![]() So even if, for a socially conscious American fiction writer, the imperative to engage with our uniquely contentious present might feel especially strong right now, you could make the case that our past is that present’s real battleground. “Make America Great Again” is essentially a demand to return not to any actual, bygone America, but to the core myths themselves, and to criminalize disloyalty to them (hence the panic about critical race theory). We are in something of a golden age of this kind of prophylactic, dissent-averse national mythmaking. What is a western, after all, but a kind of hermeneutic care package of perversely lionizing myths about the most shameful facts of our inheritance? Who were the pioneers, really, or the Founding Fathers? Where does the wealth of America’s capitalist princes come from? What’s a self-made man? Some of our most internalized parables of American motive, American character, are soothing misdirections. ![]() ![]() America’s own foundational stories-its heroes and archetypes, its go-to plots-are perhaps better read not as a way of understanding ourselves, but as permission to avoid understanding ourselves. $16.95.Įvery nation has delusions about itself that it holds dear, delusions that take the form of stories. ![]()
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