TELL US A STORY:

Hungry Souls and Brave Hearts: The Need for an American Heroic Myth (Stephen M. Klugewicz, Ph.D., October 3-4, 2003, Philadelphia Society)

We as a society have lost the true purpose of education, which, as Aristotle argued, is to teach the pupil "to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought." Young people must be taught to love truth, goodness, and beauty, and hate falsehood, evil, and ugliness. Yes, we need to teach students to think, but reason must always be subservient to truth. This is the very essence of free inquiry. Yet today to insist that there are objective answers to aesthetic or ethical questions is to be considered narrow-minded and bigoted.

All this has nearly destroyed the ability of the young to believe in anything, especially in the unseen and the abstract. Popular culture has groomed the young to be, in C.S. Lewis‚ term, "men without chests," their souls adrift, believing in nothing, following only the whims of desire. So, how do we encourage students to believe in "the permanent things"? And, specifically, to address the concern of this panel, how do we inspire among them a devotion to something so intangible as "republicanism"? Part of the answer lies in making this concept tangible to the young. The best way to accomplish this is to personalize republicanism˜to associate the concept with real people. Students relate better to people than to ideas.

In order to nurture in the young, then, a love for America's republican institutions, we must foster in them a love for the people of this country, particularly for those people who shaped the institutions of this country--a group that we can call "Founders" in the broadest sense. Some might ask whether it is possible to foster such strong feelings for such distant people. The affection we seek to encourage in the young is not, of course, the equal of the love they
feel for relatives and friends. But we can approximate instead the love they feel for, say, a favorite author or composer. "I love Shakespeare!" a student might say. He ostensibly means that he loves the works of Shakespeare, but in some sense he is saying that he loves Shakespeare the person too. By reading Shakespeare's works, he believes that in a sense he knows the man himself.

Thus people can be loved in a real sense despite the fact that they are physically distant or even entirely absent from this world. Indeed, in some ways it is easier to cultivate admiration for historical figures than it is for contemporary ones. Greatness is usually perceived from a distance, usually an historical distance. Heroes are rarely honored in their own time.

What we must give the young, then, are heroes and, more broadly, a heroic myth. In spite of the corrosive influence of much of popular culture, young people retain a sense of imagination. And perhaps because of the vacuity of popular culture, they possess now more than ever, in Carson Holloway's term, "hungry souls," eager to be fed. More than adults, children are receptive to myth. And so the cynicism of modern-day youth presents us with a great teachable moment. We must tell the story of this country˜particularly the stories of the winning of independence and establishment of a new government˜as a great myth.

It would seem, in fact, that myth-making and sharing is our highest calling as human beings, let alone as citizens of the Republic, the one way in which we can create. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings would seem a demontration of the idea that a tale is no less true for being myth. One is struck when watching The Two Towers by how applicable much of the story is to the events of the last several years. To have imbibed the myth is, in some sense, to be prepared to face the present danger. Will a people bereft of myth be so prepared?

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The Mystic Chords of Memory: Reclaiming American History (Wilfred M. McClay, December 13, 1995, Orthodoxy Today)

Historical consciousness is to civilized society what memory is to individual identity. One cannot say who or what one is -- one can't say one is anyone, or anything, at all -- without some selective retention of experience and source of continuity. One cannot learn, use language, pass on knowledge, raise offspring, or even dwell in society without the aid of memory. Without memory there are no workable rules of conduct, no standard of justice, no basis for restraining passions, no sense of the connection between an action and its consequences. There can be no sense of the future, as a moment in time we know will come, because we remember that other tomorrows have come, too. And there can be no recognition of the sacred, no act of consecration or devotion to the unseen -- for nothing exists but the proximate and the sensate. A culture without memory will necessarily be barbarous, no matter how technologically advanced and sophisticated, because the daily drumbeat of artificial sensations and amplified events will drown out all other sounds, including the strains of an older music.

In our day, even the academic study of history has begun to yield to such barbarism. For an increasing number of younger historians, the whole point of studying the past is to "prove" that all our inherited institutions, beliefs, conventions, and normative values are arbitrary -- mere "social constructions" in the service of ignoble power -- and are therefore utterly without legitimacy or authority. In this view, it is absurd to imagine that the study of the past could have any purpose beyond serving the immediate needs of the present -- and anyone who thinks otherwise is either disingenuous or stupid. The very idea of being enlarged or drawn out of ourselves by encountering the strangeness of the past -- and the strange familiarity of the past -- now seems quite beside the point.

Kirk's view of the matter was different, first of all because, for him, the past was a land of enchantment, pervaded with flitting shadows and ghostly presences. But it was also the source of what little real solidity there is to be found in the world. The study of the past, he believed, should cause us to recognize the ways that the past has authority over us. For historical consciousness, as he understood it, is not merely an awareness of the past and of one's own connection to it. It is the cultivation of respect for what cannot be seen, for the invisible sources of meaning and authority in our lives -- for the formative agents and foundational principles that, although no longer tangible, have made possible what is worthy in our own day. To borrow from the language of religious faith, the tutelage of historical consciousness teaches us what it means to walk by faith, and not only by sight.

We see, then, that historical knowledge and historical consciousness are two very different things; and the acquisition of historical consciousness, properly understood, will have to be something different from the academic study of history -- though the latter does not preclude the former. The acquisition of historical consciousness means learning the discipline of memory, which is far more than a matter of personal memory -- though that is, of course, where it begins and ends. Historical consciousness means learning to appropriate into our own moral imagination, and learning to be guided by, the distilled memories of others, the stories of things we never experienced firsthand. It means learning to make these things our own, learning to look out at the world we experience through their filter, learning to feel the living presence of the past inhering in the seeming inertness of the world as it is given to us. Of course, discernment between and among memories is of great importance. Not all are worth preserving, and not all are reliable. Here is where the practice of professional historians has been especially valuable, in preserving so much that would otherwise be lost and in ferreting out the evidence for certain propositions while uncovering the faulty basis for others. But the advocate of historical consciousness is likely to give preference to those memories whose importance and reliability have been established not merely by a select committee of the American Historical Association, but also by the passage of time. To repeat, historical knowledge and historical consciousness are different things, and the latter can never become the province of a historical priesthood.

The War Over the Gipper: Conservatives erupt. CBS cowers. The director walks. The untold
story behind the meltdown of "The Reagans" mini-series. (Sean Smith and Marc Peyser, 11/10/03, NEWSWEEK)

[T]he day the Times's story broke--"The Reagans" crew calls it "Black Tuesday"--the movie instantly became trouble. CBS chairman LeslieMoonves, who approved both the script and a juicy eight-minute trailer, ordered the lawyers to look at the movie again, and asked for assurancesthat the facts were all in order. When he was told everything was fine,Moonves started editing anyway. "There are things we think go too far," he told CNBC's Tina Brown last week. (Moonves also declined to be interviewed by NEWSWEEK.) At that point, Ackerman removed himself from the editing in protest and the actors stopped talking. "Nobody seems to know what¹s going on," Ackerman told NEWSWEEK. "Whatever is going on is going on very secretly."

As of late last week, the film had been through at least three edits. The most incendiary line--where Nancy asks the president to do more for AIDS victims and he replies, "They that live in sin shall die in sin"--has been cut. So has footage of a young Ron Reagan Jr. doing ballet. (Go figure.) Most of the other cuts come from Nancy¹s scenes. For all the concern about how the president is portrayed, Davis's take on Nancy looks like Lady Macbeth in a couture dress. "The film version is so milquetoast compared to
what her daughter wrote," says Carl Anthony, a producer of the film who once wrote speeches for Nancy. "It's odd to me when people get all worked up,
because it's called a dramatization. They forget what that means."

Once upon a time, when Hollywood too was patriotic and believed in American mythmaking, we got romantic dramatizations like Wilson and Sunrise at Campobello. But, of course, those were about Democrats. Today, in a time of war, with our very culture under attack, CBS decides to take a hatchet to one of the few great presidents we've ever had.

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-CBS set to pay for attack on the Gipper (The Age, November 2, 2003)

To play Reagan, the producers, gay activists and Democratic financial supporters Neil Meron and Craig Zadan went for James Brolin, aka Mr Barbra Streisand, who is almost as well known as his wife for loving the Clintons and condemning everything with the taint of Republicanism. And for Nancy the choice was Australia's Judy Davis, also no slouch at getting stuck into the ring-wing establishment, for whom Reagan remains a patron saint. Then there is the script. Only a few snatches have leaked out, but one excerpt in particular is infuriating the Reagans' admirers. The vignette has Nancy pleading for some quick money to combat the spread of AIDS. Donning a scowl not seen since Charlton Heston came down from the mountain, the videotic Gipper thunders: "They that live in sin shall die in sin!"

CBS might have thought it would be a good idea to tell the West Side story of the Reagan myth - but what the network didn't realise is that Reagan means many things to many people. The Americans who tell pollsters that he is one of their favourite presidents tend not to live in Manhattan, but that is no reason to question their sincerity. Reagan, they point out, is in no shape to defend himself. At 92, he's in the final stages of Alzheimer's disease.

"They've plunged a dagger into Dad's heart," says his son, talkback jock Michael Reagan, who is urging a boycott of CBS and its sponsors. A cheap smear, adds Newsday columnist James Pinkerton. Reagan "was a guy from Hollywood", he says. "He dealt with gays all his life. He was not a homophobe."

And not stupid, either, as columnist Alexander Cockburn tried to warn the left when Reagan ruled. Painting him as an old fool might ease the pain of seeing him in the White House, he wrote repeatedly, but it didn't alter the fact he kept winning every fight he picked. CBS's response: Well, what else would you expect conservatives to say? Trouble is, the shots aren't coming just from the right. Take Washington Post reporter Lou Cannon, who penned a series of warts-and-all Reagan biographies and never shrank from mentioning the loopy, impromptu lines that had Reagan's aides forever fearful of what he might say next. But from what the reporter has learned of the movie, "it's unfair - Reagan was not intolerant". If you want to assault Reagan's memory, say Cannon and others, take him down for being asleep at the wheel while the likes of Oliver North plotted the Iran-Contra conspiracy.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 2, 2003 5:01 AM