Sacred Book and

its authority is gone[!]’”26 But, to paraphrase Chris Hedges, if you take the Bible

seriously you cannot take it literally, there are simply too many factual

contradictions and inaccuracies. Moreover, the biblical depictions of the loving

God of doves and rainbows and the vengeful God that unleashes genocidal fury

cannot be reconciled, certainly not in a manner that one may describe as infallible.

And yet, as Jacques Berlinerblau writes, “It is a peculiarity of the Good Book that

it elicits in its readers the strong conviction that it unequivocally supports their

strongest convictions.”27 Moreover, as religious scholar Martin Marty argues,

America “‘has more than the Declaration of Independence and the United States

Constitution enshrined in a vault in its archival heart; the Bible is also there.’”28

The factual and moral discrepancies within the Bible are simply whitewashed,

ignored, not considered or even noticed as such by fundamentalists because this

recognition threatens the biblical foundation of a personal relationship between an

authoritative God and the obedient body and mind of the individual longing for

the salvation of the soul. But in order to believe in its literalness, paradoxically,

selectivity is required, because the Bible is not reconcilable as a whole cohesive

work. And fundamentalist Christianity’s selectivity works, in part, by giving over

26 Hodge qtd. in Elizabeth Nordbeck Thunder on the Right: Understanding Conservative Christianity in America (New York: United Church Press, 1990) 21. 27 Jacques Berlinerblau Thumpin’ It: The Use and Abuse of the Bible in Today’s Presidential Politics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 6. 28 Ibid, 7.

reasoned or argued truth to a declarative modality of truth. As Wendy Brown

argues,

most religious truths [...] are relentlessly tethered to a declarative modality of truth. ‘God said ‘let there be light’ and there was light’ was surely among the earliest and most dramatic instances of the power of performative speech, the original recognition that a saying can be a doing and a making, that an utterance can bring truth into being and thus literally re-make reality. The declaration of what is true, right, and good without any necessary reference to facticity has become a well-known neoconservative [therein including Christian fundamentalism] modality of political truth—it is a characteristic of Bush’s accounts of the war in Iraq.29

And since fundamentalists make “moral-political fetishes of truth [and]

consistency and moral certitude in this way, declarative truths have more purchase

than they otherwise might.”30 Moreover, this modality of truth articulates “‘truth

from the gut,’ which corresponds with the personal moment of conversion in

evangelicalism. Here truth derives from inner conviction or certainty that no

amount of facticity or argument can counter.”31 The latter is the very definition of

fundamentalism; it is affective moral certainty relying on the inner conviction of

the soul, or the essence of the thing. This is what our blogger Haley, and

presumably many who take part in the death celebration are feeling the night of

bin Laden’s murder. Reservations are cast aside, emotion takes hold, the

conviction of inner truth. And conviction is based not only in declarative truth but

29 Wendy Brown American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservativism, and De-Democratization (Political Theory, Vol. 34, No. 6 Dec., 2006), 707. 30 Ibid, 707. 31 Ibid, 707.

in the faith of the signs and wonders of this truth—outward manifestations of

truth, signifiers of rightness like bin Laden’s death utilized to reify convictions.

Convictions are personified in the obedience of the faithful, for instance in proper

patriotic participation, praise, worship, and song, the good works that accompany

faith: ritualized behavioural reification.

Fundamentalism is an unwavering faith in moral certainty, and the faith in

the purity of the tenets of faith and the sacredness of the rituals, like the pep rally

and the spirit evoked therein—emotion, impulse, affect—that accompanies said

faith. Within the fundamentalist socio-cultural paradigm at work in America

‘freedom’ becomes a reductive and simplistic rallying cry asserting patriotic

Truth, while ‘democracy’ is treated as an ideological endpoint—an ‘arrival at’

rather than an ongoing ‘process of’. The permanence implicit in an ideological

‘arrival’ promotes policy—economic, political, and moral—that operates in terms

of faith in utopian guarantees, and the faith in these guarantees functions in

concert with apocalypse. Hedges writes, “Utopian visions, when adopted by a

nation or an armed group, swiftly become grandiose and terrifying.”32 Indeed,

when dealing in fundamentalism(s) there is a compulsion to sum things up, tie all

loose ends, an obsession with ‘arrival’ because fundamentalism makes moral-

32 Chris Hedges When Atheism becomes Religion: America’s New Fundamentalists (New York: Free Press, 2008), 108.

political fetishes of truth.33 Jacques Derrida argues instead that the only

“undeconstructable, if there is such a thing, is justice.”34 He states,

I would be tempted to see justice as the best term, today, for what will not let itself be deconstructed, that is, for that which gives deconstruction its movement, for what justifies it. It is the affirmative experience of the coming of the other as other: it is better for this to arrive than the contrary (the experience of the event that will not let itself simply be translated into an ontology: that something should be, that there should be being rather than nothing). The openness of the future is worth more; that is the axiom of deconstruction, that on the basis of which it has always set itself in motion and which links it, as with the future itself, to otherness, to the priceless dignity of otherness, that is to say, to justice. It is also democracy as the democracy-to-come.35

But the ethics of fundamentalism are static, bound to the authority of moral

certainty: arrival. Rather ethics should be the recognition of how humankind

embraces uncertainty together. Butler argues, “If we accept the insight that our

very survival depends not on the policing of a boundary—the strategy of a certain

sovereign in relation to its territory—but on recognizing how we are bound up

with others, then this leads us to reconsider the way in which we conceptualize the

body in the field of politics”36 An ethics bound to uncertainty is not drawn to

essentialize the interconnectedness of race and religion to character, for instance,

nor does nationality essentialize the individual.

33 Wendy Brown American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservativism, and De-Democratization (Political Theory, Vol. 34, No. 6 Dec., 2006), 707. 34 Jacques Derrida Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971-2001 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 104. 35 Ibid, 104-105. 36 Judith Butler Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2010), 52.

The ‘America Fuck Yeah’ pep rally reduces all the nuances of the

situation to a lowest common denominator: national righteousness. Good

conquers evil, end of story. To maintain this righteous faith it is better, as our

blogger Haley states, to not think too much but rather bask in the glow, the

intensity of emotion, the affective thrill of being part of a ‘joyful whole’. In the

moment, our USA Today blogger feels something akin to purity, but only when

repressing her disquieting preoccupation with the filth in the ‘patriotic mess’ that

surrounds her. So rather than tarnish this purity with reasoning—a short cut to

cynicism in this context—she buys into the illusion with emotion. Anxieties are

quelled by affect, and right leaning patriotism is celebrated as wholeness. But

wholeness is the flawed logic of fundamentalism, its apocalyptic underbelly.

Hofstadter writes,

Characteristically, the political intelligence, if it is to operate at all as a kind of civic force rather than as a mere set of manoeuvres to advance this or that special interest, must [...shun] ultimate showdowns and [look] upon the ideal of total partisan victory as unattainable. [...] It is sensitive to nuances and sees things in degrees. [It is] circumspect and humane. The fundamentalist mind will have nothing to do with all this: it is essentially Manichean; it looks upon the world as an arena for conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, and accordingly it scorns compromise [...] and can tolerate no ambiguities.37

The all-or-nothing acceptance of simple unambiguous answers to complicated

questions invests the faith in ‘answers’ with wholeness, coherence, concreteness,

ultimate truth, subsequently provoking fear of even the subtlest or weakest of that

37 Richard Hofstadter Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 134-135.

which may fracture these answers and what may be gaping loopholes in these

answers, for if you are not ‘with us’ you are ‘against us’. This quickly becomes a

social paradigm where what ‘isn’t’ is ‘anti’, and what is not certain is wrong, and

this requires the refusal to question. It is anti-intellectualist authoritarianism. As

Hofstadter argues, “The meaning of [...] intellectual life lies not in the possession

of truth but in the quest for new uncertainties.”38 But when political leaders and

policy makers bow to the wholeness claims of fundamentalist faith anything

outside of the paradigm becomes a threat to the paradigm. Fundamentalism, then,

actually creates a paradigm where the absence of illusion is perceived as cynical,

faithless, incorrect. Therefore, as Haley attests, proper historical perspective has

no place in a proper patriotic celebration for even simple analysis would shatter

the moment, because the moment, the emotion, the pep rally, the crowd, all

perpetuate illusion.

Gustave Le Bon in his exploration of crowd mentality at the turn of the

twentieth century suggests, “Little adopted to reasoning, crowds [...] are quick to

act. [...] The dogmas whose birth we are witnessing will soon have the force of

the old dogmas; that is to say, the tyrannical and sovereign force of being above

discussion.”39 This is affective dogma construction. It lacks critical reasoning but

it enjoys fundamentalist fervour. It defines the pep rally mentality and it

38 Ibid, 30.39 Gustave Le Bon The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2002), xi.

privileges the political right. A recent Harvard study concluded that children who

attend Fourth of July celebrations are more likely to become Republicans later in

life because the political right has been more successful in appropriating affective

American patriotism and its symbols in the twentieth century.40 The political

right has simply been better at co-opting notions of Americanism. With the

fundamentalist stance of holding truth that is ‘above discussion’, the right’s

version of patriotism is sacrosanct, reified continually by affective rhetoric like

‘faith’ and ‘traditional values’, while anything less is anti-American. As George

Lakoff argues, U.S political conservatives have a history of

carefully working out their values, comprehending their myths, and designing a language to fit those values and myths so that they can evoke them with powerful slogans, repeated over and over again, that reinforce those family-morality-policy links, until the connections have come to seem natural to many people in the United States, including many in the media.41

Certainly not all of those who celebrated bin Laden’s death in the patriotic pep

rally are on the political right nor are they fundamentalist necessarily. But I am

arguing that they are partaking in an activity that favours the political right, that

has the tendencies of the political right. They are partaking in a fundamentalist

celebration, submitting to and championing a fundamentalist Americanist

mentality that privileges symbols over the actuality of what underpins the

40 “July 4 Celebrations Make Children More Likely To Become Republican: Harvard Study,” Huff Post Politics, accessed July 15, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/01/july-4-republicans-harvard_n_888659.html 41 George Lakoff Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don’t (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 19.

symbolic. As the death announcement turns into an all-night dance party, the real

falls away to the surreal, to fantasy, which due to its affective collective qualities

passes for hyper-real, the capital ‘T’ Truth found through the inner conviction of a

‘flag first’ celebration of community. Hedges writes, “The more we submerge

our conscience into the will of the collective, the more power we appear to have,

for suddenly we have a combined capacity to act and shape events. [...] Those

who emerge the self with the crowd surrender freedom. The crowd or the nation

now define them. [...] The voices of reason are shouted down by the intoxicated

mob.”42 Rather than a celebration of freedom then, the pep rally is acquiescence

to the flag and to the supposed valued traditions encapsulated in this symbol. Of

course, the reality of the flag is red, white, and blue with some stars and stripes

patterned about; anyone can appropriate it, and it favours elites to keep their

followers assured with that which is familiar, traditional, and treated as eternal.

Indeed, Jacques Berlinerblau observes that of late the Democratic Party “has

undergone a conversion to ‘faith and values’ rhetoric. With the judiciary and the

legislative bodies abandoning them, American secularists, like potential victims of

a nuclear bomb, are faced with a grim choice: radiation or blast?”43 The political

right, in pulling on myth and affective reifying rhetoric, have been able to

perpetually normalize the radical nature, the extremism, of American

42 Chris Hedges When Atheism becomes Religion: America’s New Fundamentalists. (New York: Free Press, 2008), 108. 43 Jacques Berlinerblau Thumpin’ It (Louisville: Westminster John Know Press, 2008), 13.

fundamentalism. They benefit from, and exploit the presumption that “culture is a

uniform and binding groundwork of norms, and not an open field of

contestation.”44 An identity invested in belonging then, is ideologically linked to

loyalty, even unquestioning loyalty to norms and virtues, and if these norms and

virtues are based in right leaning tendencies, and if they work with a militarized

logic, so be it, indeed, all the better. Hedges writes, “[Americans] embrace the

dangerous delusion that we are on a providential mission to save the rest of the

world from itself, to impose our virtues—which we see as superior to all other

virtues—on others, and that we have a right to do this by force.”45 These

delusions of grandeur are due to the prominence of myth in American history and

the Americanized rituals that work to reify this mythologized history.

As our blogger Haley and the other participants at the pep rally bask in

affective nationalism, they demonstrate the inclination to privilege and perpetuate

myth—such as American Exceptionalism and therein the perception of an

unconditional American righteousness reified by a whitewashed collective

historical memory induced in part by patriotic pep rallies—rather than realities,

and grandiose hero/villain narratives to nuanced actualities, actualities that in the

case of bin Laden’s murder Chomsky refers to as “even the most obvious and

elementary facts [that] should provide us with a good deal to think about:

44 Judith Butler Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2010), 108.45 Chris Hedges Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (New York: Nation Books, 2010), 144-145.

It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress ‘suspects.’ In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it ‘believed’ that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that ‘we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.’ Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden’s ‘confession,’ but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.46

This is the type of analysis that betrays America’s perpetual myth making. But

the type of fundamentalist patriotism exemplified at the pep rally is not inclined to

active questioning. It does not question why halftime at blood-sport football

games include gaudy military displays, nor does it question what the implications

of this are, for questioning it, doubting its importance and centrality, is simply

presumed to be disloyal, and, moreover, feared to be disloyal. Questioning also

ruins the moment, for questioning defies the affective blessed assurance that these

demonstrations offer. Questioning defies the imagining of community that Haley

46Noam Chomsky “My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death.” World News Daily: Information Clearing House, accessed May 7, 2011, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28045.html.

is taking part in. This type of patriotism adheres to the notion that a nation

blessed by God, or at least blessed by Exceptualism, has to fight; neutrality is

loathsome, and there is little room for improper citizens with divided loyalties

when it comes to America’s military conquest and the apocalyptic narrative that

accompanies these ambitions. The overwhelming support President Bush initially

received when attacking Iraq, even after the nation realized that they were duped

with the WMD argument, expresses adherence to that narrative. This patriotism

expresses a common sentiment of togetherness in the name of military might,

winning, the vanquishing of evil, superiority. Bacevich argues, “Even among

citizens oblivious to or rejecting its Christological antecedents, widespread,

almost automatic support for [the] doctrine of American Exceptionalism

persists.”47 The ‘except’ portion of ‘Exceptionalism’ is a terribly important facet

of this belief, for in collective and selective social amnesia, the type of which the

pep rally mentality produces, and fundamentalist Americanism produces,

exceptions to ‘the rules’ are made frequently, perpetually, without smudging the

whitewashed history of America in collective memory.

The anxious tradition in America of an incessant fidelity to credos such as

Exceptionalism creates and sustains the nationalistic imperative that America, and

its ‘properly’ American citizens therein, maintain their patriotic correctness and

their ‘being on top-ness’. As Robert McNamara proclaims in The Fog of War,

47 Andrew Bacevich The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 122.

“America wins the wars it undertakes.” And if they don’t? It is imperative that a

nation of winners learn to forget. This is exactly what happened within just a few

years of the end of the war in Vietnam and this is what this pep rally works to do.

In celebrating America ‘being on top’ or ‘being number one’ the pep rally

supporters simply celebrate what they consider to be a national victory while

disregarding, suppressing, the other battles—be they financial, military,

individual, or collective—that are being lost as though they are ‘collateral

damage’ in ultimately righteous pursuits. Writing at the dawn of the war in Iraq

Hedges states,

Nationalist triumphalism was shunned and discredited in America after Vietnam. We were forced to see ourselves as others saw us, and it was not always pleasant. We understood, at least for a moment, the lie. But the plague of nationalism was resurrected during the Reagan years. It became ascendant with the Persian Gulf War, when we embraced the mythic and unachievable goal of a ‘New World Order.’ The infection of nationalism now lies unchecked and blindly accepted in the march we make as a nation towards another war, one as ill conceived as the war we lost in southeast Asia.48

Yet, with each present and future battle won, as selectivity works its magic, the

battles lost fade from view—righteousness restored.

Where the pep rally—whether the one that gathers on Sunday morning in

the name of Christianity or the one that took place the night of bin Laden’s

murder—gains its strength is in the illusion of ideological cohesiveness based

around the affective truth, organized around the fundamentalist evasion of truth,

48 Chris Hedges War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), 61.

productively mobilizing instead patriotic or mythologized or religious truth that is

lacking in critical depth. The community therein then is fictional, based on a

mythical past and mythical righteousness that is produced by, and produces in its

participants, a powerful divide between history and memory. As Chomsky states,

“When enemies commit crimes, they’re crimes. In fact we can exaggerate and lie

about them with complete impunity. When we commit crimes, they didn’t

happen.”49 With this logic steering the socio-cultural paradigm, ‘Mission

Accomplished’ is meant to induce collective amnesia regarding the underpinnings

of said ‘accomplishment’, and ‘winning’—and therein the vanquishing of enemies

like bin Laden or the destruction of the Iraqi people—is paramount. Chomsky

continues by addressing the ways in which the violence of the Reagan

administration is rarely taken up:

Reagan’s regime was one of murder, brutality, and violence, which devastated a number of countries and probably left two hundred thousand people dead in Latin America, with hundreds of thousands of orphans and widows. But this can’t be mentioned here. It didn’t happen. [...] All of this didn’t happen and it doesn’t matter, because we did it. And that’s a sufficient reason for effacing it from history.50

Functioning with this type of selectivity, the pep rally garners its strength and

exerts its force. What the participants perceive to be a considerable victory in bin

Laden’s death, also works to erase American evils, and works to provide uplift to

counter military and social-economic turmoil, thereby forging community around

49 Noam Chomsky Imperial Ambition: Conversations on the Post 9/11 World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005), 93. 50 Ibid, 94.

the evasion of truth. It is not simply a victory over an evil enemy but in its

presumed righteousness it works to reify, and if need be (though never to be

admitted) restore, reinstate, reassert America’s righteousness. Laurie Fendrich, a

Professor in the Humanities at Hofstra University, contributes this to the

discussion surrounding the bin Laden death celebration:

On an emotional level, however, the moment is to be somberly savored. There’s deep satisfaction for Americans, in particular. We’re a bitterly squabbling people right now, which makes it hard to recall that in those first few days after the 9/11 attacks, Americans looked around at one another and said, ‘Those evil people were targeting all of us—they were after the whole lot of us, the way we love our freedom, and the way we freely live our lives.’51

Fendrich’s assessment then, is that Americans must rally around a violent

occasion in order to quiet the disagreements that regularly fracture community, or

perhaps more specifically, that fracture communities that disapprove of

disconcerting dialogue. Instead, a little winning togetherness is in order so that

Americans remember correctly, or rather recall nostalgically, the togetherness that

was emoted post 9/11 and forget the current squabbles in favour of the illusion of

a cohesive community solidified by military might. But importantly, what are the

‘bitterly squabbling people’ squabbling about? Perhaps recession, mortgages,

Wall Street crime, Health Care, social security, and a national debt of monumental

proportion brought about in large part by military endeavour. And this should be

Laurie Fendrich “Osama bin Laden: Dead” accessed May 21, 2011, http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm 2 May 2011. Emphasis added.

repressed, suppressed, and ignored as the nation rallies around the death of bin

Laden? Again I turn to Chomsky: “It was well understood, long before George

Orwell, that memory must be repressed. Not only memory but consciousness of

what’s happening right in front of you must be repressed, because if the public

comes to understand what’s being done in its name, it probably won’t permit it.

That’s the main reason for propaganda.”52 But here I only partially agree. The

public may have the ability to understand, may have the facts at hand, but facts

are no match for fundamentalist faith. Facts are no match for the pep rally. The

type of unchecked blind devotion and uncritical passion that the death celebration

brings to life worships the freedom to impose violence in the name of democracy

and to murder under the banner of freedom. It functions like its fundamentalist

Christian underpinnings worshipping the God of both rainbows and apocalypse as

morally absolute. As Chomsky stated, “even the most obvious and elementary

facts should provide us with a good deal to think about.”53 But fundamentalism is

fact all its own. And America’s predisposition for not only forgetting but for

accepting the holiness of its ironclad military hand has a long history that does not

simply succumb to authoritative propaganda, though it certainly does that, but it

participates wholeheartedly in the distortion of truth. Indeed, as Butler asserts,

52 Noam Chomsky Imperial Ambition: Conversations on the Post 9/11 World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005), 99. 53 Noam Chomsky “My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death.” World News Daily: Information Clearing House, accessed May 7, 2011, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28045.html. Emphasis added.

“[America is] a country that systematically idealizes its own capacity for

murder.”54 Professor Fendrich continues,

Turning to the Philosopher, we encounter the idea that anything that’s unfair goes against the law (e.g., Osama bin Laden’s terrorism), but at the same time, not everything that goes against the law (e.g., American Navy Seals flying into Pakistani territory and killing Bin Laden) is unfair. For those who insist on thinking about justice in terms more modern than Aristotle’s, there’s always Machiavelli, who famously observed, ‘If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.’ Americans who danced in the streets at the news of Bin Laden’s death while drinking beer and waving American flags generated images that, spreading around the Internet, will surely inspire bad people to do horrific things in the same way images of the Koran-burning Florida preacher Terry Jones at work inspired murder and mayhem. Yet their vulgarity and lack of judgment doesn’t alter whether killing Bin Laden was a just act or not.55

If turning to Machiavelli sans irony in order to make her point about fairness and

law and essentially righteousness is not enough, Fendrich is concerned about the

pep rally not for what it means for America but what it means to others, others

who may actually be extremist and mistake Americans’ ‘lack of judgement’ for

extremism and thus may be inclined to pull a little Machiavelli vengeance in turn.

Moreover, what she refers to as a ‘vulgar’ display ‘lacking judgement’ certainly

does not change whether killing bin Laden was just or otherwise, but it does work

to affirm its rightness profanity and all. And it works to simply disregard the

question. As Jerry Falwell, leader of the Moral Majority, rants lamenting—

vulgarly I would add—the growing communist ‘threat’ in the Eighties, “‘peaceful

54 Judith Butler Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2010), 46. 55 Laurie Fendrich “Was it Just to Kill Bin Laden?” accessed May 21, 2011, http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm 5 May 2011.

intentions’ are acts of stupidity [when] the lives of our citizens are at stake. [...An

American] political leader, as a minister of God, is a revenger [sic] to execute

wrath upon those who do evil.”56 Is this profane? Christ-like? The norm?

Falwell’s position is based in a militaristic Christianized Americanist

fundamentalist righteous destruction/unthinkable destructibility series of

dichotomies, and it is extremist. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur argues that “social

imagination is constitutive of social reality [...] both constructive and destructive”

and therein lies the ‘magic’ of the pep rally. It is the Holy American Spirit at

work in the imaginations, the ‘hearts and minds’, of the participants and

subsequently proselytized accordingly.57 The ideological expression at the pep

rally is reduced to its most fundamental fundamentalist elements—‘America Fuck

Yeah!’—and it distorts the individual’s or the group’s social situation whether or

not they are conscious of this distortion. It is a momentary illusory togetherness

centered around the evasion of truth, or fictitious pretences, that helps to solidify

American values—law, order, freedom, family, democracy—into dominant

Americanist discourse while celebrating an Exceptionalism that in actuality

betrays these values.

56 Jerry Falwell Listen America! (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1980), 97-98.57 Paul Ricoeur Lectures on Ideology and Utopia Ed. George H. Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 3. Original emphasis.

III. The American Dream...Antinomian Puritans...The Unholy Alliance

America’s militarized Exceptionalism pertaining to traditional American

values centers around the dogmatic nucleus of the American Dream, and whether

one is a winner or loser in the individualized paradigm of the Dream they can

bask in the affective blessed assurance of absolute collective Americanism in

patriotic celebrations. The pep rally, the Sunday church service, they suggest

collectiveness, they express collectiveness, wholeness. But at the core of

fundamentalist Americanism and fundamentalist Christian mentalities, and these

mentalities in convergence, is a highly individualized notion of earned equality

and a notion of salvation that finds meaning, truth, validation, in the division of

winners and losers, the saved and the damned. The American Dream is central to

contextualizing fundamentalist Americanism because the curious thing about the

American Dream is that while its commonly accepted logic is that it champions

egalitarian free opportunity for all, it is actually terribly divisive both in its

accepted ideal and in practise, a divisiveness that is quelled at the pep rally. When

this type of collective emotional outpouring takes place it works to bury the

inequalities of the participants while signalling the blood lust towards the Other,

to the threat to wholeness. The Dream is not supposed to be divisive in rhetoric; it

is rhetorically all inclusive. But much like the rhetoric of Christian salvation, the

major catch is that it is only there for a few, the elect, the chosen, the lucky, the

privileged, the capable, though unlike fundamentalist Christianity this catch is

largely hidden from view, from consciousness. The Dream suggests a level

playing field where opportunity exists for all who display true grit and

determination but its dogma polarizes successes and failures based upon the

signifier(s) of material gain. The fact that race, religion, luck, timing,

opportunity, connections, silver spoons, Vegas jackpots, etc, all have an effect on

the supposedly level playing field is not a part of the ideology of the Dream in its

dogmatised version. We are all American pure and simple, except for some, and

some more than others. This is especially evidenced in the way in which the rule

of law—one of America’s sacred traditional values that is nonetheless malleably

upheld in America as American Exceptionalism and the illusion of meritocracy

built into the dogma of the American Dream interfere. Law is frequently

treated—at least rhetorically—as a holy entity, the center of an ordered and

civilised American society. But as is evidenced with bin Laden’s murder, the

Bush administration’s aversion to law, and the long history of corrupt American

military action, the interventions of Exceptionalism and the meritocracy of the

American Dream allow the law to be clouded by prejudicial inequalities that, for

instance, see Lynndie England imprisoned for her part in the travesties of Abu

Ghraib while the president and his cronies authorize, indeed demand, the use of

torture in between their time off shooting golf and shooting each other on

vacations and hunting excursions.

Antinomian behaviour has long been treated vastly differently whether one

is near the floor or the crest of the American Dream, for the toeing line inside the

ideological confines of the Dream is not a straight one. In America, a millionaire

fundamentalist preacher (Ted Haggard) who spews hatred toward homosexuals

can be forgiven of his own gay extramarital affair and crystal meth indulgence

with a public apology and three weeks at queer reformation camp; an endless line

of congressmen manage to make their drunk-driving convictions disappear

because of bureaucratic positions; and a three-and-a-half minute ditty from a band

of four rich and well-known cocaine-and-drink-addicted adulterers can become

the President’s campaign song (“Don’t Stop,” Fleetwood Mac, and Bill Clinton

respectively). At the same time, the vast majority of gay couples are not legally

allowed to marry nor experience the fiscal securities therein due to the inequities

of freedom and the lingering effects of the inherent lag in changing discourse—

the ghosts of dogma that infect ‘traditional’ Americanism; while a factory worker

may lose his job because his license was revoked for being point-zero-three over

the legal limit; and a pot-smoking turtle-loving teen of lower-class income may

find himself doing time in the halls of juvenile justice on a possession-with-intent-

to-deal charge because he could not afford any other but the court appointed

lawyer, who despite making a decent buck, was a putz who graduated at the

bottom of his class. This is often the law at work in America.

In Rule of Law, Misrule of Men, Elaine Scarry addresses the ‘grocery list’

approach that the powers that be during the Bush administration utilized in terms

of adherence to law, picking and choosing that which best fit their agenda, the

same type of judgement Obama’s crew utilized in bin Laden’s murder, and in

protecting corrupt corporate leaders. Though the law is not a holy entity, and

often Scarry treats it as just that, she does aptly demonstrate the hypocrisy and the

troubling fallout that ensues when those in power, those who are in positions that

to some extent are meant to create and enforce laws, break them. But importantly,

what becomes apparent in Scarry’s text is a subtext that betrays her faith in the

potential purity of law, instead indicating the fundamental absurdities of war as

though adherence to law potentially civilises war, and the ironies of militarization

that indicate the misguidedness of an investment in the sacredness of law.

Ultimately Scarry’s hope is that with new leadership post-Bush the country might

“pivot back to its gravitational center in the rule of law.”58 But her faith in the

separation of the rule of men—“their beliefs, their preferences, their choices”—

and the rule of law—“where beliefs, preferences, and choices are constrained by

invariable and nonnegotiable prohibitions on cruelty and fraud”—borders on the

naive, demonstrating subtextually that America’s rule of law often is the misrule

of men.59 In the land of the American Dream where meritocracy is divvied out

according to perceived successes achieved upon a supposedly level playing field

where power and success are considered the natural outcomes of self-

determination, the rule of law is frequently unjust and morality is often

determined by hegemony. As former President Jimmy Carter asserts, “In general,

the powerful and influential in our society shape the laws and have great influence

on the legislature or the Congress. This creates a reluctance to change because the

58 Elaine Scarry Rule of Law, Misrule of Men (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2010), 113. 59 Ibid, 113.

powerful and influential have carved out for themselves or have inherited a

privileged position in society, of wealth or social prominence or higher education

or opportunity.”60 For example, George W. Bush was born with a silver spoon; he

is a rich kid who became accustomed to the illusion of meritocracy that is built

into the American Dream. Even worse, he asserts that he has the holy law of God

on his side. If ever there one who was wired for what Scarry deems ‘neo-

absolutism’ and what I argue is militarized Americanist fundamentalism (a not so

new absolutism), Bush was it. And the death of bin Laden is a component of his

War on Terror. Scarry writes, “[The] confidence in the power of the presidential

nominees to restore us to ourselves is not based above all on one attribute—not

charisma, not eloquence, not heroism, but another quality that they share: their

commitment to the rule of law.”61 But this is an elitist classist assumption and is

precisely what makes the notion of the purity of law and the priority given to

policing and militarization precarious and dangerous in terms of American policy.

The American Dream creates an ‘us’ and ‘them’ dichotomy domestically while

American Exceptionalism separates America from, well, everybody else. And

where the pep rally is so affective, where fundamentalist Americanism can be so

effective, is in temporarily neutralizing the disparity and difference sustained by

the ideological function of the American Dream in the celebration of (lawless)

60 Jimmy Carter “A Message on Justice,” accessed July 13, 2011, http://www.jimmycarterlibrary.gov/documents/law.pdf. 61 Elaine Scarry, Rule of Law, Misrule of Men (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2010), 111.

Exceptionalism. Yet in the affective bubble of fundamental Americanism, as in

the paradigm of certainty in Christian fundamentalism, the underpinning

actualities demonstrate their dogma to be fractured, untrue.

In order to properly contextualize the American Dream, and the

convoluted paradoxical mélange of economics and Christianity contained within

its dogma, and the militarized realities that are the outcome of its hallowed status

in American discourse, it is imperative that I briefly examine America’s Puritan

roots. For though the term ‘the American Dream’ was not properly coined until

James Truslow Adams’ The Epic of America published in 1931, like the nation

itself, the Puritans gave the Dream its birth. The mythic truth of the American

Dream is that the presumption of virtue accompanies those who successfully

acquire material gain, and perhaps to a lesser degree, that a person who achieves

financial success in the free market is a ‘real’ American. This truth descends from

the Puritan Protestant work ethic that “enshrined industriousness and thrift as high

virtues, and the acquisition of wealth through earnest labor was taken for a sign of

indwelling grace.”62 (However, when acquisition of wealth is a sign of God’s

favour, thrift may take a backseat except perhaps when it comes to charity and

taxes.) Wealth as a sign of God’s favour has a rich biblical foundation. When

Job toughs out God’s little wager with the devil he is rewarded with twice what he

had before (though this also weirdly includes children as though it goes without

62 Richard Klugar Seizing Destiny: How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 16.

saying that doubling their quantity makes up for smiting the originals). As well,

Abraham’s faith is rewarded with material prosperity. And Deuteronomy 8:17-18

simply states that it is the Lord that provides the power to acquire wealth.63 But

wealth as a sign of God’s grace is linked too to selective signifiers of proper faith.

Consider, for instance, a significant monkey wrench in the Puritan belief system:

the doctrine of Predestination. Predestination, or ‘election’, is the notion that God

has prior to one’s birth preselected the souls bound for heaven and those

condemned to hell. As such, human nature has been corrupted since The Fall and

surrendering to the proper will of God is humanity’s only salvation. John Stuart

Mill criticizes this view of Puritan Christianity that human nature is radically

corrupt, for inevitably, according to Puritan dogma, “there is no redemption of

any one until human nature is killed from within. [...M]an needs no capacity, but

that of surrendering himself to the will of God: and if he uses any of his faculties

for any other purpose but to do that supposed will more effectually, he is better

without them.”64 This is anti-intellectualism in action, and though the Puritans

prided themselves on their intellectual prowess in deciphering proper biblical

theology, it was imperative that Truth was manifest in signs and wonders because

according to the Puritan doctrine of Predestination, eternity is destined, one way

or the other, and therefore the security of salvation becomes assessed and

63 Jacques Berlinerblau, Thumpin’ It: The Use and Abuse of the Bible in Today’s Presidential Politics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 22.64 John Stuart Mill On Liberty and Other Essays. (Oxford: Oxford university Press, 1991), 69.

determined from without. That is to say that the appearance of being saved—

meaning the apparent outward manifestation of salvation found in the actions of

the individual and the community working in concert with inner conviction—is

the most accurate calculator of whether one is indeed ‘chosen’ and will be

eternally marching in the Lord’s celestial army or not. But the Puritans read their

signs like fundamentalist Americans read their history—selectively.

Chris hedges accurately notes, “The United States of Andrew Jackson or

George Washington is not the United States of Frederick Douglass or Sitting Bull.

But we present our history from the perspective of the winners, from those in

power.”65 He cites the legacy of the Puritan ethos in dominant Americanist

discourse, that they were anointed by God to control and subjugate the New

World and therein he cites Cotton Mather’s pious assessment regarding the

murder of Pequot Indians: “‘it was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls

were brought down to hell that day.’”66 To understand the native’s version of this

history, of course, would be a self-reflexive look into America’s own savagery.

And of course the rallying around bin Laden’s death works also to dehistoricize

this event in America’s history and decontextualize it by stamping a superficial

version of events into collective memory wherein his death is simply a victory of

an enlightened society over a barbaric evil. Moreover, Jacoby asks, “What is the

65 Chris Hedges When Atheism becomes Religion: America’s New Fundamentalists (New York: Free Press, 2008), 109. 66 Ibid, 110.

war in Iraq, if not a foolishly optimistic effort to bring ‘enlightened’ democracy to

a nation of darkness?”67 Though rather than ‘foolishly optimistic effort’, I would

rephrase with ‘supposedly moral imposition’ or ‘apocalyptic utopian civilising

mission’, or ‘divinely inspired annihilation built on revenge and uncertainty’, for

this was not a secular intervention; this imposition of ‘enlightenment’ had plenty

to do with religion. Bush demonstrated just how central Christianized logic is to

Americanism. He demonstrated not only how well Christianized language works

to rally the troops, so to speak, but how integral Christianized logic is to the norm

in America. Bush’s rhetoric was laden with the language of a holy America

versus barbaric Others, and much of the reaction to bin Laden’s death is laden

with these notions as well. Brown refers to this type of posturing as a symptom of

the “culturalization of politics:”

the assumption [is] that ‘every culture has a tangible essence that defines it and then explains politics as a consequence of that essence.’ This reduction of political motivations and causes to essentialized culture [...] is mobilized to explain everything from Palestinian suicide bombers to Osama bin Laden’s world designs [...] and the failure of democracy to take hold in the immediate aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. It is what George W. Bush draws on when he insists that a gruesome event in the Middle East ‘reminds us of the nature of our enemy.’”68

Of course when the photos of Abu Ghraib went public, the problem was certainly

not framed by the administration as pertaining to American unrighteousness, or as

a problem of the radical nature America’s militarized logic, or of barbarism and

67 Susan Jacoby The Age of America Unreason (New York: Vintage Books, 2009), 193. 68 Wendy Brown Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 20. Original emphasis.

torture, but of a few bad apples acting unprofessionally. And importantly, the

photos were not framed as indicative of the treatment of prisoners but rather an

exception, an unfortunate anomaly of un-American activity. These are the

selective workings of fundamentalist blinders that disallow active questioning and

champion inner conviction. The following is former preacher and current

Republican Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee’s response to bin Laden’s

death and the subsequent celebrations:

It is unusual to celebrate a death, but today Americans and decent people the world over cheer the news that madman, murderer and terrorist Osama Bin Laden is dead. The leader of Al Qaeda— responsible for the deaths of 3000 innocent citizens on September 11, 2001, and whose maniacal hate is responsible for the deaths of thousands of US servicemen and women was killed by U.S. military. […] It has taken a long time for this monster to be brought to justice. Welcome to hell, bin Laden. Let us all hope that his demise will serve notice to Islamic radicals the world over that the United States will be relentless in tracking down and terminating those who would inflict terror, mayhem and death on any of our citizens.69

‘Americans and decent people the world over’—it goes without saying that

Americans are decent of course, the ‘proper’ ones anyway, the ones celebrating.

Yet, as Huckabee piously links all Islamic radicals to the hell that he welcomes

bin Laden to (and certainly one can be radical in their faith without carrying out

violence), the radical Christians that made-up the founding Puritan contingent

who savagely murdered plenty of natives that got in their Christian way are

widely considered America’s heroes who produced the traditional values that

69 Mike Huckabee “Statement on Bin Laden Death,” Mike Huckabee: Life, Liberty, Pursuit of Happiness, accessed on July 7, 2011, http://www.mikehuckabee.com/mike-huckabee-news?ContentRecord_id=85d5c187-71d8-4da2-b695-b870c98ddbe2

have made Americans ‘decent’ people. The Puritan’s inner conviction and

outward obedience is there in Huckabee’s response, in welcoming bin Laden to

hell, and in predicting America’s future ‘terminating’ military conquests. The

stringent binaries of ‘with us’ or ‘against us’ are implied while redemption is

found in submission to proper and decent authority. It is precisely this type of

religiously inflected stringent rhetoric—resembling Cotton Mather’s

aforementioned Puritanical assertion—that fuels patriotic fundamentalism. And

as Brown asserts, there is a “resolute, even patriotic refusal [in America] to think

or desire for others to think, let alone think differently;” thus the nationwide-ness

of the pep rally.70 A similar conformity shaped the Puritan community as well.

The signs of God’s indwelling grace were necessary both for the individual and

the proper theology of the community especially given that the Puritan exodus

involved breaking from the authority of dominant religious discourse in England,

thereby embracing antinomian activity. Thus the Puritan brand of fundamentalist

Christianity that led them to confidently and determinately depart from former

lands would prove a powerfully anxious theological site of individualism and

conformism, a paradoxical basis of identity affirmation confused by notions of

salvation earned through good works and purity of faith, and contrarily, the

predestination of God’s good will, thereby—again paradoxically—nullifying

meritocracy.

70 Wendy Brown American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservativism, and De-Democratization (Political Theory, Vol. 34, No. 6 Dec., 2006), 709.

Seeking out manifestation of God’s favour became a highly selective and

subjective practise, although the Puritans engaged in it as though fixed evidence

was frequently apparent. This is evidenced by Anne Hutchinson’s tragic tale and

the witch-hunt’s unfortunate occurrences—the anxious dismissal of those who

thought differently. But even earlier, while the Mayflower was still in transit, it

was presumed that the mighty Puritan God had made his presence clearly

manifest in the vanquishing of evil. When a crude and unsavoury element of the

Mayflower’s crew was met with a supposedly proper theocratic execution,

supposedly executed according to the perfect theodicy of the almighty himself,

Bradford praised the faultless justice of his God:

There was a proud and very profane young man, one of the seamen [...] he would always be condemning the poor people in their sicknesses, and cursing them daily with grievous execrations [...] he would curse and swear most bitterly. But it pleased God [...] to smite this young man with a grievous disease, of which he died in a desperate manner. Thus his curses lighted his own head; and it was an astonishment to all his fellows, for they noted it to be the just hand of God upon him.71

Bradford gives frequent examples in Of Plymouth Plantation of the supposedly

ever-clear signs of God’s favour. For example: “Being thus arrived in a good

harbour and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God

of heaven, who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered

them from all of the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm

71 William Bradford. “Of Plymouth Plantation.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol. A, 7th edition. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), 114.

and stable earth, their proper element.”72 But here is where selectivity is

paramount: when Bradford speaks of standing “half amazed at [his] poor people’s

present condition” shortly after Plymouth landing, he does not indicate giving a

moment’s pause as to whether anything negative—like the “sad and lamentable”

deaths of “half of their company [...] infected with scurvy and other diseases”

whilst “scarce fifty remained”—may have been inflicted by his God for a possibly

particular violation of theological decree of which the good Pilgrims may have

stumbled across the wrong side of the line.73 The Puritans read their signs like

they read their Bible, as though empirically solid, and dismissed what could

possibly be negative signifiers as circumstance where sheer determination was

required.

Likewise, while the economy crumbles and thousands of Americans make

the ‘ultimate sacrifice’ in foreign wars started under self-righteous pretences, the

death of an enemy like bin Laden becomes the temporary trump card of righteous

signifiers, a balm for the many American casualties involved. And as the

American Dream’s neoliberal arteries create a more disparate socio-cultural

landscape the nation’s military victories are an ultimate source of patriotic pride.

Moreover, when reading signifiers of economic success within the Dream

paradigm, and tying this success to virtuous determination, and even, as the

Puritans did, to divine favour, the actual underpinnings of success may be

72 Ibid, 115 73 Ibid, 115, 121-122.

purposefully overlooked. Furthermore, a certain portion of the population may be

capable of maintaining a hegemonic hold on virtue and therein the ‘guidelines’ to

what is considered virtuous. As the current neoliberal juggernaut holds sway

over economic policy, political writer Matt Taibbi laments the uneven arm of the

law wherein “[f]inancial crooks brought down the world’s economy – but the feds

are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them,” citing the fact that only

Bernie Madoff, “a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims

happened to be other rich and famous people” has gone to jail for his financial

crimes.74 Taibbi argues that as the leaders of mighty and corrupt corporations

manage to hold on to their millions while the less fortunate are becoming destitute

and stranded in the socio-economic paradigm, “[t]hey’re attacking the very

definition of property – which, after all, depends in part on a legal system that

defends everyone’s claim of ownership equally. When that definition becomes

tenuous or conditional – when the state simply gives up on the notion of justice –

this whole American Dream thing recedes further from reality.”75 But the illusion

of meritocracy is built into ‘this whole American Dream thing’ as the misrule of

law demonstrates and the religious inflection of the Dream helps secure. Max

Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism (1905) writes,

religious allegiance is not a cause [though it certainly can be as I argue shortly] but to a certain degree a consequence of economic phenomena. Having a share in [certain] economic functions presupposes either

74 Matt Taibbi, “Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?” Rolling Stone, March 3, 2011, 44. 75 Ibid, 51.

ownership of capital or an expensive education, and usually both, and is thus linked to the ownership of inherited wealth or at least to a certain level of prosperity. A large number of the wealthiest regions of the [American] empire, which were favoured by geography or natural resources and most economically developed, and in particular the majority of the wealthy cities, embraced Protestantism in the sixteenth century; and even today Protestants are still feeling the benefit in the economic struggle for existence.76

Weber’s point here is important; we must recognize not only the underpinnings of

wealth and religion and the two in convergence, but we must question the realities

of these underpinnings. What does it mean if the political right purports to hold

the patent on proper patriotism? Or if wealthy neoliberals and Christian

fundamentalists can hold the monopoly on virtue? Or if American values and

subsequently American military action are upheld as sacrosanct and events like

bin Laden’s death are reworked and ‘anti-intellectualized’ into righteous symbols?

The Puritans arrival as the Lord’s Chosen People, and the subsequent

proliferation of their ideals provides the groundwork for Americanist anti-

intellectualism and many of the mythical and/or religious ideological aspects

therein. Hofstadter writes, “The American mind was shaped in the mold of early

modern Protestantism. Religion was the first arena for American intellectual life,

and thus the first arena for an anti-intellectual impulse. Anything that seriously

diminished the role of rationality and learning in early American religion would

76 Max Weber The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and other writings (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 1-2. Original emphasis.

later diminish its role in secular culture.”77 Of course, I argue that secular culture

in America is still highly Christianized. And as Hofstadter points out, “It is to

certain peculiarities of American religious life—above all its lack of firm

institutional establishments hospitable to intellectuals and to the competitive

sectarianism of its evangelical denominations—that American anti-intellectualism

owes much of its strength and pervasiveness.”78 And, as such, the suggested

indwelling grace and individual merit signified by material gain that is a legacy of

the Puritan founders is what the American Dream has come to encompass despite

the intentions of James Truslow Adams who coined the term in The Epic of

America. He writes, “We cannot become a great democracy by giving ourselves

up as individuals to selfishness, physical comfort, and cheap amusements. The

very foundation of the American dream of a better and richer life for all is that all,

in varying degrees, shall be capable of wanting to share in it.”79 In other words it

is not about climbing to the highest rung but about providing a firm foundation

and ladders for all. He continues, “It can never be wrought into a reality by cheap

people or by ‘keeping up with the Joneses.’ There is nothing whatever in a

fortune merely in itself or in a man merely in himself. […] If we are to make the

dream come true we must all work together, no longer to build bigger, but to build

77 Richard Hofstadter Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 55. 78 Ibid, 56. 79 James Truslow Adams The Epic of America (New York: Garden City Books, dateless), 323.

better.”80 Of course he did include “Lincoln was not a great man because he was

born in a log cabin, but because he got out of it,” and this is what we are left with

as a guiding ideological grounding.81 Selective adherence is a bitch. Yet, fighting

one’s way from a log cabin to greatness does not always travel an altruistic path,

but Dream believers champion the ends. According to the bare (non)essentials of

Adams text and the Puritan legacy that make up the ideology of the Dream, once

one finds their way to the top, altruism is thrust upon them. But why this myth is

so central to fundamentalist Americanism, as I argue that it is, is in part because

of its rhetorical reification and in part because of the affective-ness of fairytales

coming to life acting as the signifiers of its worth, but it is also central to

Americanism because of the gauntlet that is thrown down. Material gain is

reduced to a matter of character, and as such it makes identity something to be

lived up to or failed at according to a strict code, not of behavior per se, but of the

signifiers attached to behavior. If the ‘real’ Americans are the rich Americans,

then to be a proper American one needs to live up to this ideal of the Dream. John

Steinbeck states, “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see

themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed

millionaires.”82 Of course the short cut to the Dream then for all of the

80 Ibid, 323. 81 Ibid, 323.

82John Steinbeck, accessed June 27, 2011, http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/328134.

temporarily embarrassed is to bask in the nation’s Exceptionalist victories as all

can do at the pep rally, a temporary forum of nationalistic affective egalitarianism

performed by proper patriotism.

In America, Sartre states, there exists “the myth of liberty [...and] perhaps

nowhere else will you find such a discrepancy between people and myth, between

life and the representation of life.83 This gulf is due, at least in part, to the

prominence of the American Dream. Jennifer Hochschild, a scholar of Dream

ideology and all of its glorious incongruities, argues that it has been, “for decades

if not centuries, a central ideology of Americans.”84 She writes,

Implicit in the flows of oratory and survey responses is [the tenet] of the American Dream that the pursuit of success warrants so much fervour because it is associated with virtue. ‘Associated with’ means at least four things: virtue leads to success, success makes a person virtuous, success indicates virtue, or apparent success is not real success unless one is virtuous.85

However, the latter qualifier of success barely registers—indeed, it need not

apply, especially not in a neoliberal socio-economic paradigm. Hochschild insists

that the psychology of Dream ideology differs from strict logic: “Failure is made

more harsh by [...] the belief that success results from actions and traits under

one’s own control.”86 And importantly, she exposes the actuality of the glaring

83 Jean-Paul Sartre Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Americans and Their Myths.” The Nation, 1865-1990: Selections from the Independent Magazine of Politics and Culture. (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1990), 178. 84 Jennifer L. Hochschild Facing up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 23. 85 Ibid, 23. 86 Ibid, xi.

holes in what she admits to being the otherwise brilliantly constructed ideology of

the American Dream: “the hollowness of materialism, the degradation of

community, the hypocrisy of claims to equal opportunity, the selfishness of the

lucky.”87 Moreover, when the ideals of the Dream are not only sprung from

fundamentalist Christian roots but purposefully forcefully rhetorically linked to

fundamentalist Christian principles, they garner a metaphysical link to a perverse

version of freedom. Eric Foner writes,

Christian conservatives [...] fully embraced the free market economics of libertarian conservatives. The reverend Jerry Falwell, founder of the self-styled Moral Majority, proclaimed that ‘the Word of God in both Old and New Testaments’ offered a justification for ‘capitalism and free enterprise.’ But the Christian right’s definition of freedom owed far more to the idea that genuine freedom meant living a moral life—voluntarily if possible, but if necessary as a result of coercion.88

Right-wing fundamentalist televangelist Pat Robertson, famous for blaming

homosexuals and other supposed ‘deviants’ for America’s troubles, including the

9/11 attacks, declares, “free enterprise is the economic system most nearly

meeting humanity’s God-given need for freedom....Capitalism satisfies the

freedom-loving side of humanity.”89 Robertson’s view insinuates that, at least to

an extent, capitalism encapsulates freedom as both a Christian and American

ideal. This is the patriotism and freedom of the neoconservative and neoliberal

87 Ibid, xii.88 Eric Foner The Story of American Freedom (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998), 317-318. 89 Qtd. in Adam Geyer Ideology in America: Challenges to Faith (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 45.

alliance: a hyper-realized version of the American Dream in cutthroat free market

fundamentalism, and a tenuously and selective biblically based morality policing

that incorporates the logic of militarization both in its capitalism and in its defence

of American values. Alan Geyer states, “The rank and file of the Religious Right

have been particularly susceptible to the economic buccaneers’ pretence that the

conservative [agenda] is more about culture—faith, flag, family, sex—than about

economy: a highly pious distraction.”90 But this ideological leap that Geyer is

suggesting need not rely on susceptibility to pretence. Rather selectivity,

purposeful ignorance, self-obliviousness, and overt hypocrisy—all proper

Puritanical propositions—are all culpable characteristics of the neoconservative-

neoliberal alliance. Satirist Bill Maher comments, “I’m astounded that the

Republicans can hold themselves out as the patriotic party. Somehow patriotism

has gotten redefined as selfishness: never letting anybody take anything from

you—especially the government—and never helping anybody.”91 But this is how

freedom has frequently been defined within the Dream paradigm and accelerated

within neoliberal logic. Moreover, this freedom has mutated into a fundamental

condition of fundamentalist Americanism. As Brown writes,

Neoconservatism [valorizes] power and statism, and when those energies are combined with the moralism and the market ethos, and when a public is molded by the combination of these energies and rationalities, a fiercely anti-democratic political culture results. This is a culture disinclined to

90 Ibid, 46. 91 Qtd. in “Bill Maher on Palin, Pot, and Patriotism: An extended interview with America’s angriest satirist,” Rolling Stone (Issue 1129. 28 April, 2011), 82.

restrain either statism or corporate power, and above all one that literally comes to resent and even attack the classic principles and requirements of constitutional democracy.92

In other words, this culture may find its salvation in championing fundamentalist

American values (perhaps even at a pep rally) that are decidedly anti-democratic

or that drastically limit freedom. This works because various discourses are

upholding one another in absolutist manners but the reality is that they are

strengthened by their malleable, selective, intertextual application.

The political right’s success in co-opting proper patriotism includes the

paradoxical and perverse vision of freedom and equality that comprises the

ideologies of the neoliberal-neoconservative alliance. As the 1970s moved into

the 1980s, the Republican Party had formed an alliance with the Christian right

garnering “a solid electoral base” in order to “colonize power effectively.”93

“This political base” David Harvey writes, “could be mobilized through the

positives of religion and cultural nationalism and negatively through coded, if not

blatant, racism, homophobia, and antifeminism. The problem was not capitalism

and the neoliberalization of culture but the ‘liberals’ who had used excessive state

power to provide for special groups (blacks, women, environmentalists, etc.)”

thereby attacking the sanctity of the supposed level playing field of Dream

92 Wendy Brown American Nightmare: Neoliberalsm, Neoconservativism, and De-Democratization (Political Theory, Vol. 34, No. 6 Dec., 2006), 710. 93 David Harvey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: University Press, 2005), 49.

dogma.94 And another common characteristic of Christianity and traditional

American values is the rhetoric that they are perpetually under attack. It is there

in Haley’s blog, in Huckabee’s response, and in Fendrich’s Machiavellian

triumph—the crisis that underscores the illusion of stability and the wholeness of

fundamentalism. Muslim countries hate ‘our freedom’, homosexuals, socialists,

Muslims, liberals, hate America. Even casting a vote in America, democracy

enacted, is ridiculed as an anti-American activity or anti-Christian activity if not

approved by patriotic correctness. As David Domke writes, this creates “a

hostility towards—rather than merely disagreement with—those who are

perceived to represent impurity or evil.”95 The rhetoric of perpetual attack is a

function of a precariousness that is indeed simply a characteristic life, but a

characteristic that is minimalized when the Other’s precarity is maximized. Thus

this perpetual state of crisis provides the inclination to be hyper-vigilant, firm in

conviction to one’s version of truth. Therein lies the stubborn non-self-

reflexiveness of American military policy and the faith in the virtue of the Dream.

And of course neither American military policy nor the neoliberal-

neoconservative alliance that Harvey is describing are ideologically coherent in

action and rhetoric but nonetheless tend toward fundamentalist rhetoric with

which to defend its supposed truths. Harvey continues,

94 Ibid, 50.95 David Domke God Willing?: Political Fundamentalism in the White House, the ‘War on Terror,’ and the Echoing Press (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 32.

The effect [of the neoliberal-neoconservative Republican alliance] was to divert attention from capitalism and corporate power as in any way having anything to do with either the economic or the cultural problems that unbridled commercialism and individualism were creating. From then on the unholy alliance between big business and conservative Christians backed by the neoconservatives steadily consolidated, eventually eradicating all liberal elements (significant and influential in the 1960s) from the Republican Party, particularly after 1990, and turning it into the relatively homogeneous right-wing electoral force of present times.96

Slightly different than what the aforementioned Weber citation describes, but

holding to his stated importance in the recognition of the underpinnings of

hegemony, here religious allegiance—both paradoxical and fundamentalist—is

both a cause and consequence of economic phenomena. The neoliberal-

neoconservative alliance demonstrates not only how the underpinnings of

financial success may operate and thus sustain themselves, but too how certain

values are made common sense by hegemony even as those values are

paradoxically enacted. Brown argues,

Apart from egalitarianism, civil liberties, fair elections, and the rule of law also lose their standing at the conjuncture of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, becoming instruments or symbols rather than treasures, indeed becoming wholly desacrilized even as they are rhetorically wielded as beacons of democracy. Neoliberalism doesn’t require them, and the neoconservative priority of moral values and state power trumps them.97

Indeed, fundamentalist mentalities require symbols and selectively adhered to

signifiers for they are the built in blind spots of the objective rules of dogma. In

the American Dream paradigm, wealth, power, and prominence frequently stand

96 David Harvey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: University Press, 2005), 50. 97 Wendy Brown American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservativism, and De-Democratization (Political Theory, Vol. 34, No. 6 Dec., 2006), 701-702.

in for moral authority, while military might is Exceptionalism’s authoritarianism,

its symbolic rightness. Brown continues, “the moralism, statism, and

authoritarianism of neoconservatism are profoundly enabled by neoliberal

rationality, even as neoconservatism aims to limit and supplement some of

neoliberalism’s effects, and even as the two rationalities are not concordant.”98

The neoconservative-neoliberal alliance operates under the guise of altruistic

Christian (though certainly not all neoconservative are Christians, their influence

is pervasive) and American values and the supposed advancement of individual

freedom therein. Yet, in this alliance, freedom is a rallying cry with broad

connotations but very specific and strict, albeit hypocritical, limitations. As

Harvey argues, “The word ‘freedom’ resonates so widely within the common-

sense understanding of Americans that it becomes ‘a button that elites can press to

open the door to the masses’ to justify almost anything.”99 The word ‘freedom’

can also justify limiting freedom, for example the privatisation of social securities

that neoliberalism is responsible for, reducing freedom for many to mere survival.

But the prominence of the American Dream as a function of freedom in the

psyche of the nation is so great that its dark underbelly is seldom brought into

question. Instead its divisiveness can be neutralized by nationalistic victories and

collective myth-making.

98 Ibid, 702. 99 David Harvey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: University Press, 2005), 39.

That the neoconservatives have a statist bent—albeit predominantly in

terms of morality policing rather than, for instance, economic regulation—while

the stance of the neoliberal-neoconservative alliance anti-statist, preferring free

market leadership (which interestingly allows corporate interest to have a heavy

hand in political policy that in turn quite resembles statism), is but one of the

peculiarities of this alliance. The neoliberal-neoconservative alliance fancies

itself one of rationality rather than extremism regarding the market as “rationality

in all its purity.”100 Yet in fundamentalist fashion both neoconservatives and

neoliberals bow to an almighty authority that, as Harvey suggests, causes

“[g]overnance by majority rule [to be] seen as a potential threat to individual

rights and constitutional liberties.”101 He continues, “The neoliberal presumption

of perfect information and a level playing field for competition appears as either

innocently utopian or a deliberate obfuscation of processes that will lead to the

concentration of wealth and, therefore, the restoration of class power.”102 The

neoconservative Christian interests are served by accumulating the wealth and

resources that can impose the Christianization of American daily life, thereby

creating a paradoxical socio-cultural paradigm of intense and uneven state

intervention in terms of morality policing whilst the neoliberal agenda is one the

lets the pure rationality of the market act as their divine authority. In either case

100 Theo Goldberg Militarizing Markets, (no publishing information), 6. 101 David Harvey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: University Press, 2005), 50.Harvey 66 102 Ibid, 68.

they use authoritative intervention to discipline—God’s and the market’s. David

Goldberg argues, “There is no inherent rationality, let alone rational efficiency, at

work or achievable in markets. To assume otherwise is to ignore the central place

of people with all their whims, desires, fears, excitements, greed, and concerns in

market relations and conduct.”103 Indeed, to treat the market as such is akin to

fundamentalist Christians taking the whims desires, fears, excitements, and greed

of humankind out of the ink of the holy scriptures in terms of authorial authority.

Moreover, when both the market and the Bible are marked by militarized logic,

muscular Christianity and muscular Americanism manifest in part in military

victory plays an important part in the acquiescence of the citizenry. And as

Goldberg argues, “[b]oth military organizations and [...] markets have come in

their own ways to embody this [militarized] logic marked, in short, with

regulatory and disciplinary power.”104 The interests of right-wing Christians are

not only being fused with the logic of the free market, but the logic of the free

market is fused with the apocalyptic militarism that guides fundamentalist

Christianity and fundamentalist Americanism. Goldberg writes, “To speak of

militarizing markets, then, is not to take the force of the military on markets

literally. Rather, it is to consider how the logics of militarization—its order(ing)

of things, the modes of organization, the hierarchy of relations and social

conditions, its ways of thinking and doing, adoption and imposition, demand and

103 Theo Goldberg Militarizing Markets , 6. 104 Ibid, 6. Original emphasis.

command—are fused with military structure, truth, temporality.”105 The effect on

the American citizenry then, may be understandably that of acquiescence of the

disadvantaged to the militant elite, as we have seen both in the War on Terror and

in the bin Laden death rally celebrations. It serves both neoliberal and

neoconservative Christian interests that the pep rally takes place, that American

values are given little room for nuance yet championed while being acted upon in

a state of paradox, and that freedom be understood as a capitalist virtue whilst

family values and faith reign down their terror on freedom. Brown writes, “If

[religious and anti-democratic submission] is what Americans face today, it is not

only because the current president links state purposes with God’s purposes

[which I argue is a longstanding Presidential conviction and rhetorical tool] but

also because the exercise of executive power rests on a pacified and neutered

citizenry in which a combination of religious and neoliberal discourses have

supplanted liberal democratic ones.”106 Self-delusion is imperative in order to

uphold the Dream’s illusion of merit and the ideal of Exceptionalism, and it is a

function of privilege, or a self-imposed ‘earned right’ of privilege, so to speak, to

be self-oblivious of one’s own privilege.107

105 Ibid, 6. 106 Wendy Brown American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservativism, and De-Democratization (Political Theory, Vol. 34, No. 6 Dec., 2006), 709. 107 Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege and Male Privilege,” Privilege: A Reader Ed. Michael S. Kimmel and Abby L. Ferber Cambrige: Westview Press, 2003).

Of course, self-delusion can also be an adopted strategy of those who are

failures in the Dream paradigm, those Brown describes as a ‘neutered’ citizenry

who buy into the convolution of Americanist fundamentalism(s) in order to be a

part of the greater whole exemplified in the pep rally, or who put such stock and

religious fervour into misconceptions and misappropriations of ‘freedom’ that it is

theirs’ and their country’s undoing. Specifically then, the anti-intellectualism, the

non-questioning, the acquiescence prompted by fundamentalism neuters the

citizenry. In a nation with such a long history of fundamentalism, a neoliberal

and neoconservative alliance, despite all the overwhelming contradictions therein,

not only works but is a brilliant convolution of antiquated militaristic power.

Brown writes,

This strand of state power exploits and borrows from a religious structure of authority for its own, makes use of religious anti-pathy to democracy for its own, and this among other things to launch an imperial endeavour that, through the use of civilizational discourse, identifies the state with the West and Christianity against what are figured as stateless fundamentalist barbarians. In this way, the populism of evangelical Christianity can be mobilized for state authority and power, thus converting it to right-wing political populism. However, this would not be possible if not for the weakening of liberal democratic institutions and democratic culture already achieved by neoliberal rationality.108

I disagree, however, with Brown regarding her last point. Surely a neoliberal

rationality accelerates or enhances the realities she is speaking to but Christianity

mobilized for state power is a trait of Americanism, a staple, a legacy. Citing

108 Wendy Brown American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservativism, and De-Democratization (Political Theory, Vol. 34, No. 6 Dec., 2006), 703.

specific rhetoric of politicians past and present, left and right, Berlinerblau asserts,

“In American politics it is not unhelpful to assert that one’s policies have biblical

sanction. [...L]et it be stressed that biblical proof-text warfare has been part of

American culture for centuries.”109 The linking of Christianity to political power

is a strategy of nostalgia even. Moreover, nostalgia is a characteristic of the

neoliberal-neoconservative alliance. In its perverse vision of progress it uses the

rhetoric of returning to traditional American values, of pursuing an idyllic past.

Somehow in this mythic past there is always more that was right about

Americanism, and the pursuit of the return, the happy ending where it is all nicely

summed up, is a pursuit that inevitably finds fewer and fewer people who belong

there at the end—utopia and apocalypse. Turning then to a drastically different

account of the bin Laden death announcement than our blogger Haley’s, the

following is from Laurie Essig, Professor of Sociology at Columbia and it

articulates as it parts with America’s nostalgic bent, its anti-intellectual

compulsion for fairytales.

I wasn’t feeling catharsis. I was feeling shocked that even a left-wing maven was telling us nice little fairytales in which bin Laden’s death is the happy ending. There is a romance of death that has been playing out in the U.S. media and even on the streets as people gathered to express their relief. It struck me as sickeningly similar to what I’d seen at the royal wedding: an ideology of romance glossing over power and its discontents. Except instead of fetishizing the wedding dress we made a totem of the corpse. In other words, romance is an ideology that promises us happy endings if only we perform the right rituals with the right magic. Sadly,

109 Jacques Berlinerblau Thumpin’ It: The Use and Abuse of the Bible in Today’s Presidential Politics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 20, 23.

the terribly romantic tale of a SEAL killing bin Laden cannot help the US ride off into the sunset anymore than a perfect wedding can ensure a lifetime of happiness.110

Fundamentalist Americanist logic is rife with fairytale and myth. Fairytales come

true are the proof of the merit of the American Dream. And fairytales mark the

Puritan Exodus and the subsequent frontier narrative that helped solidify the

militarized logic of Americanism into discourse.

110 Laurie Essig “The Romance of Death” accessed May 21, 2011, http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm 7 May 2011.

IV. Mythical History...Essentialist Americanism...The Backward Gaze

Faith in the American Dream, faith in the significance of military

conquest, faith in a righteous past, the holiness of the Constitution, and the holy

apostolic founding fathers, provides to faithful Americans the illusion, the

aesthetic, the rituals, the magic of stability whilst, as stated earlier, paradoxically

also propagating a state of perpetual crisis. The result is a mythical universe with

an apocalyptic underbelly situated at the forefront of the psyche of the nation

infiltrating various dominant discourses with the logic of militarization. Just as

the Puritan exodus is central to this mythical universe of good and evil so too is

the subsequent frontier myth of Manifest Destiny wherein heroic Americans battle

the harshness of nature and brutal savage Others in order to claim what is

rightfully theirs, the fruition of God’s ordinance. And this mix of Manichean and

theocratic discourses still functions prominently in Americanist discourse. Leroy

G. Dorsey describes the importance of Theodore Roosevelt’s writings in

(re)solidifying the frontier myth into America’s mythical worldview,

demonstrating how this worldview is central to Americanist discourse, although

what he terms ‘audiences’ here could aptly be called ‘participants’:

The description of a mythical universe—the scene in which the hero must struggle—provides an emotional link for audiences to enter the narrative. [...The] audience’s interest in unknown regions comes from its psychological need to project its own unconscious feelings of violence and delight. The mythical universe, then, reflects the audience’s psyche; it exists as a site wherein both aggression and amusement can be

experienced, and where those experiences can potentially transform men and women into heroic legends or abject cowards.111

This worldview is survival of the fittest with implied divine consequence. It

works to legitimate American fundamentalism. The frontier myth indicates that

“the violence and chaos of the frontier demanded martial strength to conquer it

and called for the right character to civilise it,” thereby normalizing the violence

of the narrative and drawing a close association between character, virtue, and

violence.112 The power of these ‘norms’ exists in their reputation, perpetually

reified in their reiteration. Dorsey writes,

[T]he Frontier Myth derives much of its rhetorical power from the fact that it appears as a repetition of ‘ageless and transcendent traditions and principles’ [...thus making America appear] timeless and part of the predictable course of history. Through such taken-for-granted, identity-shaping myths, human behaviour, no matter the motivation or consequence, can simply feel a part of the natural and Godly state of things.113

In other words what is properly American is right, and what constitutes the norm

in ‘America proper’ gains its power through reputation and repetition. Moreover,

the norm in America is not the majority but masquerades as such while

privileging the rich, the white, and the political right. Michel Foucault argues,

“power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we

are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical

111 Leroy G. Dorsey We are All Americans Pure and Simple: Theodore Roosevelt and the Myth of Americanism (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2007), 56. 112 Ibid, 56. 113 Ibid, 40.

situation in a particular society.”114 At a very basic level then, power is formed

through discursive intertextualities, different narratives and discourses that

interlock and uphold each other, creating dominant discourses that gain their

meaning, their power, through repetition. Foucault: “power must be understood

in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in

which they operate and which constitute their own organization.”115 To

understand this power at work is to understand its context and historicity, to

understand that it functions as power because of reputation and reification. Yet in

America the long history of fostering fundamentalist discourses allows certain

power-knowledge relationships to be decontextualized and dehistorized, instead

understood as self-evident, declarative truth, producing the seemingly permanent

tendency towards the adoption of and obedience to fundamentalist creed.

The retelling of American myth forms fundamentalist faith in the rights,

duties, and laws of citizens perpetuating the notion that therein equality and

camaraderie can be found beyond patriotic ritual and rhetoric. This is where the

pep rally and where support for the War on Terror can play a vital role by offering

earned equality in the participation of proper patriotism. Dorsey writes, “In myth

[...], a community wants to imagine itself with a ‘deep, horizontal comradeship’

114 Michel Foucault The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction. (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 93. 115 Ibid, 92.

regardless of the ‘actual inequality and exploitation’ that certain groups suffer.”116

The American Dream implies that inequalities are the result of individual

successes and failures, of one earning or not earning equality and therefore

exploitation is a ‘natural’ outcome of the social Darwinist realities of the Dream

in action and a prominent feature of current neoliberal realities. However, the

power of the pep rally, the magic of the pep rally, the magic of fundamentalist

Americanism, is that it offers the illusion of this ‘deep, horizontal comradeship’

by exploiting national sovereignty and extracting purity from violence. The pep

rally offers to its participants Theodore Roosevelt’s mantra ‘We are all Americans

pure and simple’. But much should be read into the words ‘pure’ and ‘simple’ in

the pep rally context.

Roosevelt’s public discourse was largely focussed on hammering home

the guidelines of what constituted ‘real’ Americans with his belief that American

identity revolved around physical strength and moral character, and for good

measure he threw God into the mix as well as his endeavour was greatly helped

by the Revivalist movement in Christian fundamentalism that he endorsed lead by

Dwight L. Moody, Billy Sunday, and Billy Graham. This was a masculinised

brand of Protestant Christian fundamentalism the ethos of which Richard

Hofstadter describes (particularly as it pertains to Billy Sunday and Roosevelt’s

Americanism) in the following manner:

116 Leroy G. Dorsey We are All Americans Pure and Simple: Theodore Roosevelt and the Myth of Americanism (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2007), 6.

This type of mentality is a [...] synthesis of fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist Americanism, very often with a heavy overlay of severe fundamentalist morality. The one-hundred percenter, who will tolerate no ambiguities, no equivocations, no reservations, and no criticism, considers his kind of committedness as evidence of toughness and masculinity. One observer remarked of Sunday that no man of the time, ‘not even Mr. Roosevelt himself, has insisted so much on his personal, militant masculinity.’117

This type of fundamentalist discourse running in tandem with Roosevelt’s

Americanism helped solidify the frontier myth into Americanist mythology

establishing sacred principles that distinguish America from other nations:

chosen, elect, unique, better. And as Dorsey argues, “When success is elusive,

these mythic stories naturalize the contradictions of a community’s practises,

explaining inequalities and abuses by the community as part of the ‘natural’ or

inevitable flow of history.”118 Thus, like the personal relationship between God

and the individual in Christianity, Roosevelt provided proper citizens with the

guidelines for a personal relationship between the individual and the tenets of

Americanism, provided the citizenry was obedient to the authority of traditional

American values, and therein the strict and literal interpretation of what these

values are. Roosevelt was an integral part of instituting these mythical qualities

of an essentialist American history and essentialist American identity. Walter

Benn Michaels argues that in the nativist modernist paradigm that Roosevelt

117 Richard Hofstadter Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 118-119. 118Leroy G. Dorsey We are All Americans Pure and Simple: Theodore Roosevelt and the Myth of Americanism (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2007), 5.

promoted, “identity becomes an ambition as well as a description. [...] What we

want [...] may be a function of what we are, but in order for us to want it, we

cannot simply be it.”119 The nativist logic determines that the notion of cultural

identity, and individual identity as such, becomes not a description of a peoples’

actual practises and values, their normative activities, but rather an object of an

essentialist ambition to become what one already is—an ambition that can be

entirely elusive. In this way it resembles the Predestination doctrine of the

founding Puritans wherein the guarantee of salvation is essentially unknown but

one must still live up to being saved in order to be saved. Michaels writes,

“Indeed, it is only this transformation of identity into the object of desire as well

as its source that will make the dramas of nativism—the defence of identity, its

loss, its repudiation, its rediscovery—possible.”120 Therein lies the earned

equality that Roosevelt preached and that lives on in the paradigm of the

American Dream: identity as an object of desire. And as Butler argues, identity

“is fabricated as an interior essence,” the effect and function of “a decidedly

public and social discourse,” that is “the public regulation of fantasy [as]

articulated and enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and organizing [...]

119 Walter Benn Michaels Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 3. 120 Ibid., 3.

core.”121 Certainly the chants of ‘U.S.A., U.S.A., U.S.A’ and singing ‘we are the

champions my friends’ on the night of bin Laden’s death work within the

paradigm of fantasy, illusion, and essence that Butler describes, creating the ideal

submissive Americanized subject.

“If the American has the right stuff in him,” Roosevelt states, “physically

and intellectually fit, of sound character, and eager in good faith to become an

American citizen, I am for him.”122 This muscularized version of the proper

citizen both pertains to inner essence and outward manifestation of this essence.

This citizen has to work hard at demonstrating their embrace of national ideals,

ideals that are essentially part of the character to begin with, steeped in myth and

not so subtle masculinity and militarism—precisely what is displayed and being

reified at the patriotic pep rally. This national character also pertains to the

rugged individualism championed in the ethos of the American Dream and its

neoliberal arteries, grounded in the Puritan exodus and the frontier myth.

Dorsey writes,

The nation’s Frontier Myth, popularized in movies, television shows, speeches, artwork, and a host of other texts, has become a fundamental expression of what constitutes an American. [...] Rhetors offer a mythic story of America’s historical origin, rife with conflicts against racial, ethnic, and indigenous others on an untamed frontier, as an inevitable and expected consequence of institutional democracy and freedom. These

121 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), 173.

122 Qtd. in Leroy G. Dorsey We are All Americans Pure and Simple: Theodore Roosevelt and the Myth of Americanism (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2007), 17.

stories become [...] a ‘strategy of remembrance’. Such discourses not only help an audience to remember its origin as a community ‘based on rights, laws, and duties negotiated by a wide range of relatively well-informed citizens,’ but they also create a community ‘based on xenophobic patterns of identification,’ suppressing ‘important historical and political realities’ in the process. The grounding of contemporary behaviour in mythic retelling of history can create a compelling system of beliefs for listeners, as retelling often results in revision and reinterpretetation of the familiar myth to suit the current crisis.123

‘A strategy of remembrance’ is a terribly apt phrase to describe how

fundamentalisms are formed and reinforced. It is an apt way to describe how

nationalism, and Americanism in particular, work. Nationalism is strategical just

as fundamentalism is strategical, and the truths therein, these mythic truths, do not

come out of nowhere, they are not immune to proper contextualization, only

treated as such as a strategy of remembrance. Fundamentalist biblical literalists,

by decontextualizing, dehistoricising, retelling and reifying the myths of the

Bible, proclaim that the Good Book has all the answers for modern day life,

indeed not only answers but literal prophesies including apocalyptic end-time

prophecies. This is a strategy of remembrance to attain some certain universal

truths about the present and the future. And as fundamentalism defines what is

proper Christianity or proper Americanism with the gaze directed backward, to

the garden, Eden, the frontier, to America’s Puritan fundamentalist Christian

roots, to mythologies that have influenced longstanding dogmatisms, American

123 Leroy G. Dorsey We are All Americans Pure and Simple: Theodore Roosevelt and the Myth of Americanism (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2007), 6.

and Christian fundamentalisms perpetuate the compulsion to restore the future by

preserving the past, by preserving traditional values. This perpetually backward

gaze makes moral improvement difficult if not impossible. It makes tradition

correct, myth reality, and what is right, right, black and white, defended by might.

V. Conclusion...Winning...Righteousness...Romance

America has never outrun its paradoxical Puritan roots. Indeed, the

melange of antinomianism and conformity, self-determination and divine destined

chosen-ness, that is found in the Puritan back story and reified in the frontier myth

provides a framework for American morality compiled of ‘self-evident’

metaphysical truths contextualized within a paradigm where intolerance and self-

righteousness are facets of moral and proper behaviour. The result is a nation

given collective purpose through war, conquest, ‘winning’, where ‘mission

accomplished’ is meant to erase the actual underpinnings of the disastrous

realities of said mission, and where violence is sacralised, physical might is right,

and material riches stand in for honour, bravery, virtue. Repetition of

mythological and religious truths provides meaning while collective and selective

amnesia, help secure meaning. The pep rally mentality that accompanied the

news of Osama bin Laden’s death demonstrates a fundamentalist Americanism

with apocalyptic undertones where the American is the saved and the Other is the

damned, or perpetually worthy of damnation, disposable, ungrievable. The

mythologizing of America, and the vital Puritan role therein, articulates a social

identity wherein winning is paramount and is manifest nationalistically in the

vanquishing of enemies and manifest individualistically in material success.

Moreover, under neoliberalism, which is the logic of the American Dream pushed

to its limit, and which is paradoxically championed by neoconservatism, the

Dream is radically delimited to the project of acquiring as much wealth in as short

a time as possible, by any means necessary. This is the lie at work in American

fundamentalism: winning is right(eous)ness, and maintaining is right(eous)ness,

by whatever means necessary. And to maintain ‘winning’, to keep the Dream

alive, the nation is perpetually at war, while the logic of militarization is

intertextually intertwined with economic, nationalistic, political, and religious

discourses. This is why the pep rally is so affectively effective: war, the Dream,

the frontier—romantic, sure; but there is an awful lot going on, and all that true

grit? They are anxious scenarios. But at the pep rally you don’t have to do

anything. Just show up. And don’t think.

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