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American Mythless

“To protect wilderness was to protect the nation’s most sacred myth of origin.” — William Cronon, "The Trouble With Wilderness" (1995) What are the archetypes of American mythology? There are the Settler-Conquerer and Wild-Other. Paul Bunyan, for example, is Settler-Conquerer myth incarnate. A more generic type is the Western Cowboy alone in the 'wild'. Wilderness, first seen as fallen and feared as a place of Satanic temptation in early America, later became idealized family recreation and symbolic of American heritage and experience. An amalgam of influence from European Romanticists and American Post-Frontier Nostalgists is still found today in phrases such as "God's Country." While both Biden & Trump used their parties' 2020 national convention speeches to tap into this hollow myth, Trump did so with borderline satire: Legends were born. Wyatt Earp, Annie Oakley, Davy Crocket and Buffalo Bill. Ranchers and miners, cowboys and sheriffs, farmers and settlers, they pressed on past the Mississippi to stake a claim in the wild frontier. They knew that our country’s blessed by God and has a special purpose in this world. The United States will be the first nation to plant its beautiful flag on Mars. We will defeat the virus and the pandemic and emerge stronger than ever before. To amplify the voice of Indigenous Action, the following are excerpts from "Rethinking the Apocalypse: An Indigenous Anti-Futurist Manifesto," published in March, 2020 in response to the onset of the pandemic. “We live the future of a past that is not our own. It is a pathogenic global social order of imagined futures, built upon genocide, enslavement, ecocide, and total ruination. It is this very “culture” that must always have a subhuman enemy that any and all forms of extreme violence are not only permitted but expected.” “It is the Other who is poisoned, who is bombed, who is left quietly beneath the rubble. This way of unbeing, which has infected all aspects of our lives, which is responsible for the annihilation of entire species, the toxification of oceans, air and earth, the clear-cutting and burning of whole forests, mass incarceration, the technological possibility of world ending warfare, and raising the temperatures on a global scale, this is the deadly politics of capitalism, it’s pandemic.” “Its an apocalyptic that colonizes our imaginations and destroys our past and future simultaneously. These systems are anti-life, they will not be compelled to cure themselves. This is the re-emergence of the world of cycles.” Violence will be the mythic legacy of this empire. During an era where history is now both instant and obsolete, the only way for America to avoid collapsing in on itself is to, in its own familiar terms, conquer its legacy — a past & present whose thematic tools are production, captivity, and suppression.


The information presented here is adapted from these sources:

Indigenous Action Rethinking the Apocalypse:
An Indigenous Anti-Futurist Manifesto

The New York Times Magazine
The Trouble With Wilderness

Austin Water Center for Environmental Research
Wilderness: The Myth of Pristine Nature

NPR
Fact Check: Biden's Address To The DNC, Annotated
Fact Check: Trump's Address To The Republican Convention, Annotated
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