Week of March 10, 2008

In 2006, a book was published entitled What Would the Founders Do? a play on words on the adage,"What Would Jesus Do?" The cover of the book shows Washington, Hamilton, Franklin and other Founding Fathers sitting around a table in a modern day bar quaffing beers and presumably mulling over the events of modern day America and passing judgment on them. Here in Washington recently, the answer to that question by some has become"We don't know what the Founders would do since it's taking so long to process their papers."

Sounding a call similar to [Arthur] Schlesinger's [concern about the disuniting of America], Bruce Cole, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, recently worried that today's students are ignorant of the history that provides a common national bond. To remedy this, he has commissioned forty laminated posters to be distributed to high schools across the country, including Grant Wood's 1931 painting The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere."You can call them myths if you want," averred Cole,"but unless we have them, we don't have anything."

Cole needn't worry about an impending myth shortage. Myths fill the national consciousness the way excited gas molecules fill a vacuum. When has our stockpile of myths been so depleted that we needed an emergency infusion of laminated posters? As one set of myths goes backstage others jostle in the wings, waiting for their moment. In a nation as diverse as ours, we instinctively search for symbols—in children's biographies, coloring contests, the next Disney movie—that allow us to rally around a common name, event, or idea. As Alon Confino has written, national memory demands compromise and requires adulteration. Rather than consistency, memory is" constituted by different, often opposing, memories that, in spite of their rivalries, construct common denominators that overcome on a symbolic level real social and political differences."

The common denominators that today draw together Americans of different colors, regions, and ages look somewhat different than those of former eras. While there are still some inventors, entrepreneurs, and entertainers, the people who come to the fore are those who acted to expand rights, alleviate misery, rectify injustice, and promote freedom. Even if the narratives people hold about those individuals are denatured, distorted, decontextualized, and declawed, the fact that they are told in Columbia Falls, Montana; Cranston, Rhode Island; Little Rock, Arkansas; Saratoga Springs, New York; and Anchorage, Alaska seems at this juncture to be deeply symbolic of the national story we tell ourselves about who we think we are ... and perhaps who we aspire to become.

He's a Muslim. He was sworn into office on the Koran. He doesn't say the Pledge of Allegiance. His pastor is an anti-Semite. He's a tool of Louis Farrakhan. He's anti-Israel. His advisers are anti-Israel. He's friends with terrorists. The terrorists want him to win. He's the Antichrist.

By now you've probably seen at least some of these e-mails and articles about Barack Obama bouncing around the Internet. They distort Obama's religious faith, question his support for Israel, warp the identity and positions of his campaign advisers and defame his friends and allies from Chicago. The purpose of the smear is to paint him as an Arab-loving, Israel-hating, terrorist-coddling, radical black nationalist. That picture couldn't be further from the truth, but you'd be surprised how many people have fallen for it.

Bush's signature project has been the war in Iraq, which he has managed like a veteran Las Vegas magician, with a misdirection and legerdemain that can make a whole elephant disappear. Despite nearly 4,000 U.S. soldiers killed, 30,000 wounded, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, millions displaced internally and abroad, the creation of a new and serious terrorism problem, high fuel costs at home, and the entire lack of any obvious benefit from the whole endeavor to the American people, more than 40 percent of Americans now say the U.S. is making progress in establishing civil order in that country. McCain went to the same David Coppersmith School of Prestidigitation as Bush. He says he is dedicated to nothing less than complete military victory in Iraq and the maintenance of bases in that country for as much as a century, and his audiences do not appear to break out in derisive laughter. The bad news for McCain is that about 63 percent of Americans, a figure that has been fairly steady for the past year, continue to believe launching the war in the first place was a mistake.