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The Journal of Big Bend Studies Volume VI Earl H. Elam, Editor

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MYTH AMERICA: VELLEITIES AND REALITIES OF THE AMERICAN ETHOS Sixth Annual Mary Thomas Marshall Lecture, delivered March 12, 1993, Texas State University System– Sul Ross, Alpine, Texas. Published in the Journal of Big Bend Studies, Volume 6, January 1994.

By Felipe de Ortego y Gasca Scholar in Residence in Social and Behavioral Studies, Sul Ross State University, Texas State University System

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about his social convictions. I was a child of the Roaring Twenties and came of age during the Great Depression. I remember the legless and armless veterans of World War I selling poppies on the corners of San Jacinto Plaza in San Antonio. As Americans, we all believed the “war to end all wars” had been a just war; and that as Americans we were all suffering together the ravages of the Depression. We believed that good times were, indeed, just around the corner, and that every cloud had a silver lining. We weren’t sure about a chicken in every pot or a car in every garage. Despair was for Communists. Good Americans kept the faith. God would not abandon His chosen people. After all, Manifest Destiny was God’s work–from sea to shining sea. Though I grew up in a segregated society, I did not see myself as the “other” in America. I sang the words to “The Star Spangled Banner” just as loud (however off-key) as my peers who, like me, were oblivious of the realities that belied the message of the song. I pledged allegiance to the flag of the Uni-ted States in forte voce, eyes beaming, hand over heart, sure of my place in America as a citizen of the nation, believing that someday I could be its presi-dent. Naivete and the innocence of youth kept alive in me that spark of the American dream which text-books all around me asserted was the birthright of every citizen. Like a good novitiate I never faltered in that faith. I went to bed praying for all the saints and the president. And, like Pippa, I knew that because God was in His heaven all was right with the world. I am not suggesting we abandon the American dream or become atheists. On the contrary. “We are,” as Shakespeare put it,” such stuff as dreams

any of the ideas in this presentation have found voice in previous works of mine, but this is the first time I have gathered the discrete strands of this theme and shaped them as “velleities and realities of the American ethos.” By “ethos” we mean the sum total of a people, that which unites them uniquely in nationhood. Over the years the images of America as “myth” or “invention” have insinuated themselves into my consciousness and work. These are not images of condemnation but of observation. At first, my images of America were those served and shaped by the curricula of the various public schools I attended. I never doubted that George Washington was the father of our country or that Lincoln freed the slaves. I believed the Pil-grims invented Thanksgiving and that Woodrow Wilson sent American troops to France to fight the war to end all wars. Growing up as a child of itinerant migrant workers, my sense of self was centered in the matrix of what Americans believed about their country and, by extension, about themselves. My parents believed in the American dream and shunned welfare which they thought was the nadir of existence. In other words, the “pits.” Only los desgraciados (the shame-less) went on the dole. During the depths of the Depression, my father worked at many jobs to keep us fed, clothed, and housed. Poor but proud! That’s how he thought of himself. My father would have made a good Puritan. He was, in addition to being a hard worker, an avowed Socialist. He fled Mexico in 1921 because he thought the Mexican Civil War (1910-1921) had stopped short of its promises to the people. Our home was consequently a waystation for Mexican radicals fleeing the ideological storm of Mexico. My father died unrepentant 2

are made on.” The person without dreams is one without aspi-rations, without thoughts of what can be, seeing life as it is and asking “Why?” instead of seeing life as it can be and asking “Why not?” No! The Ameri-can dream is still a good deux ex machina for the evolving pageant of the country. If we lose the dream, we will surely be, as John W. Gardner (1965) put it, “A less spirited people, a les s magnanimous people and an immeasureably less venturesome people.” However, as Americans, we need to be reassured by realities that the country is still committed to the dream. If not, then we are being opiated by the rhetoric of the dream, offering us words instead of substance, turning the dream thus to ashes and like the colocynth–that bitter fruit of the desert–providing neither succor nor sustenance.

Modern Greeks learn about their classical ancestors in schools, through the media, and in the architectural remains of that long-gone period. Through that historical thread, the Greek ethos links the past with the present, instilling in every Greek the sense of a shared community experience and national pride. The Parthenon is thus a “living” reminder to contem-porary Greeks of the splendor that was Greece in antiquity. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey have preserved for Greeks the essence of the Greek ethos down through the centuries. The spirit of Odysseus beats in every Greek heart.

Ethos, Nation and Self It is out of ethos that a concept of nation emerges and out of which a concept of self blooms. To see how ethos impinges on the creation of nation and consequently on the concept of self, one needs but consider the polities created by distinctive groups. A German government reflects the German people. This does not mean a homogeneous people, but the people who consider themselves German or think of themselves as German (within national boundaries that define that Germanness). Or as the Greeks of antiquity thought of themselves as Hellenes despite their different city-states. Diasporically, German Americans may think of themselves as Germans but in terms of their polity they are Americans. As Americans, it is not the German ethos they identity with but the American ethos. They are thus not German nationals but American nationals. So, too, Mexican Americans identity not with the Mexican ethos but with the American ethos. When teaching American Ethnic Literature I ask my students during the first session to tell me their nationalities. Invariably their responses include: Irish, English, German, Italian, French, Mexican, Dutch, et al. I then ask them if they have passports from these countries. Realization creeps in and they answer: American. They have grasped the difference. I explain then the concepts of national origin and of ethnicity. Then we talk about the concept of nation.

NATIONS AND ETHOS Characteristics of Ethos An ethos is the way of life characteristic of a particular society in its deep-seated habits of thinking and acting. Nations bind their citizens to national aspirations by means of ethos which become part of national identity. That’s why Czechs are different from Croats and Croats are different from Bosnians. While language and culture are indeed distinctive characteristics of a people, it is ethos which ultima-tely binds together all the stalks of national identity. In many ways, ethos is the “spirit” of a people, the zeitgeist of a civilization or a system as expressed in its culture, institutions, ways of thought, philosophy and religion. Additionally, ethos contributes to the collective identity of a people, to their sense of con-tinuity, to their consciousness of belonging to a par-ticular group that exists in time and has existed his-torically and spatially across the generations.

Evolution of Ethos The ethos of a people is not haphazard. It evolves over time, out of fact and fancy, out of truth and lies, out of myths. In many ways, the ethos of contempo-rary Greek life and culture, for example, directly reflects the myths of classical Greece.

Nations and Common Heritage The principal objective of a nation is to convince its constituent people(s) that they possess a 3

common heritage manifested in the language of the nation. In many countries, a common heritage lies rooted in affiliative beliefs linked ethno-culturally and/or eth- no-linguistically. It is belief in the common heritage that creates national allegiance. Not always, though. An anecdote is told about peasants in a district of West Galicia who, when asked if they were Poles, replied “We are quiet people.” To the question, “Then are you Germans?” the peasants replied, “We are decent folk” The anec-dote reminds me how easily we identity Americans of Mexican ancestry in the Southwest as “Mexicans.” Consequently, when asked if I’m “Spanish” (a euphemism for Mexican), I sometimes reply, “No, I’m Unitarian.”

Myth is also a form of discourse, at once communi-cative, informative, passionate, and resonant. Joseph Campbell (1988) said myth was rooted in human need. That may be why the Slovak national anthem, for example, appeals to Slovak identity with the words: Up, ye Slovaks, our true Slovak language is still living while our loyal hearts are beating for our nation. Living, living, yes and deathless is the Slovak spirit. Hell and lightning, hell and lightning rage in vain against us.

And the song “America” tells us: O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain. For purple mountains majesty, above the fruited plain. America! America! God shed His grace on thee. And crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.

Beyond Ethos Because ethos provides us with a contextual way of seeing ourselves, it is thus a discursive social con-struct. George A. Kelly (1963) defines a “construct” as an abstract way of contextually categorizing phenomena around us, such phenomena sorted through a personal or cultural template often used like Procrustes’ bed. Constructively, we see, then, what the ethos lets us see. Einstein understood this phenomenon when he theorized that we see what the language let’s us see. This is not to say we are inflexibly bound by the ethos or the language. Merely that ethos (and its language) define the parameters of our ability to see. Recognizing those limitations, Einstein was able to move beyond the structures of ethos and language, inventing a mathematics to accommodate what he perceived about the universe beyond the boundaries of ethos and language. Freud too created a vocabulary to accommodate what neither ethos nor language permitted. Because ethos orients the way we see the world, we do not see (or at least have difficulty in seeing) the world in various other ways. Robert Heinlein (1961), the brilliant science-fiction writer, noted that all the languages available to us at present are inadequate and that the mind loses a large part of its substance when it comes into contact with words.

I confess that when I sing the song my breast swells up with some indefinable emotion–perhaps patriot-ism, a good word much maligned. After all, I did serve my country during three wars. But I consider the words of the song America more symbolic of what America can be than a description of what it has been. In like fashion, the Pledge of Allegiance says: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands: one nation, indivisible, under God, with liberty and justice for all.

Whose God? I sometimes wonder, mortified by the division rampant in the streets, remembering that blacks did not gain the benefits of liberty until they marched for, bled for it, and died for it in the fifties and sixties, and that the quest for justice in America is still a battle being waged by many. Does “justice” mean “just us,” the privileged of the mainstream?

Epistemic Function of Myth Myth serves an epistemic function. The knowledge that anchors us in time and place as a people is more often than not drawn from a tapestry woven of delicate fibers, spun on looms of memory, which have transformed coarse mater into a tenuous design of our own choosing. I have used

MYTH AND ETHOS Myth as Discourse 4

this image to define the United States as a tapestry of may colors, still on the loom, still in the making. The final design of the tapestry still not apprehended. It is through the agency of myth that we learn about our forebears and their struggles for the nation. The myths of El Cid shape the consciousness of Spain just as the myths of Rolande shape the consciousness of France. Robert L. Wilkins (1972) writes, “Historians can debunk the myths about our past, they can reinterpret the historical record and rewrite the schoolbooks, but they cannot ignore nor easily dispel, the magic of historical memory to mold [people’s] lives and thought..” The power of historical memory was evident at the First Vatican Council of 1869-70 where some Bishops protested the proclamation of Papal infallibility, pointing out that the historical record did not support it. Papal infallibility won out because most of the Bishops assembled there argued for a reconstruction of the past based on historical memory rather than the record.

In Cards of Identity (1955), one of Nigel Dennis’ characters asserts, “Identity is the answer to everything.” Indeed, everywhere we go we are asked to identify ourselves. We carry a profusion of evidence to prove who we are. Our word is not sufficient. Identity, as I have said, grows out of ethos, out of the concept of self that it promotes. Who w e are emerges paramount in the modern state. Which is why, perhaps, Franz Kafka sought to alert us to the excesses of the authoritarian state in its zeal to de-identify the hapless person, to designate him or her by number rather than as a person with a name. The Nazis serialized their victims.

Identity as Semiotic Code Identity is part of the semiotic code of ethos. It is a sign in the scheme of meaning. Perhaps the reason identity is so crucial in human history is that it is central to the roles we play in that drama. According to Sidney Jourard (1964), “no social system can exist unless the members play their roles and play them with precision and elegance.” Much of the world’s literature deals with the quest for identity and meaning. In the epic of Gilgamesh, for example, the hero’s quest is a search for this roots in order to find out if he was a divine god or just a mere mortal. If he was a god, Gilgamesh thought, then knowing that would help him play the role appropriate to that knowledge. Many of us stand taller, walk taller knowing we are descendants of Lord so and so, Prince such and such. I confess a modicum of hubris knowing I’m a descendant (on my mother’s side) of one of the sixteen families from the Canary Islands who founded La Villita in 1731, forerunner of the city of San Antonio. It seems strange to place so much value on identity rooted on the tropes of ontological realities–myth and ethos.

Myth as Empowerment Myth is an empowering process. The myth of George Washington and the Cherry tree enhances our sense of truthfulness, a value we have canonized in the American ethos. The myths of the Old West reinforce our sense and awe of the pioneering spirit, another value canonized in the American ethos. The myth of small towns promotes our regard for the agricultural origins of the country and our esteem for the bucolic values canonized in the American ethos. The myth of the Alamo stirs our sense of outrage at the slaughter of the innocents. Another value in the pantheon of the American ethos. Of course, the myth of the American cowboy–as personified, perhaps, by Larry McMurtry’s picaresque cowboy. Cadillac Jack–gives us pause to reflect on the passing of an American icon. The myth of the American cowboy preserves the romantic nostalgia we have for an era that has passed much too swiftly. We have come to place great reliance on the extrinsic symbols of these myths, believing that great truths lie in their epis-temology.

Identity and Ontology For Paul Tournier (1957), identity is at once an ensemble of phenomena. “If we concentrate on the phenomena,” he points out, ”the person escapes us; if we see the person, the phenomenon eludes us.” And yet we are inescapably caught by the gravitational pull of myth and ethos in their orbits

MYTH, ETHOS, AND IDENTITY Cards of Identity 5

around identity. They are like Charybdis and Scylla, luring us with their song as we pass through the straits of life.

how reality is understood at a given moment is determined by the conventions of communication in force at the time . . . and how we think and behave in ordinary life is largely a matter of how we understand our realities (Littlejohn, 111-112) The French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure put it this way: “The point of view creates the object” (Dineen, 331). This is not to say that all reality is a construct of the mind. For example, a tree is not a mental construct. It exists in the world. However, how we relate to a tree is part of our discursive social construction of reality, our template by which we sort and make sense of the phenomena around us. If we see trees in terms of building materials only, that’s indicative of our social construct. If we see trees as part of a natural scheme to be preserved, that too reflects our social construct. The way a dog regards a tree reflects the social construction of the dog.

Authenticity Much has been written about identity and authenticity. Many psychologists believe most people are inauthentic, hiding behind imagos (projected images) they proffer as themselves. Apropos of authenti-city, Pascal wrote,”We strive continually to adorn and preserve our imaginary self,” slaves to the personage we have invented or which has been imposed on us (Tournier, 27-28). And still we remain mysteries to ourselves as we peel away, like onions, the layers of identity. Despite the classical injunction to know ourselves, we move through life like Albert Camus’ stranger, alienated from life, even from ourselves because we do not know who we are.

What is Not

The Past and Authenticity

In a musical version of Hamlet which I adapted with Mark Medoff (Tony award author of Children of a Lesser God), Bernardo, one of the guards on the parapet who has seen the ghost of Hamlet, Sr., sings (by way of explaining the apparition): “Do you see that tree? That’s no tree you see. What you think you see is not. And what is not is what you see.” The point is that our senses are not always the most reliable for processing sensory information. This does not mean they are useless, just that we need to exercise prudence in how we assess what we see. Sometimes our senses deceive us, filling in for us what is actually not there. For example, when we look at a quarter moon, many people insist they can see the whole ring of the moon. That’s a case of our eyes providing for us the continuous surface of the moon because that’s what we expect to see.

Little wonder, then, that we seek to anchor our “selves” in what we perceive to the surety of the past–the myth and ethos of our culture, our nation, exalting that past, if necessary, even more fraudulen-tly or hyperbolically. People and nations invent themselves, reinvent themselves everyday for any number of reasons, as Jean Paul Sartre (1964) observed. Pakistan is an invention of Indian Mus-lims. South Africa is an invention of the Boers. The new South Africa is a reinvention by their descen-dants. Our country was invented by white-European Americans for their own purposes. That’s not a cas-tigation, but an observation. For example, Republi-cans invented themselves in antebellum days to gain the presidency. There’s nothing sinister in invention or reinvention. They are facts of life. America today is not what it was yesterday; will not be what it is today. Time, tides, and circumstances change all.

Ethos and Change

MYTH, ETHOS, AND REALITY

I think it’s important to ask: Why are concepts of time, space, and matter given differentially to people? Diverging views do not flaw or invalidate the ethos. Such divergences mean merely that the ethos is in a state of evolutionary flux. In other words, the ethos accommodates change, transforming itself through the incremental growth and

What is Reality According to the psychologist Kenneth Gergen, the world does not present itself objectively to the observer . . . the linguistic categories through which reality is apprehended are situational . . . 6

Skim milk masquerades as cream. Externals don’t portray insides, Jekylls may be masking Hydes.

development of the people while still controlling them. Paradoxical as this may sound, the ethos of a people permeates their existence both limiting and at the same time encouraging them to test the barriers it has created for their own order. Nowhere is this more evident than in the dissolution of the Communist empire, controlled by an ethos of centralization, submission, and forced service to the state. The ethos emerging in post-Communist Russia may look different, but in fact is not. For the Russian ethos–as manipulated by the Communists–is of long duration with roots in antiquity. What may emerge is the essential Russian ethos which, like Milton’s unsightly root” in another country, core a bright and golden flower. The Russian spirit–its zeitgeist–will endure despite the nature of the government that rules the country. Just as the American people endured the reigns of George Bush and Jimmy Carter, both of whom had different visions of what they wanted America to be. Ulti-mately, America will be what the American people want it to be–consistent with the American ethos and the realities it harbors and/or eschews.

The Puritan Past After more than 350 years of American culture, we still think of the United States as rooted in Puritan tradition, even though there is little that is Puritan in contemporary America. Nevertheless, when a latter-day minister preaches a fire-and-brimstone sermon we identify that kind of sermon with the Puritan preaching tradition of Jonathon Edwards, taking little note that fire-and-brimstone sermons were not the exclusive preserve of American Puritans. When we see Americans working hard, we say they are working in the tradition of the Puritan ethic even though the ethic of work–hard work–is found in cultures globally. Still, we identify that kind of individual enterprise and initiative as the Puritan ethic–translated latterly as the Protestant ethic. So ingrained in the American mind and ethos has the notion of the Puritan work ethic become that we bemoan the loss of the Puritan age, failing to realize that the Puritans believed in not feeding those who did not work. Though seeking God’s grace, they did not believe in charity, unless it was for the old, the lame, and the inform. When we think of the Puritans we laud their efforts to establish religious toleration in America. That notion of religious freedom is deeply embedded in the American ethos, but “those Pilgrims never dreamed of establishing religious freedom in their colonies. Indeed, they had no idea of [religious] toleration” (Wilken, 9). Religious freedom in Puritan America meant religious freedom only for them. What is little known about the Puritans is that among them in the early Plymouth Colony there was not one who could be called a Man of Letters. Bliss Perry (1912), their notable critic informs us, “they produced no poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture or music worthy of the name ‘because’ English Puri-tanism was hostile to Art.” The Puritan Common-wealth closed the theaters in England and forbade production of Shakespeare. Only religious verse was permitted. That’s why John Milton survived. Americans who today believe the values of the country in those by-gone days were more substantive and worthy of reclamation allow the

VELLEITIES AND REALITIES OF THE AMERICAN ETHOS Starting Out The veils obscuring the realities of America began dropping off for me during my undergraduate studies at Pitt where I studied the runes of literature and lan-guages. I started out wanting to be a metallurgical engineer but wound up as a student of cultures be-cause the requirements of that preparation were more compatible with my new-found intellectual interests. After four years, I left Pitt without taking a degree but armed with intellectual curiosity. At Pitt, I found the Apocrypha and the Areopagitica and Alduous Huxley’s dictum that “people are not always who they seem to be nor who they tell each other they are.” Restraint often trumps honesty. From that dictum and from some lines of atrocious verse I extrapolated that the same was true for nations, and that what people believe about them-selves is the product of cultural formulas nations create to transmit themselves cross the generations. The verse goes like this: Things are seldom what they seem.

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velleities about those values to obscure their historical outcomes. According to Julian Jaynes (1972), “Looking back in memory is a great deal of invention.”

Not everything from the American past is remember-ed. Unfortunately, much of it is made up, fabricated for whatever purposes have suited the authors or inventors. To this pint, Maxine Hong Kingston has Bok Goong explain in her book China Men how the customs of the Chinese community came into being. “We made them up,” Bok Goong says. “We can make up customs because we’re the founding [fathers] of this place.” Many Americans believe that the real history of the United States is the one they are carrying in their memory. Historians know that history is a matter of perspective and interpretation –perhaps all of life is a matter of perspective and interpretation.

Culture and Beliefs In the context that I have framed myth and ethos, what do Americans believe about themselves? I daresay most Americans believe they are selfreliant, tolerant, forgiving, good-natured, fair, honest, depen-dable, hard-working, resourceful, God-fearing, and inter alia, punctual. What do Americans believe about their country? They believe that America values education, equal justice for all, that hard work is rewarded. Americans believe in the Constitution, the separation of church and state. They believe in being good neighbors. The list is long. How have we, as Americans, come to believe these things about ourselves and about our country? Who done–it? The American ethos, that’s who done-it! But that should not be taken as an indictment. In fact, there is nothing wrong with the American ethos. The things Americans believe about themselves and their country are commendable traits and values. It is the ethos, after all, that helps us keep our eyes upon the doughnut and not upon the hole. That comes from a piece of doggerel I chanced upon some fifty years ago during World War II:

Reframing the Question At this stage of my life I have come to understand that wisdom lies not in the answers we provide to the questions of life but in knowing how to frame the questions. Sad to say there are people who believe they have the answers and who go on repeating the same actions and behaviors expecting each time different results. Fortunately for us, James Watson (1968) and Francis Crick stopped duplicating count-less experiments on the structure of DNA and reframed the question about their inquiry. The result was the discovery of the “double helix.” That was a breakthrough moment for science. Such a break-through is possible in our understanding of the American past. But we must be willing to look at that past without rosecolored glasses, willing to forego the stance that: My mind’s made up, don’t confuse me with the facts. Willing to look at the record rather than accept the bishops’ word about the past, ready, like Watson and Crick, to reframe the question.

As you wander on through life, whatever be your goal, Keep your eye upon the doughnut, and not upon the hole.

Where we run afoul of the American ethos is when we put on rose-colored glasses to look at our-selves and our past. Things go awry when we de-ceive ourselves that our conduct is commensurate with our beliefs. That what we believe, in fact, is the way we are, always have been. Like the Bishops of the First Vatican Council, we prefer to believe in our collective memory rather than the record. Unfortu-nately, it is faulty historical memory that contributes to the flawed construction of a nation’s past–and the realities it believes in.

Praise and Values Looking back on our past, then, that mythic and in-vented past, how can we praise the values of the founding fathers of the United States when they did not believe in founding mothers? How can we praise the values of the founding fathers when many of them kept slaves and believed in the tenets of that peculiar institution? How can we praise the values of Jeffersonian democracy when those values wee exclusive rather than inclusive? When property was valued more than people? And

Tradition and Truth 8

Realities

when some people were valued more as property than human beings?

In like fashion, the Old West was not as it has been painted in American texts. Frederick Jackson Turner saw it one way. My ancestors in that Old West saw it another way. The Old West was not a vacant space when Anglo American settlers ventured there. The history of Texas does not begin in 1836. Research by Mexican American historians indicate that as many as 150 Tejanos fought at the Alamo instead of the usual six sometimes cited. One of the velleities about the Alamo is that Americans were there defending American values. Freedom is not a uniquely Ameri-can value. The defender of the Alamo were Mexican citizens fighting the Mexican government. Texas land grants required that foreigners acquiring them become Mexican citizens. The Old West was not a desolate and unpopulated place where one found only patches of wild and drunken Indians, lazy Mexicans, and hot-blooded señoritas. Anglo-American writers of the Old West lied about the place. In Two Year’s Before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana, for example, told denigrating stories about the Pacific settlements of Mexico, especially San Francisco, from the point of view influenced by his ethos–a hardly tolerant ethos in his time. I’m not saying the Hispanic ethos of the nineteenth century was better than the Anglo ethos of the time. On the contrary, I’m saying that the point of view of one ethos ought to be considered by the point of view of the other participating ethos of the time .The Hispanic presence in the Old West temper-ed the ingress of Anglo settlers to the area. Countless Anglo men married Hispanic women, had children by Hispanic women, producing issue comparable to the issue produced by Spanish men with Indian women-a hybrid variation of mestizaje. The image of Hispanics in the Old West by Helen Hunt Jackson, Gertrude Atherton, and Willa Cather, for example, were fraudulent, focusing on the fantasy heritage of the Old West. Small towns in America are not as they are portrayed in myth, as the ethos remembers them. There were far too many small towns where African Americans did not let the sun set on them, stayed off their streets at night, and stepped off their sidewalks for white women. Many African Americans stepped off the sidewalks at the sight of any white person. There

Velleities One of the velleities we have canonized in the American ethos is that a special relationship exists between the United States and England since the first Europeans who populated the American colonies were English–from whom we are all cultural and linguistic descendants. What of Native Americans? Are they chopped liver? And what of the Spaniards who by 1620 had settlements and forts in Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, Texas, New Mexico, and California. What of Cabeza de Vaca’s travels across Texas from 1527 to 1535? Or Gaspar de Villagra’s epic poem about the battle at Acoma, New Mexico in 1590? (Ortego, 1971). This mono-mythic notion of the English and the growth of civilization in America has blinded Americans to the realities of European ingress to the hemisphere. As I said, because ethos orients the way we see the world, we do not see (or at least have difficulty in seeing) the world in various other way. Our children learn early in school about the Mayflower. Sometimes enlightened teachers tell them about the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, or even about the ship Amistad. On more than one occasion students have challenged my accounts of sixteenth century Ame-rica, believing that the English brought civilization to America in 1610, failing to realize that Native Americans already had civilization prior to the arrival of the Europeans (including the Spaniards). And when I tell them about the century of Spanish exploration in North America preceding the arrival of John Smith in 1610, they smile at me benignly, thinking I’m some kind of provocateur. Or they’ll say: But the Spaniards were only interested in gold not civilization like the English who were interested in settling the continent (another myth). They are unaware of the extent to which they have been influenced by the Black Legend in the American ethos: that Spaniards and their kinsmen were the villains in North American history while the English and their kinsmen were heroes in that saga. Ameri-cans have created caricatures and stereotypes about Hispanics, black, American Indians, Asian Ameri-cans, Feminists, Gays, to conform to their beliefs about these groups. 9

were too many small towns in America where African Americans and Mexican Americans had to eat outside their restau-rants. There wee too many small towns in America where “Nigras” and “Meskins” could work for whites but could not sit on the same verandas with them. As for the American cowboy, he was a vaquero first, passing on the lore of the range to Anglo newcomers who mangled Spanish words like calabozo, calling it calaboose; and juzgado, calling it hoosegow. And thought la riata was one word, adding the English article “the” to the word “riata” which already had the article “la”–thus saying “the” the” rope when saying “the lariat.” Cowboy voca bulary reflects its Hispanic origins in words like ro-deo, chaps, mustang, mesa, arroyo. Linguistic appro-priations are inevitable consequences of languages in contact. Histories of the American past should reflect more accurately those contacts and those appropria-tions.

travelers, though, we need to remember that the map is not the territory (Ortego, 1992). Places are not necessarily as they are des-cribed in travel brochures. In like fashion, the past is never the whole story. As story–narrative–we ask: to what extent is the ethotic narrative (story) of the American past a matter of pragmatic and creative immediacy than of a correspondence to the way things actually were or are? Anthony Kerby (1991) tells us that “although the past is a constant horizon and support for the present, it is not thereby given with fullness of meaning to reflection and recol-lection,”–the latter being both “selective and inter-pretive.” This is an easy elision to the Lacanian notion of memory and reality–the metaphoric and metanymic transformations of experience and cog-nition, neither of which are concerned with verisimi-litude but with the construction of a past that meets our approval. Thus, the American ethos historizes velleity as reality.

Historical Amnesia

SUMMING UP

One of the more pernicious velleities of the American ethos is that of America as a redeemer nation. Wilkin points out that such an expectation has grown out of “the historical interpretation of the uniqueness of the American past” and that “even to this day, the belief in a ‘redeemer nation’ shapes the self-understanding of this nation, influences its way of life, education, and culture, and even determines aspects of our foreign policy.” Talk about Political correctness. Such a heroic view of the United States requires an awesome historical amnesia not to men-tion an equally awesome historical myopia. This is not to say one should not think well of one’s country. But we do, after all, expect Germany to face up to its Nazi past. It seems fitting to ask the same of the United States, to face up to its past. Any country, really.

In Ecrits, the psychologist Jacques Lacan (1977) contends that “the unconscious is neither primordial nor instinctual; what is knows about the elementary is no more than the elements of the signifier,” that “the world of words . . . creates the world of things.” In other words, human phenomena are interpreted subjectively via language. That is, things are what we say they are. The world is as we “say” it is and not the way we do not “say” it is. Subjectivity has thus fecundated the American ethos. To conclude, ethos is a powerful construct by which human endeavor is valorized. The ethos becomes thus a guiding telos, creating for us sustainable velleities and realities that support our identity and direction in time and space.

National Memory

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Still, the vitality and unity of a nation depend on common memory, common hope, and common faith rooted in that memory. It is well, however, to remind ourselves that the value of historical memory is that it allows us to deal with our angst from a perspective that transcends time. Indeed, a people without a historical memory is like a country with no maps to guide the traveler. As

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Copyright © 1993 by the author. All rights reserved.

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