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Ira Chernus's MythicAmerica

MythicAmerica explores the mythic dimension of American political culture, past, present, and future. The blogger, Ira Chernus, is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Apocalypse Management: Eisenhower and the Discourse of National Insecurity.

His new “MythicAmerica: Essays” offer an online introduction to the study of American myths. Read about the blog and the author here.

To receive periodic email summaries of the blog, send an email to update@mythicamerica.us, with “Update” in the subject line. You can communicate directly with Ira at the same address.

  • Nov 20, 2013

    11/22: The Day "Truth" Died

    by Ira Chernus's MythicAmerica

    When JFK died, America's belief in "truth" as absolute certainty began to die too. 
  • Oct 17, 2013

    Uncovering the Tea Party's Radical Roots

    by Ira Chernus's MythicAmerica

    If we put the Tea Party's claim to be Jeffersonians in the proper historical perspective, we come out not on the far right but on the far left.
  • Oct 9, 2013

    The Myth That Makes the GOP Suicidal

    by Ira Chernus's MythicAmerica

    Right-wingers' desire to be left alone and safe behind symbolic fences is driving their party's self-destructive policies.    

  • Oct 2, 2013

    "Yes, We Have No Narratives": A Great American Myth

    by Ira Chernus's MythicAmerica

    We won't have an informed debate about Iran until our mass media admit that in the U.S. as well as in Iran, dueling narratives are at the heart of competing views on foreign policy. 

  • Aug 22, 2013

    The Question Americans Can't Ask About Egypt and Syria

    by Ira Chernus's MythicAmerica


    Credit: Flickr.

    What does the Obama administration really want in Egypt and Syria? "To reduce the risk to U.S. interests," writes Washington Post blogger Max Fisher. The administration wants "to play the middle and to avoid any strong positions" because it values "above all, an aversion to risk." So "the White House tried [in Egypt], as in Syria, to manage it from the behind the scenes."

    The result has been bad for the U.S. and horrendous for the Egyptians and Syrians: "Bloody stalemate has become the status quo." But that status quo is "unsustainable."

    It's hard to argue with Fisher's observations. It's equally hard not to argue with his conclusion, a call for the U.S. to take charge: "Better to force a solution, however uncertain, than wait for things to combust on their own. Staving off catastrophe only works for so long."

  • Aug 15, 2013

    Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Egypt: Compare and Contrast

    by Ira Chernus's MythicAmerica


    Police preparing to attack pro-Morsi protestors in Cairo. Credit: Flickr.

    The professor inside my head just handed out an essay assignment:

    Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Egypt: Compare and Contrast.

    The big difference leaps to my mind first: The crackdowns on Occupy Egypt (the movement in support of ousted president Mohamed Morsi) have been far more violent than the ones that dispersed the Occupy Wall Street encampments across the U.S. in 2011. In both cases definite numbers are almost impossible to come up with. But there seems to be not a single death clearly due to police action against an OWS site, though surely hundreds suffered injuries. In Egypt, of course, hundreds have been killed by uniformed agents as well as civilian supporters of the military government. Injuries run into the thousands.

    On the other hand, since the Egyptian authorities seem more intent on doing violence than arresting people, their arrest totals at the encampments may not equal the 7,762 arrests of OWS protesters in the U.S. recorded so far.

  • Aug 7, 2013

    “Them Bad Russians” Still Haunt America

    by Ira Chernus's MythicAmerica


    Nikolai Bulganin, Dwight Eisenhower, Edgar Faure, and Anthony Eden at the 1955 Geneva Summit.

    “America it's them bad Russians. Them Russians them Russians. ... She wants to take our cars from out our garages. Her wants to grab Chicago. ...  Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. ...  America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set,” the poet Allen Ginsberg wrote. 

    But Ginsberg’s poem “America” was written in 1956, when Cold War fervor gripped the nation. We have come a long way since then -- haven’t we?

    Sure we have, Barack Obama assured us, when he lamented that “there have been times where they slip back into Cold War thinking and a Cold War mentality.  And what I consistently say to them [Russians], and what I say to President Putin, is that’s the past and we’ve got to think about the future, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to cooperate more effectively than we do.”

  • Aug 1, 2013

    Bradley Manning Meets Woodrow Wilson: The Secret of the Espionage Act Revealed

    by Ira Chernus's MythicAmerica


    Credit: Wiki Commons/HNN staff.

    Military justice is to justice as military music is to music. In a civilian court, the judge explains the decision as soon as it’s handed down. In the military, the judge just announces the decision and passes sentence.

    In Bradley Manning’s case, Judge Denise Lind did say “she would issue findings later that would explain her ruling on each of the charges.” We don’t know how long “later” may be. All we know now is that Judge Lind does not think Manning was aiding the enemy.

    Which raises an interesting question: If you take classified documents, but you don’t do it to help some enemy, apparently you haven’t done any harm to the United States. So why is it a crime? Why does it count as “spying” at all? I always thought “spying” meant one side stealing secrets from the other side.

  • Jul 25, 2013

    Walt Whitman: Dreaming of America, On the Road

    by Ira Chernus's MythicAmerica


    Credit: Wiki Commons.

    With the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s greatest speech approaching, I started wondering: Who has a dream anymore? Down toward the left end of the political spectrum, where I spend most of my time, there’s plenty of (usually quite accurate) complaining about the ills that plague our world and some talk about specific policies aiming to remedy one or more of those ills. But hardly anyone ever follows Dr. King’s example and publicly shares a vision of what a far better world would look like. It’s just “not done” these days. Perhaps it feels too naïve, too unrealistic, too embarrassing.  

  • Jul 20, 2013

    What Ever Happened to American Regionalism?

    by Ira Chernus's MythicAmerica


    Soda vs. pop vs. coke vs. soft drink. American regionalism in a nutshell.

    I spent several hours last week driving around New York City. For a guy like myself from the wide open Rocky Mountain West, it was rather hellish. I plan to drive in NYC again approximately when hell is covered with a thick sheet of glacial ice.

    It could have been worse, I suppose. I’m not a native Westerner . I grew up in the suburbs of New York. So I had a good idea of what driving in “the City” might be like. I knew that, if you live in the tri-state area, “the City” (and indeed each of its boroughs) is a distinct region, far different from its suburbs.

    And I knew that my wife, a native Midwesterner, made a terrible linguistic faux pas when she told someone that she had business meetings “on” Manhattan and “in” Long Island. She got the prepositions exactly reversed. There’s no logic to it. It’s all just local knowledge.

  • Jul 11, 2013

    Liberals Tolerate Ambiguity More Than Conservatives

    by Ira Chernus's MythicAmerica


    Image via IMDB.

    In my little corner of the world it’s time for a celebration. A book -- an entire book -- has just been published devoted to my favorite subject: the role of myth in American history. That doesn’t happen very often.

    Time No Longer, by Patrick Smith, is hardly the definitive book on the subject. (That will be written by a great historian of the future, one perhaps now still in grade school.) It’s a journalist’s energetic gallop through the history of the nation, full of the kind of sweeping generalizations, illustrated with anecdotes, that journalists so often love.

    Some of Smith’s points are smart enough to deserve applause. Many are dubious, or debatable at best. But when debatable, or even dubious, claims are about important issues they are intellectually stimulating. Such claims show up often enough in this book to make it definitely worth a careful, critical read.

  • Jul 2, 2013

    Who Says Conservatives Are More Patriotic?

    by Ira Chernus's MythicAmerica

    As we got busy preparing for Fourth of July festivities, this question popped into my head: Are conservatives more patriotic than other Americans? If you were a foreigner spending some time in the USA, getting news from the mass media and just talking to people, you might easily get that impression -- especially around the Fourth, when conservatives seem to be the ones most likely to display those big American flags.

    In fact you might easily get that impression on any day of the year, when conservatives seem to be the ones most likely to put their love of country on display in all sorts of ways, aiming to leave no doubt in anyone’s mind about their patriotism.

    But what’s the truth behind the display? Are conservatives really more patriotic than others? Well, it depends on what you mean by patriotism.

    And there lies the heart of the matter: Conservatives appear to be more patriotic because they have so much control over the very meaning of the term. Most of the time, when anyone uses the word “patriotism,” it turns out to mean what conservatives say it means.

  • Jun 26, 2013

    On DOMA, Right-Wing Justices Got It Right -- and Wrong

    by Ira Chernus's MythicAmerica


    Antonin Scalia in 2010. Credit: Wiki Commons.

    (This post is dedicated to my son, Angel, and his spouse, Thomas, who had to leave their home state and go to another state simply to exercise the legal right of enshrining their love in the bonds of matrimony.)

    No one has ever accused Justice Antonin Scalia of timidity. So it’s not surprising that his opinion in United States v. Windsor, the case that struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), fairly screams: I’m not a bigot. I’m not. I’m not.

    “The majority says that the supporters of this Act acted with malice,” he claims in his dissent. And of course by dissenting he became a supporter of the act. So he must defend himself against the charge that he harbors malice toward gays and lesbians. “I am sure these accusations are quite untrue,” he retorts flatly. “To defend traditional marriage is not to condemn, demean, or humiliate those who would prefer other arrangements... To hurl such accusations so casually demeans this institution.” In other words, “It demeans me!”