“Total Recall” and America’s false-memory syndrome

“Total Recall” and America’s false-memory syndrome

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Those groups were eventually able to acculturate as “white” in ways that African-Americans and most dark-skinned immigrants could not, but at the ultimate cost of having their cultural memories reformatted, “Total Recall”-style, or subscribing to Henry Ford’s famous proclamation that history is bunk. Again, I’m not suggesting that the allure of a mythological past is unique to Americans, or white people, or the Tea Party. But there’s no denying that the modern Republican Party has been extraordinarily successful at convincing the white working class to vote loyally and even enthusiastically against its own economic interests by offering a seductive vision of American identity that is based on a past that never was and that excludes vast swaths of the bicoastal urban and suburban population from full membership.

At times the left has also been guilty of its own historical mythology, a crypto-Christian vision of American exceptionalism turned upside down, in which the U.S. is a profoundly evil nation poisoned by the original sins of slavery and the Indian genocide. (This is roughly how the Martians view Earth in C.S. Lewis’ religious allegory “Out of the Silent Planet.”) That certainly isn’t what the Obama-era Democratic Party stands for (if it stands for anything identifiable at all), as much as Republicans love to harp on anomalous figures like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It’s difficult for any American to view the Obama-Romney contest from an objective distance, but when I try to do so, I come up against the fact that these are two men from slightly different sectors of the elite caste, who will pursue similar policies on a wide range of issues and have almost identical relationships with corporate capital, the true power center in our so-called republic.