American State Myth in the Living Era

Today’s quarter-millennium anniversary of American independence is purely formal, if you read history. The document signed on July 4th, 1776, merely clarified the terms of the Continental Congress’s July 2nd resolution of Independence; the signatories famously didn’t begin signing the Declaration of Independence until August. Besides, the Battles of Lexington and Concord, generally considered the start of the American Revolution, occurred on April 19th, 1775.

What, then, does America celebrate today? We celebrate a story, a myth. Like the Christian Nativity, which almost certainly didn't happen on December 25th, Independence Day celebrations hang a neat date on the otherwise vague, shapeless division between the Before Times and the Age of Salvation. Such divisions create clarity, sequence, and an almost catechistic transition from benightedness to true vision.

The parallels between Christianity and American state mythology deserve further consideration, because they speak to our national identity. I've written before about how the official Thanksgiving story serves the same role in America that the Genesis creation narrative serves in the Bible. But if Jamestown and Plymouth commence America's Hebraic “wandering in the wilderness” epoch, the Declaration of Independence is definitely Christmas in the American story. For good or ill.

Like Christ's ministry, the American “Experiment” involves reams of teachings. John Locke, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Paine serve the same role as the Sermon on the Mount and the Parables. These teachings come from an era, not an individual, so the parallels are imperfect. But American schools teach simplified, bowdlerized versions of these texts just as Sunday School teaches a paraphrased Bible for kids.

But Sunday School elides the contradictions and nuances that make the Bible frequently difficult, even for scholars. Likewise, schoolbook history removes the conflicts, doubts, and often slippery moral center surrounding the Revolution and what came after. Like reformers today, the Founders fought each other as much as the enemy. But you wouldn't know that from most official schoolbooks.

The Book of Acts records that, without Christ around to resolve questions, the Apostles fell to infighting. But they resolved the most important debates at the Council of Jerusalem. Likewise, Jill Lepore records how the American Constitution represents the Founders’ best available solution to their internal divisions. The Council of Jerusalem has no published proceedings; we know only the conclusions printed in the Bible. The Founders tried to achieve the same effect by refusing to publish the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention until all participants had died.

Then the parallels become loaded. The Gospels record Jesus preaching, teaching, and giving theological interpretations. But when crowds started clamoring for him personally, or tried to make him king, Jesus fled. Only after Jesus was absent, and Paul's Epistles became scripture, did the person of Jesus, rather than his teaching, become prime in Christianity.

Likewise, while the Founders lived, they argued about principle and procedure. How direct should popular control be? How strong can the Executive Branch become before it threatens the nation? Only after the Founders’ deaths do we start seeing the personal veneration of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and latterly Lincoln. The individuals, not the philosophic process, become the source of capital-T Truth.

As Jason Stanley writes, when we venerate old texts and dead persons, debate about how to apply their Truths becomes impossible. Too much American political discourse today focuses on the Founders’ words and persons, the fallacy of Originalism. Changing how we apply the Founders’ principles to real life, becomes seen first as decline, then as blasphemy. Truth becomes a fixed, oracular artifact, not a function of how we live.

The idea that we can Make America Great Again relies on the principle that greatness derives from the past, not from how we live now. Change can never happen, since change grants primacy to the present. Our living, breathing needs become a barrier to Truth, which the dead uncovered in 1776, and which must be treasured and preserved, never used.

Jesus himself hated this veneration of the dead. When challenged on “marriage at the resurrection” in Matthew 22, Jesus replied, “God is lord of the living, not the dead.” Even without a literal God, American state mythology should follow the same values. America is a living nation, not a graveyard of ideals. Any moral Truth that impedes living Americans is a contravention of the philosophic process that Washington, Jefferson, and Paine put in motion.

If today is a day to celebrate the dead, then who cares. But if we recommit ourselves to living Americans, we truly remember what this day is about.

The Beginning of Truth at the End of Civilization

Ronald Malfi, Bone White

A scruffy, frostbitten mountain man wanders into a rural Alaska diner, orders a hot beverage, and casually confesses to eight murders. Then he patiently waits for the state bulls to arrive from Fairbanks. The accused’s strange confession, and the particularly gruesome murders, soon become national news, and Paul Gallo, a Maryland literature prof, recognizes the landscape where his brother disappeared. So he catches the next plane to Alaska.

I have conflicted feelings about Ronald Malfi’s thriller of isolation, atmosphere, and paranoia. On one hand, Malfi subjects his characters to innovative tortures on the perimeters of civilization, tortures which explore the characters’ depths and the extremes they’ll reach to survive. On the other hand, Malfi relies upon the Blair Witch horror model, the city-dweller’s terror at wilderness, amplified by the characters’ lack of Cub Scout-level survival skills.

Investigator Jill Ryerson of the Alaska Bureau of Investigation as seen remarkable crimes on America’s “Last Frontier.” For her, human rationality comes to the tundra to die. But even she’s shocked by the violence and rot she finds in Joseph Mallory’s isolated cabin outside Dread’s Hand, Alaska. (Yes, “Dread’s Hand.” Malfi’s symbolism isn’t light-handed.) But for all his candor, Mallory refuses to explain his motivation, leaving Ryerson even more confused.

Paul Gallo absolutely knows his twin brother is among Mallory’s victims. Danny’s last text came from Dread’s Hand, after all. Paul and Danny were Corsican twins growing up, but as adults, they’ve felt disconnected, and wandered through life seeking purpose. So Paul heads for Alaska, hoping not only for answers, but also to reconnect with the missing half of his soul. Imagine his shock when Ryerson’s investigation turns up…

Nothing.

Malfi’s story heats up in Act II, when Paul, disgusted with Ryerson’s lack of procedural headway, undertakes his own investigation. The East Coast city boy rents an SUV and heads into Alaska’s mountainous interior, and if this sounds ominous, it is. Malfi’s high-handed atmospherics really gain steam here, as Paul questions a community that’s kept secrets aggressively for generations. As often in horror fiction, local yokels are the scariest phantoms.

Ronald Malfi

Simultaneously, however, Malfi relaxes into genre stereotypes. His dead-eyed provincials shouting “Y’all just git!” are pinched straight from better-known literature; James Dickey’s Deliverance, and its better-known movie adaptation, spring to mind. Malfi has described this book in interviews as his most autobiographical (I don’t know his CV, so can’t confirm). But one starts suspecting Malfi has lived much of his life through books and movies.

His worldbuilding supports this doubt. He makes fleeting mistakes about both Fairbanks and Annapolis which reveal, to those with local knowledge, that he mostly researched these locations online. So many Dread’s Hand locals warn Paul that he’s risking getting stranded all winter that, when it doesn’t happen, we’re astounded. I’m not sure whether I appreciate or loathe this subversion of Chekhov’s Gun. Maybe a hybrid.

Wilderness, for Paul (and Malfi), is metaphorical, not physical. When Paul abandons the signposts of comfortable suburban life to seek truth in the hinterlands, he abandons the comfortable presumptions which his White American upbringing bequeathed him. An AmLit professor, he’s spent his life teaching students to find truth in others’ texts. But he reaches a point where his only truth exists in places where no paths or pre-built infrastructure exist.

Which, when presented in LitCrit analysis, sounds pretty cool. But Malfi’s actual storytelling relies on mass-media depictions of country life, including crude nature demigods, crudely drawn animals, and fear of countrified superstition. One gets the feeling, reading Paul’s journey, that Malfi never took an orienteering course or camped overnight in the woods. His depictions are crude, sweeping, and stereotyped, yet somehow, Paul finds ways of surviving.

I can’t help wondering if Malfi read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, about another college-educated city boy who abandoned the map in Alaska’s wilderness, and learned the wrong lessons. Malfi seemingly believes that the physical, non-metaphorical wilderness is a place where people go to learn themselves, push their limits, and emerge transformed. Which it can be, if they take the time to prepare. But that’s not what Paul does.

The contrast is ironic. Malfi writes about a man who escapes the comfortable but stultifying confines of White modernity to discover the harsh but liberating truth. But he writes it using familiar, market-tested storytelling tropes, assembled like Lego bricks. There’s a lot I like about Malfi’s book, particularly his ambitious themes and deeper questions. But the tools he uses to address those themes and questions are just too comfy.

“Easy Words” and the Tyranny of Literature

Social media doesn’t allow complex thought, nuanced analysis, or Socratic discussion. I think everyone can appreciate that. Anybody who’s ever tweeted “I like apples” and gotten dogpiled for not including oranges, kumquats, and jackfruit in their synopsis knows what I mean. Especially on platforms like Xitter, Threads, and Bluesky, which cap post lengths, the internet flattens difficult topics, squelches humor, and rewards anger. That’s why I still blog.

I don’t want to rehash last week’s Threads debacle over what constitutes excessively difficult language. The two accompanying images should suffice. One platform user requested authors to “use easy words,” citing scrying as an example of needless difficulty. (Some defenders claim this was a joke, though the humor eludes me.) Following a Kelly Marie Tran-level pile-on, another user posted a defense that made things worse by correlating dictionary use with ableism.

The post that created the controversy

I’m more interested in the underlying assumptions about literacy, ability, and writing. As a sometime writing teacher, I recall struggling with students who used clipped vocabulary, short sentences, and especially passive voice construction. I don’t like getting involved in the controversy surrounding America’s purported literacy crisis, mostly because it feels like a media-fueled moral panic. But youth do, anecdotally, have difficulty writing nowadays.

Which is, on consideration, weird. If anything, young adults write more today than my generation did. Emails, text messages, social media posts—these remain mostly language-based communication modes. Youth share in online discussion boards, chat-based RPGs, and other participatory, text-centric communications. Platforms like Smashwords, AO3, and Wattpad have turned youth into published authors without kowtowing to the Big Five publishing conglomerates.

Yet that practice didn’t translate into greater writing capability in my classroom. I recall students using the justification that “I write how I speak,” which I think they believed meant they used a casual tone and relaxed grammar, without a lot of pausing to consider the nuances of word choice. Which, fair enough, I often do too, especially when writing fiction and trying to capture a character’s authentic voice.

So why the difficulty? Students came into my Freshman Comp class having written far more than my peers did outside the classroom (notwithstanding us aspiring authors). They use their own characteristic tones, rather than trying to affect a scholarly tone. They should be able to produce something beyond the short sentences, sweeping generalizations, and tedious reliance on “to be” verbs that plagued me attempting to read their output.

Not to get all Marshall McLuhan on you, but the difference probably involves not what content youth read, but where they read it. Yes, youth write copious text messages. But the SMS format, and the difficulty typing with thumbs, discourages long sentences and nuanced vocabulary. Heck, it even discourages punctuation. I used to wonder why students had such difficulty with comma placement, but texting discourage comma use altogether.

The attempted defense that made things worse

Scrying seems, to me, a pretty straightforward word. I discovered it in grade school while reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales. But the Brothers Grimm, besides being adults themselves, were also transcribing oral tales delivered by community elders, tales which had been passed down, largely intact, across generations. I read books commensurate with my reading ability, mostly published by conglomerate publishers, written by experienced professional authors, who were mostly adults.

You might detect an element of elitism in this, and I won’t deny it. Not just anybody who constructs a sentence is an author, but the person who learns from the best sentence builders of the past and present. Just like not everybody at karaoke is a singer, but the ones who take the time to learn vocalism and breath control and range, the capacity to write comes from apprenticing oneself to better writers and working at it for years.

Instead, youth write copious texts to their friends, but much of their reading consists of texts from their friends. Too many aspiring authors who post fanfic to Wattpad mostly read other fanfic authors on Wattpad. Rather than giving them something to strive after, and challenging content that refines their thinking, it results in a persistent regression toward the mean, as all new writing resembles what came before.

That original Threads user didn’t deserve the abuse they received, a dogpile so severe that they apparently fled social media. But “easy words” is a request for reading as a passive activity, which readers fall into without resistance. It’s a request to feel good enough as we are, to have authors hug us and say “good job.” That’s not a kind of reading I want to do.

What’s a Trillion, More or Less?

Elon Musk

Last week’s declaration that Elon Musk has become history’s first trillionaire has me thinking about what a dollar means in today’s economy. Not in the ordinary moralistic sense of it being wrong that he has a trillion dollars, while nearly one in five American children is food insecure. No, rather, I question what Elon actually has. Because it sure isn’t money in the sense that most citizens have money.

Start with how Musk became rich. He didn’t create or sell anything valuable. His IPO on SpaceX common shares enjoyed a price jump, causing the fraction of shares in Musk’s hands to increase. In other words, his “net worth” includes the promised future value of transactions he hasn’t yet made. You or I can claim future transactions as personal value only under specific circumstances, controlled by regulations and personal integrity.

This personal integrity component matters. Musk’s notorious buyout of Twitter caused massive financial losses that reduced stock values by half. Then he stopped the bleeding by selling Twitter’s successor company, X.com, to xAI, his tech startup. He moved his holdings from one pocket to another, giving himself a markup along the way. He later repeated the trick, selling xAI to SpaceX, mere months before selling SpaceX to Wall Street.

Each of these transactions created money without creating value. Neither Twitter nor xAI saw their corporate functioning improved by the transaction; in fact, neither has ever turned a profit. Neither has SpaceX. Smarter critics than me have analyzed the SpaceX IPO and determined that it involves nothing but high-minded promises and Elon’s personal financial network. Tesla’s mediocre cars have no resale value, and the Boring Company’s tunnels barely exist.

Please remember, when we discuss Musk’s “net worth,” we mean its dollar value, not actual dollars he has. Musk’s fortune mainly consists of his stock portfolio, which mostly comprises his own companies. He pumps their floating value by making his companies seem desirable, but he also controls the supply, keeping them scarce. He cannot ever sell his stock holdings, because that would flood the market and crash their value.

Musk isn’t a trillionaire because of products he makes, services he provides, or material he sells. He’s a trillionaire because of resources he owns. This is the definition of capitalism. Sometimes, when we reformists deride “capitalism,” conservatives accuse us of opposing free markets. Not so: markets exist in economic models other than capitalism. Rather, capitalism is the system that controls who owns which resources, and how they’re priced.

Home Depot is a market. So is the informal collocation of off-the-books day laborers in the Home Depot’s parking lot. Home Depot’s market is regulated by legislation, Federal Reserve policy, and labor law. The day laborer market is regulated by trust and honor. But only the Home Depot is capitalist, since it also owns its concrete slab building, its supply contracts, and the parking lot where the day laborers meet.

But Musk has reached a plane where Home Depot can’t reach. Home Depot has value only if it creates value for other people. It must sell product at sufficient mark-up to generate profit, but not so much that it discourages commerce. It must both read the present market, and anticipate future trends. And it must make moral compromises, such as letting undocumented day laborers use its grounds.

Let’s put it another way. A friend of mine, a registered Libertarian and outspoken Musk supporter, owns the local craft brewery. He owns his building, his tanks, his trucks, and his distribution contracts. But to remain solvent and pay his workers, he must produce beer. He can’t sell futures on his proposed ability to produce epoch-making innovative beer, eventually, then punt down the road. He must sell beer now.

This doesn’t apply to Musk. Of the six corporations Musk controls—Tesla, X Corp, xAI, SpaceX, NeuraLink, and the Boring Company—only Tesla currently sells products on the open market. And those, as reported by neutral reviewers, are good-enough cars whose resale value is undercut by limited battery life. Musk mostly sells the promise of future dividends, a promise he’s never consummated, and keeps moving into the future.

It’s apparently paradoxical. He’s charmless in media interviews, disdains workers and women, espouses small-f fascist politics, and sells mostly empty promises. Yet the retail value of those promises has made Musk a trillionaire. Which means that, ultimately, the foundation of that trillion is Musk himself. At least Cornelius Vanderbilt, for all his dick-swinging vulgarity, built actual railroads. What even is Elon’s trillion?

Trek vs. Wars, or, Who's the Better Star?

The original Star Trek bridge crew, sitting comfortably with their moral certainty

Throughout my lifetime, one defining debate in niche culture has been: which is better, Star Wars or Star Trek? Which franchise reflects what we latterly call “nerd culture” in the most practical, incisive way? I’ve always disagreed with the question, because it seemed to me that the two franchises served different purposes. Arguing which was better seemed like debating whether you loved your pancreas or liver more, as though removing one would kill you less.

Star Trek always tried to be more concrete, humane, and values-driven. The structure always featured a new encounter with an alien species, rampant technology, or breakaway sect. And each conflict was, each in different ways, solved by the characters applying Gene Roddenberry’s humanist philosophy. Exactly what that means changed over time—the original series was more swaggering and colonial than TNG, for instance—but it was built to change. It was designed to remain open-ended.

By contrast, George Lucas designed Star Wars to end. It intended to encompass Luke Skywalker’s transition from provincial peasant to galactic hero, and at least as Lucas outlined, it would then end. Whether we want that “original” ending to be the medal ceremony at the conclusion of the first movie, or the destruction of the Empire at the conclusion of the third, either way, the story intended to resolve with Luke assuming his mature role.

So Roddenberry wrote one franchise to continue, while Lucas wrote the other with an arc that resolved. Yet time hasn’t allowed either outcome. The recent release of The Mandalorian and Grogu, the twelfth canon Star Wars feature film, accords it with the MCU and James Bond for stories that just continue, long after the cultural milieu that created them has ended. And Star Trek has, if anything fared even worse, at least in fan accounting.

Recent Star Trek outings like Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy have received pummelings from fan critics. Admittedly, the internet has given cranky fans a nearly limitless platform to complain about virtually everything. Especially with popular franchises, new entries have suffered in the ratings because of advance fan opposition; outings like Captain Ake or the Fifteenth Doctor have been lame ducks before their episodes even appeared, because of closed-minded, hostile, and even violent fan reactions.

The Abrams movies resurrected Yoda, because Luke wasn't allowed to finish growing up

Put another way, Star Trek’s core audience doesn’t experience the show anymore, they revere it. Most current Star Trek fans weren’t alive when the original series aired, and even first-generation TNG fans are in their fifties and up. The most vocal and committed audience base didn’t experience Star Trek in its cultural context on Cold War belligerence and America’s struggle with its own imperialist history. Star Trek wasn’t an abstraction, it manifested America’s fraying conscience.

Like holy texts, like the Bible or the Koran, Star Trek seems (falsely) to speak for itself. The cultural conflicts it commented upon have become fodder for historians and schoolbooks, not something the audience is steeped in. You could say something similar about Star Wars, which certainly commented upon the post-Vietnam landscape. But Star Wars held itself aloof, a willingly timeless goulash of space wizards, samurai movies, and Flying Tigers splendor that pretended to neutrality.

J.J. Abrams, who sanded Roddenberry’s humanist morals off Star Trek, also snipped off Star Wars’ Jungian roots. He turned the Starship Enterprise into a Lucasian circus, while he rendered the Millenium Falcon into a time capsule that, somehow, must keep fighting. Admittedly, he didn’t do that alone. Besides the connivance of producer Kathleen Kennedy, the process included Lucas himself, who licensed new content in 1990 and flooded the market with novels, comics, and canon movies.

In other words, Star Wars, like LotR or Narnia, was always supposed to end. But, controlled by America’s largest media conglomerate, it can’t; not while money exists to wring from audiences. For thirty-six years (as I write), Skywalker and company have been forced to re-fight their original battles, amended only by meaningless set dressing. They never get to govern the galaxy they liberated, because they’re busy constantly resisting another apocalyptic empire that, somehow, never dies.

Meanwhile, Star Trek had no limiting arc. It had little canon continuity until The Wrath of Khan; it simply responded to surrounding culture. This fluidity reflects in how the franchise constantly moves Khan Noonien Singh’s birthdate: Trek isn’t designed to be consistent, it’s designed to be current. Yet fan reverence for its roots keeps the most strident audiences from seeing the story in the present, reducing it into a lifeless artifact, a fly in amber.