The Narrative, Amnesia and the Future of the Nation

A country without a memory is a country of madmen.

- George Santayana

A country without a history is a country that never existed.

- Willem Picter

***

In the Soviet Union, they referred to it (unofficially, of course) as rehabilitation. That’s what happened when officials who had run afoul of whatever the current policy was in the Kremlin were first ejected from power and spent some time excluded from public view (sometimes they were shot), but then had their names brought back into respectability, as the winds of state ideology changed. According to Solzhenitsyn, one could gauge who was ascendant in the corridors of power by observing which disgraced officials appeared in news reports. It was, apparently, a bit like reading tea leaves. But if you were good at it, that might be the difference between finding (or keeping) a decent job and a life of one’s own personal exile.

Of course, it is not quite like that in America today. Everyone knows that we have a lot more respect for truth than they did in the Soviet Union. After all, communism has been relegated to the slag-heap of history, while capitalism remains triumphant on a global scale. Trumpism and McCarthyism aside, full frontal assaults on collective memory have been comparatively rare in American history. Because we’re the greatest country ever. Etc.

No, a much more elegant (and efficient) system has developed over the years, especially since the coup of 1963. Rather than crudely deleting people and events, which is messy and too frequently entails the need to revive and rehabilitate, which confuses the hell out of those who have actual memories, the more effective method has become a two-pronged strategy.

The Coup of 1963

The foundation of the strategy has been in place for most of American history: American exceptionalism. To paraphrase (with an appropriate level of broken grammar): 

Because the Land of the Free always has We-the-People’s best interest at heart, and because we are entirely unlike any country in history ever, whatever America does, even when it is wrong, is right.

This is The Narrative, the ideal, an extreme that probably does not reflect any but the most nationalistic of Americans’ view of things. To quote Barry Goldwater, “Extremism in defense of virtue is no vice.”

Nevertheless, most of us living above poverty (a shrinking number, to be sure) still have one or more subtle versions of this gospel in the back of our minds, persistently arguing against seeing things more realistically. The implanting of The Narrative begins, of course, quite young. If you are culturally Middleclasswhite, to avoid it completely you would have to have never spent any time in a school and entirely avoided television, radio and motion pictures. Newspapers = OK. Any books that might be read in a school = OK. Even in first grade, you have to stand and pledge allegiance to the flag (a ritual invented by Francis Bellamy, of Mount Morris, NY, who created it in order to sell American flags).

Pledging allegiance, ca. 1941

To challenge The Narrative is pretty much unthinkable…unless there is someone there in your life at a young age planting the seeds of reasonable doubt: Actual facts. Otherwise, the climb out of the hole requires a huge effort, one that most Americans have proven themselves unwilling to undertake. And who can blame them, after all? As long as there is another house to aspire to owning, another TV to buy, another new car to show off, who would want to walk away from all that? Because of course, as we all know, no one in the world is as free, happy or generous as we are. That’s a given. And powerful. We mustn’t forget powerful.

If you are culturally Non-Middleclasswhite, you probably have had Doubt planted much earlier and much more deeply. Chances are you have seen with your own eyes clear evidence that contradicts some portion of The Narrative. If you have been incarcerated, especially for an offense that a Middleclasswhite person would never even have been arrested for (which happens a lot), you are more likely to understand how Power and Privilege actually work in this country. Likewise, if someone you love was shot by police for doing nothing, or died from a curable illness, or if your circumstances compelled you to spend time in the military destroying someone else’s country, you are more likely to have had The Narrative undermined — even despite your military indoctrination, which stands to a great degree on The Narrative, after all.

I myself have found a remarkable number of people from circumstances just described who nevertheless freely recite important elements of The Narrative anyway. That’s part of what’s so wonderful about it: It’s aspirational.

From the perspective of The Narrative, the Non-Middleclasswhite, the incarcerated, the veteran, and others, are all irrelevant since they do not represent The Narrative. They are outliers, lazy, malcontents, lowlife, intellectuals and, worst of all, potential socialists. They can therefore be marginalized, discounted, ignored. It’s as if they don’t exist, even in their own minds! 

The Narrative is a self-fulfilling prophecy, the primordial Yankee tautology, the glorious defining of self out of existence. (If you are a veteran who has earned Doubt, the pressure to renounce it is particularly intense: to speak out against The Narrative is to betray, not just “your country,” but also your buddies who “gave all.” To retain independent thought in that situation takes a special kind of courage.)

In a way, it’s beautiful. At once both elegant and effective. The apotheosis of American Ingenuity. The Ultimate Engineering Project: The Engineering of Minds!

And it worked for a long, long time. Most of the time since the Civil War, I suppose, with occasional interruptions of discontent when things got really bad “down below”. Some practical adjustments had to be made in the 1930s. But then, as has often been the case, there was a war conveniently available to realign everyone to The Narrative.

An assault on the Narrative, ca. 1967

But in the last decades of the 20^th century, the power of The Narrative began to be eclipsed. Consensus Reality began to intrude, to assert itself as it will always eventually do. It probably began with the Youth Revolution and its assault on the Vietnam War from the mid-60s on. Too many people came back too messed up and too confused by what they had experienced. The War wasn’t working. Also, some Middleclasswhite people began to manipulate brain chemistry in ways that made the absurdity of The Narrative more and more obvious to them. It was a dangerous, critical time for The Narrative.

But fortunately for the Administrators of The Narrative, the coup of 1963 had already happened. As shocking as that event was, and despite all efforts to attack the Official Story of that murder, it remained possible to sow doubt about those who would gainsay The Narrative. The coverup was leaky as hell, and yet it still held just enough water for most lazy-thinking people in the general public glued to their televisions. And it was reiterated so authoritatively in nearly all forms of media, that anyone who might challenge the official story (and by implication, The Narrative) could be labeled a conspiracy theorist and be lumped together in the public imagination with people who believe in Little Green Men.

Some Little Green Men

The Kennedy and King assassinations, and their attendant coverups, were proving grounds for a new approach to maintaining The Narrative. The second phase: if the facts are too inconvenient, ignore them! Don't just lie, lie big! It doesn’t have to work forever, only long enough for a critical mass of the public to stop caring about it. This was a great and most excellent insight: 

Progress has made the individual’s attention span so short, and the endless parade of Shiny New Things so extravagant, that the Engineering of Amnesia can continue apace.

Moreover (and this is a more recent and especially pernicious development), the demands of the economy itself can be used to tamp down Doubt. Nowadays, there are probably as many people who would indeed challenge The Narrative, but don't because they are too busy working to devote the energy to exploring the truth. The facts are there, in public view. Never more so than now, in the era of the global information web. 

But so many people in this country who in previous decades would have had some leisure time — people called in the quaint language of a bygone era The Joneses— no longer do. They are trapped in "good jobs" that year by year cover less and less of their needs, forcing them to work longer hours, for less renumeration when compared to the growth of the economy itself. The single breadwinner has given way to the two-income household, the Used-to-Haves, and they watch the prospects for "a better life for the kids" dwindle as more and more of the product of their labor is sucked up into the top half a percent of the wealthy. 

Everybody's working; there's no time for thinking. Facts no longer matter. There is only fear and outrage...but no time to figure out who is to blame.

It’s not sustainable, of course. Progress isn’t sustainable. But that doesn’t matter. If the situation ever becomes so bad that Progress itself is undermined, the game is over, anyway. And who knows? Perhaps a new approach to maintaining The Narrative will be concocted, despite it all. Some day. If it’s ever needed. The tools refined for the assassination coverups may have been the most important inventions in American history.

The Administrators of The Narrative also had the good fortune that the so-called Mainstream Press had already been sold on The Narrative. Even allowing for a little bit of simpering discontent now and then, The Narrative could still be reinforced through managing perceptions. Spin. Infotainment. It doesn’t have to work forever, only long enough for a critical mass of the public to stop caring.

And by and large, the “legitimate” press could be relied upon, not to speak truth to power, but to collaborate with their own deception. Their careers are on the line, after all. Who cares about reputations? Reputation is simply part of the engineering of The Narrative.

Any journalists who disobey, any historians who insist on exploring things that would cast serious doubt on The Narrative, can be ignored — even by their colleagues. They are outliers, lazy, malcontents, lowlife, ivory-tower intellectuals and, worst of all, socialists.

A leading advocate
for the Narrative

So for every Michael Moore movie, the press can be counted on to put some boob like Gerald Posner on air to obfuscate, and to reiterate The Narrative. There’s always The History Channel. For every scandal like the Iran-Contra Affair, Congress can be counted on to put some creature like Oliver North on stage to wrap himself in the flag and thereby derail the investigation. We have already seen that the flag itself is part of The Narrative. Challenge The Narrative, and you are challenging the flag, a phenomenon Colin Kaepernick understands all too well.

And the press could be counted on never, ever to ask obvious questions. If they do, they can justly be ignored as irrelevant: they are not doing their jobs — they are challenging The Narrative, not reiterating it. Just mention it and move on to real news, because everything on the weird end of town is irrelevant.

The 37th POTUS*

And this is how monsters in high office get rehabilitated in America. Not through ham-handed, Soviet-style rehabilitation. In America, you cannot just start talking about some monster as if he never was a monster. There is no way to rehabilitate a monster in America. But for the important people, the string-pullers, the faces that are actually visible, you don’t have to, because despite anything they actually did, they never were monsters in the first place. Everything has been sanitized, for your protection, and the bodies hidden off-camera. Maybe such creatures made a mistake, here and there, but they upheld The Narrative in good faith. How could they possibly be monsters?

The 40th POTUS**

To say they are, is to imply that America somehow does wrong things. That we cannot keep our own house clean. And if that were true, what will become of us? Will we join the Soviet Union in the slag-heap of history?

Although some monsters get rehabilitated in this way during their lifetimes, we see it most clearly when Legal Criminals die: Americans can be counted on to forget whatever actual, doubt-inspiring facts they might accidentally have been exposed to. The Narrative abides. There are no monsters in the corridors of power.

The 41st POTUS***

And that is fortunate, since who knows what we would do with ourselves if ever there were? Why, then we would be no better than a banana republic! That’s simply not possible, under The Narrative.

* Among his achievements: conniving with the South Vietnamese to prolong the War long enough to prevent LBJ from inking a cease-fire and winning the election of 1968 for Hubert Humphrey; bombing Hanoi on Christmas; expanding the war into Laos and Cambodia in order to stop the North Vietnamese from winning the one in Vietnam; helping to stage a coup in Chile that killed the duly elected president and brought in an era of "disappearances" under the dictator, Pinochet.

** Among his achievements: conniving with Iran, an enemy of the US, to keep hostages locked up until the election of 1980, thus preventing an "October Surprise" by Jimmy Carter that would have won him the election; subverting the will of the people, as expressed by Congress cutting off funding for the terrorist Contras in Nicaragua, by selling missiles to that same enemy, Iran, to fund the Contras illegally; supporting the Contras' terror war against the duly elected government of Nicaragua; supporting the terror war against opponents of the Somosa regime in El Salvador; doubling the deficit by cutting taxes while spending hundreds of billions on an arms race that doomed an already-doomed Soviet Union; spending billions of dollars on a fantasy "Star Wars" missile defense system that never produced anything but profits for companies like Raytheon; creating not one, but two economic bubbles that burst and produced huge economic recessions during and after his presidency; appointing Antonin Scalia, one of the SCOTUS' most insanely reactionary justices ever; cutting unemployment benefits, food stamps, school lunch programs and Medicaid; sucking billions out of the economy through deregulation that led to the savings and loan scandal; gutting the EPA to feed wealthy backers in the petroleum and other industries; the War on Drugs the Black Community and poor people in Latin America.
***Among his achievements: Clarence Thomas; NAFTA; giving Saddam Hussein nod-and-wink approval to invade Kuwait, and then launching what was to be a 20+ year war against Iraq, which included child-killing sanctions, massive destruction of the country's infrastructure, and then eventually an outright invasion out of pique that shattered the fragile balance of power in the Middle East (Just think about all the shit that came from the war against Iraq: US troops stationed in Saudi Arabia became a propaganda coup for Bin Laden and a spur to the formation of al-Qa'ida; the eventual destruction of Iraq by GHWB's son, W, facilitated the rise of ISIS and the Syrian Civil War and produced a trillion-dollar boondoggle for military contractors. It is no exaggeration to say that all by himself, GHWB precipitated the lethal and chaotic developments of the 21st century in the Middle East).

Picture credits: 

https://listverse.com/2016/11/27/10-intriguing-newspaper-reports-of-little-green-men/
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/30-years-ago-today-richard-nixon-wrote-a-letter-to-trump-predicting-success-in-politics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan
https://krtv.com/news/2018/11/30/former-president-george-h-w-bush-has-died/