Tag Archives: preferred narratives

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The Recurring Ruptures of American Life

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Our official origin story of a national melting pot is what many still express, but millions of citizens carry the scars of bigotry, racism, sexism and homophobia. It is an old story that still puts many Americans out of the picture.

Live long enough on the unsteady terrain of American civil affairs and it seems like the seismic upheavals are frequent and endless. Patterns of breakdown bump into other existential threats that vie for attention. Natural disasters overlay human ones, as in the devastation in the Los Angeles area. Just now, the most recent fissures are evident in racial ghosting, anti-WOKE conspiracies, federal dismemberment, and the takeover of national electoral politics by the super-rich. All feed contorted mutations of language that almost make the absurd seem plausible.

The nation’s material wealth may soften the experience of moving too fast over unstable ground. But the ground will still win, with many retreating into origin stories that mostly skirt the white-man tribalism that has surfaced yet again. The American skill for euphemism has meant that patterns of dominance and control have mostly been renamed out of existence. But The remnants of past ruptures lie around us in a visible topology. It is hard not to be drawn to the edge, where dreams of national destiny keep us focused on the horizon rather than what is at our feet. Our official origin story of a national melting pot is what many still express, but millions of citizens carry the scars of bigotry, racism, sexism and homophobia.

Rumbles from the unstable ground come often enough to keep our politics in a state of a perpetual suspicion, a thread that extends far back to skirmishes with the French in the 1750s, and the British in the 1770s. In the modern era the nation faced real threats of Nazi domination, as well as exaggerated fears of victimage at the hands of Soviet or Chinese communists. Active thoughts of conspiracy blend with recurring instances of literal and rhetorical assassinations that have easily been top of mind in the eras of Kennedy, Nixon, King, Reagan, the second Bush, and now, Trump’s dangerous delusions of a hostility everywhere.

Trump has turned almost every relationship with other states into a test of wills, energized by a laundry list of imagined slights that require retribution. This is most obvious in the hostile turn on Canada, whose public discourse has mostly escaped the shadows and fog thrown off by American political rhetoric. As is often noted, maybe Canadians profited from missing a searing national birth in a true revolution. They and most of us can’t fathom the demons that currently drive the economic vengeance of their neighbor.

The “national story” is full of too many cracks to be covered over in the “preferred narratives” we tell ourselves.

We think the long reach of time is in our favor, ignoring the warning of Henry Adams, who wrote in 1879 that history “must submit to the final and fundamental necessity Degradation.”

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This idea of decline is a continual theme in the work of one of the nation’s most important observers of our national life. In Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) Joan Didion, who passed away in 2021, refused to yield to the romance of 60s liberalism, with promises of a “counterculture” forging ahead in a new and less imperialistic nation. A writer of fiction and thoughtful books of observational reporting, the California native usually began with the trenchant principle that we tell each other stories “in order to live.” But her method always to included implicit caveat that narratives invite counternarratives. If most writers stayed in the center lanes of thought, Didion was the more dangerous observer willing to stay on the verges to get a better view of the abyss. Born in California and drawn to its fluid culture of Malibu as well as Goldwater libertarianism, Didion noticed the obvious decline of interpersonal connection that was beginning to favor atomized experience over collective action. Writing through the last quarter of the last century, she also saw a drift away from  institutional and personal distrust that advanced democracies needs to flourish. As biographer Tracy Daugherty noted, “Didion felt this historical decline in her bones. The “national story” was full of too many cracks to be covered over in the “preferred narratives” we tell ourselves. Now, even the wealthy want to report ‘exact representations of their own victimization’ to whomever will listen. Such talk of the otherness of strangers results in the popular idea that even affluent cities have been “ruined” by the poor or homeless.

Roughly half in our polarized society thought their abuse was caused by large government, while others have recognized the value of a federal role in knitting the nation together. She tended to side with the skeptics, using her voice in the literate style of the “new journalism.” In one memorable account of hippie parents in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury the preferred narrative might often the sentimental romance with the Age of Aquarius. Didion offered another memorable view, including an account of a five-year-old in a squalid apartment hooked on LSD.

Reading Didion’s work in the 80s led many of us to conclude that her reporting about a fake national dream seemed too dark for the times. We wanted to see the pleasant glow, but we missed the fire. She was not distracted to and recorded the relentless and cyclical collapse of national intentions in Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Panama and elsewhere. Halting steps toward the leveling of opportunity was always the best part of the American project. But gains were offset by the trauma and eventual numbness from the spate of assassinations, violent crime, school shootings, and racial tensions even in seemingly progressive cities. These fissures in American life seemed beyond what was possible with our incrementalist politics. With a few exceptions, like Lyndon’s Johnson’s Great Society programs in the early 1960s, it seems clear that otherwise limited horizons and an ossifying culture would make little headway in smoothing these kinds of fault lines.  As Didion once noted, “The center will not hold.”

Our constitution blocks the timelier self-corrections that can happen in parliamentary systems. Squint a little and an independent executive and Congress in one month can easily look like a politburo and an oligarch in the next. Until the election of Trump, the nation had not faced so committed a chaos agent, and one from a blue state. The election caught us looking in the wrong direction, guessing that our largest existential rupture would come at the hands of a dominant southern Congress.

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Intrusive Counternarratives

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[The brutal war that Russia is waging against Ukraine is a reminder that, even with obvious atrocities, the victims never have exclusive rights to tell their own authentic narrative.  Most of us are aghast at the falsehoods Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin are passing off about the nature of the conflict.  But their counternarrative to the West’s descriptions of wanton aggression clearly has consequences.  Not only do many Russians buy these dubious justifications about “de-Nazification,” but the same narrative has helped to buy the silence of Russian partners like India, Israel and China.  It is the peculiar and sometimes disturbing nature of human thought that groups can so easily entertain views that could be disproved by what is happening on the ground.]

We think that our most precious possessions are the things we have acquired or the relationships we have.  But for many people, the “right” to tell their own story looms just as large.  Narratives of our personal or tribal lives may be the keys to understanding who we are and where we came from.  But in fact they are not exclusively ours to tell.  We don’t have proprietary rights to our own personal histories.

This is both self-evident and enormously consequential. For the moment, forget the well-known fantasist narratives of Donald Trump.  We can’t even agree even about the foundational stories about our collective past.  What Christopher Columbus or Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln actually achieved will always involve contentious narratives. We can also be unpleasantly surprised by accounts of our own actions that offered by those we know.

It’s apparent that anyone can write someone else’s biography.  Even biographers who are out of favor with their subjects or never met them are frequently eager to weigh in with their own versions.  For example, we were recently surrounded by multiple narratives of the life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.  There’s Walter Isaacson’s 2011 best-selling biography (Steve Jobs, 2011) and the Aaron Sorkin film based on it.  Both recognize Job’s  vision for turning computing into a necessary life skill.  And both portray a garage innovator with both a knack for ingenious design and also an inability to acknowledge his co-visionaries.  Then there’s Alex Gibney’s very different documentary (Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, 2015) detailing a single-minded marketing genius reluctant to engage with the unpleasant facts surrounding the Chinese factories that produce Apple products.  Amazon currently lists about ten books on Jobs. The point is that we can count on each version to offer a different person to readers.

The same is true for groups that seek power or legitimacy in the larger culture by presenting what are sometimes very different accounts about their pasts and their aspirations.  What’s the story of Scientology? It depends on who you ask. How has the institutional life of Catholicism evolved since revelations of widespread child abuse were widely reported at the beginning of the new century?  Skeptics and admirers routinely compete for attention to relay their stories.  In many ways the fissures that are spread across the culture deepen over time, often expanding into complete fault lines as interested parties vie for media access to “get their story out.”

There’s a whole lexicon of useful terms to represent these divisions.  We talk not only about “narratives,” but also “contested narratives,”  “counter-narratives,” “preferred narratives,” “backstories,” “storylines,” “myths,” “legends,” “lore,” “rumors” and “histories” that are disputed as “more fiction than fact.”  Facebook champions an individual’s own preferred narrative: a kind of carefully constructed window display of one’s life. Most other digital outlets focusing on the culture of celebrity capture readers by taking a very different turn:  favoring counter-narratives and backstories.  Sometimes they are even true.

Novelists who would seem to have the advantage of exclusive use of the products of their imagination are inclined to end up in tangles of their own making when readers find possible connections to known events. Readers can also be unforgiving if a scribe borrows another’s particularly traumatic narrative.  A few years ago the prolific Joyce Carol Oates came under criticism in New Jersey for embellishing on a news story about a college student found dead in a campus garbage container. The short story, Landfill, was published in the New Yorker, to the chagrin of the student’s family and others in the region.

For all of our hope that our stories can be communicated in ways that bring us credit, the fact is that we can never claim rights to exclusivity. Ask anyone who has recently been in the news how well their views have been represented or how they were characterized. You are apt to get a response of mild frustration.  What we see in ourselves is probably not what those who retell our stories are going to report.  For individuals or groups without power this is sad to witness. Groups lose something basic when they lack the means to communicate their preferred history.  The rest of us battle on, occasionally discovering a narrative that gives us more credit than we deserve.