University of Virginia Library

'America equals freedom'

considers too private, or too close
to feelings of guilt, to speak about
directly."

We also witness the separation
of word and deed in the pronouncements
of President Nixon (the fact
that we select one man to be an
image for America is in itself an
intriguing concept). Before the
United Nations, Nixon is called
upon to project an image of
America to the world community.
Rhetoric about an "open world"
which is "the cathedral of the
spirit" abounds. Yet, as The New
York Times editorial of September
19 points out, the world delegates
"sat on their hands." Whyl Nixon
said America's objective was self-determination
for the people of
Viet Nam, yet America supports a
government there that excludes
"substantial elements of even the
non-Communist opposition."
Nixon said America wants to halt
the weapons race, yet he pushed
ABM. The President appealed to all

the world, yet refuses to recognize
China. Many Americans - at least
the Times - sensed that a false
image of themselves was being
projected beyond their control.
James Reston applied, or mis-applied,
many of Franklin's axioms
from Poor Richard's Almanack to
Nixon to show the dichotomy
between traditional American
image and actual American practice:

The historian Richard Hofstadter,
writing in 1965 about the split
image of America in the sixties,
goes to the extreme and says that
America is paranoid. Not only does
it sense the separation of image and
reality, but it is paranoid about
losing the threatened image, and
therefore rejects any view of reality
which might refute the image.
Americans, unlike Europeans, are
"unable to enjoy their own nationality
as a natural event." Each of the
many ingredients in the melting pot
wonders whether it is, in fact, a
truly American ingredient, for we
originally are not Americans by
birth, but by the choice of our
forbears. Yet when Wallace or
Reagan label certain ingredients
"unamerican," one is thrown on
the defensive to prove just how
American he is. Is there an
un-French or Un-Spanish Activities
Committee, for example? There is
frustration on the other side because
the defenders of a part
American image sense that the
"unamerican" blacks, intellectuals,
women may be the most
American of all. In its extreme
form such paranoia about the image
of America leads to suppression,
which is paradoxically the opposite
value from that of the original
image. Arthur Miller in Harper's
tells of his travels in Russia and
draws many parallels between the
American image and the Russian
image. The Russians, says Miller,
clearly and strictly define what it
means to be "Russian," what the
good worker and comrade should
do, etc. and advertise it on posters
throughout the cities. This has the
positive aspect of providing a secure
and specific sense of identity. Miller
is clearly aligning Soviet unfreedom
with American unfreedom. Vietnam
Nixon's ambiguous popularity in
America, Miller reasons that "more
and more it seems as though the
ideological makeup of a regime is
rather an obfuscation than the
expression of ideals or viewpoints."
He even predicts that America's
image will be so torn apart that a
new one might have to be imposed:

If we dislike an arbitrary assignation
of image to America, especially
if the image is false, how are
the false images perpetuated? Says
W.H. Domhoff in his recent book
Who Rules America?, the men with
the money the kings of capitalism
and leaders of industry
subtly control America. Their resources
are rechanneled into the
production of heirs who will

perpetuate their image of America.
Their chief production source is the
university.

James Ridgeway in The Closed
Corporation: American Universities
in Crisis says that the general public
is kept unaware of this. The view of
universities completely under the
sway of the military-industrial complex
is unfair. But the question
remains: do the universities encourage
students to seek a central
identity for their country and for
themselves as Americans? A University
of California senior says, "It is
pretty depressing to see what's
going on and realize that your
education is not equipping you to
do anything about it." The liberal
arts education is incoherent, with
courses having no common purpose
and no central image around which
to work. Arthur Lewis, a black
educator at Princeton, says that
America is the only country whose
schools, forsaking their European
predecessors, require students to
"fritter away their precious years in
meaningless peregrination." The
image of the American university is
far removed from its substantive
value, and students know it. Does
this mean that we must destroy the
university? Or can the university be
focused on a central image which
gives it relevance to modern America?
John Fischer urges that a
"Survival U." be established. The
prospectus calls for a central image
of America as rebuilder, environmentally
even more than politically;
this is one of the few positive
alternatives we read about.

Black men have been excluded
from America's self-conscious image
until recently. Eldridge Cleaver
points out in Revolution and
Education (a tape made in exile)
that black men are no longer
striving to align themselves with
America's image but to destroy that
image. Yet his rhetoric calls to
mind the very revolutionary zeal on
which the "American ideal" is
supposedly founded:

Shades of Patrick Henry! Is this, indeed
a return to the true American
image? Violent revolution a necessary
part of the American image?
Black men invoke the image of
John Brown to shift the entire
context of the idea of American
patriotism. Malcolm X says, "If you
are for me any my problem, then
you have to be willing to do as old
John Brown did." "If you can't see
yourself as being in the context of
John Brown, then bring me the
guns." says Rap Brown. Accordingly
paternal white liberalism has
given way to a sense of white guilt,
as Gary Endelman points out in
The Virginia Weekly. Truman Nelson
calls this guilt "a rare and
mortal disease of white humanity."
Yet Anthony Lewis of The New
York Times argues that the image
of America as white can change
peacefully; that since America is
revolution incarnate it can experience
a conceptual revolution without
physical confrontation. Again,
a positive alternative.

Another alternative is to disregard
the problematical image of
America, complicated by years and
men, and return to the original
natural or spiritual communion
with the land itself, like that of
Mark Twain. Steve McQueen has
said, "I would rather wake up in
the middle of nowhere than any
city in America." Terry and Penny
Russell, two staunch advocates of
free speech at Berkeley, retreated
to the land and wrote of their
experiences in 1967 in On the
Loose (Terry was killed soon
afterwards). They lament America's
killing of the wilderness, yet theirs
is not a mere pastoral retreat. As
they say, they left "not to escape
from, but to escape to: not to
forget but to remember." The
original image of America included
the aspect of endless frontier, and
though we may hear that image still
upheld (concerning the frontiers of
space, for example) we do not feel
it. There seems to be no new place
to go, geographically or otherwise.
The Russells are offering a positive
alternative; they speak of America's
image as "the geography of hope."

There are pure pessimists. Segal
insists that, in "the collision of
creed and reality," the ugly reality
will kill America's image. But we
have also seen that hope need not
be self-delusion. To return to the
Mailer passage which prefaces this
paper, a new image of America can
be born of the old one, preserving
her sound qualities but not bearing
the scars she has been given. The
childbirth as begun in the sixties.