Page 75 - Šolsko polje, XXVIII, 2017, no. 3-4: Education and the American Dream, ed. Mitja Sardoč
P. 75
p. mclaren ■ from a city on the hill to the dungheap of history
at the level of the nation state, and this requires conceptual structures to
help citizens adjust to its genocidal history—and the myth of the Amer-
ican Dream, which has become the zeitgeist of our age, has helped us to
justify the United States as a great democratic nation despite the fact that
it is the greatest threat to world peace in the world. The American Dream
has been instrumentalized to serve as one of many coping strategies pro-
vided by the myth of democracy as “the white man’s burden”. President
Teddy Roosevelt was particularly inspired by this poem by British writ-
er, Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and
the Philippine Islands” (1899), which helped give weight to Roosevelt’s
expansionist excursions into the Philippines, at a time when Puerto Rico,
Guam and Cuba had been placed under U.S. control. A few lines of the
poem read:
Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go send your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child
Take up the White Man’s burden
Today in the United States, racialized violence serves as the domes-
tic expression of the American macrostructural unconscious, whose func-
tion is to provide psychic power to the myth of America’s role of taking up
the White Man’s Burden, and this requires an untrammeled devotion to
the God of violence, and the worship of the military who support imperial
wars of aggression in the service of what is known as America’s “providen-
tial history”—a version of history taught in spin overdrive in many Chris-
tian evangelical communities—that the United States has been chosen by
God to keep the world safe for democracy. This myth of American Prov-
idential history keeps the American people in thrall to the aggrandizing
ordinances of a Trump, for instance. This is why Howard Zinn’s famous
book, The People’s History of the United States, is banned in many school
districts. This is why, for instance, I was placed on top of a list of “the most
dangerous professors” in 2006, when I was teaching at UCLA, during a
time when a right wing group was offering to pay students 100 dollars
for a secret audiotape of my lectures, and 50 dollars for notes they took
of what I was teaching in my classes. Personally, I think it would be good
73
at the level of the nation state, and this requires conceptual structures to
help citizens adjust to its genocidal history—and the myth of the Amer-
ican Dream, which has become the zeitgeist of our age, has helped us to
justify the United States as a great democratic nation despite the fact that
it is the greatest threat to world peace in the world. The American Dream
has been instrumentalized to serve as one of many coping strategies pro-
vided by the myth of democracy as “the white man’s burden”. President
Teddy Roosevelt was particularly inspired by this poem by British writ-
er, Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and
the Philippine Islands” (1899), which helped give weight to Roosevelt’s
expansionist excursions into the Philippines, at a time when Puerto Rico,
Guam and Cuba had been placed under U.S. control. A few lines of the
poem read:
Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go send your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child
Take up the White Man’s burden
Today in the United States, racialized violence serves as the domes-
tic expression of the American macrostructural unconscious, whose func-
tion is to provide psychic power to the myth of America’s role of taking up
the White Man’s Burden, and this requires an untrammeled devotion to
the God of violence, and the worship of the military who support imperial
wars of aggression in the service of what is known as America’s “providen-
tial history”—a version of history taught in spin overdrive in many Chris-
tian evangelical communities—that the United States has been chosen by
God to keep the world safe for democracy. This myth of American Prov-
idential history keeps the American people in thrall to the aggrandizing
ordinances of a Trump, for instance. This is why Howard Zinn’s famous
book, The People’s History of the United States, is banned in many school
districts. This is why, for instance, I was placed on top of a list of “the most
dangerous professors” in 2006, when I was teaching at UCLA, during a
time when a right wing group was offering to pay students 100 dollars
for a secret audiotape of my lectures, and 50 dollars for notes they took
of what I was teaching in my classes. Personally, I think it would be good
73
