Reply #37: Founders myths [View All]

[jobycom]

Every society creates founders' myths to justify their existence, and usually those myths give a clue to the values of those societies. Our own founders' myth began in the mid 1800s, with stories about George Washington and the cherry tree, to point out our honest, hardworking roots.

But the myths also created stories about Columbus, and many still stand. People were aware of where the land was coming from, and what was happening to the original inhabitants. So myths were created to make people feel better. Columbus--so forgotten a figure that the continent wasn't even named after him--was revived, and his story was transformed. No longer did he come to America seeking land and plantations and cheap slave labor. He came to America as an explorer, and discovered a new land. He was was brave and bold, and battled many obstacles (most of them fictional) to even reach America.

What he really did when he reached America is a more appropriate founder myth than the one we've all been taught. He enslaved the Native Americans, and purposely slaughtered whole towns that rose against him. When he found that the indiginous slaves could flee into the lands they knew so well, he traded these slaves with African slaves, who could not escape as easily. Sailors claimed they could navigate from the Canaries to America without instruments, by following the bodies of slaves tossed overboard when they died in the cargo holds of the slave ships.

All that was forgotten in our creation myth, because white Americans wanted to forget where the land came from. Instead, Columbus "discovered" this empty land, and then he disappears once he hits the shore, and the Pilgrims emerge, complete with Thanksgiving and the welcoming Indians. Those were good Indians. The Cowboy myth developed to explain the bad Indians.

These myths are so much a part of white culture we don't understand them, and don't see them. We don't realize that Hitler modeled, consciously, his Final Solution on what Europeans did to the Native Americans. To him, he was following historical precedent, set by us.

Perhaps telling our history the way it really happened would destroy some of these myths, and might make us more hesitant to invade other lands. Or perhaps we are just so spoiled as a nation that we will never learn, until something truly horrible makes us understand what we do to the world.

I don't know this nation. Our ideals are so beautiful, but we are so far from trying to live up to our ideals that we shouldn't even use the name "America" anymore. But we will, until the name, like the dream, is ruined.