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From: Craig Mastos
T1: cmastos@powernet.net
Date: 12/3/99
Time: 12:46:04 AM
Remote Name: 216.88.152.153
I walked into our new offices just as a Mitsui junior executive was clearing the last items from his desk. Before turning to go out the door, he hesitated, pointed to a map on the wall depicting Japan's Co-Prosperity Sphere in East Asia. "There it is," he said smiling. "We tried. See what you can do with it!" --Foreign Service Officer John K. Emmerson, on arriving in Tokyo, October 1, 1945
I don't think I've been banned yet, so here are some thoughts that I believe might be provoked by an "English" class on "The Vietnam War and American Culture." In "Montana or the End of Jean-Jacques Rousseau" (Partisan Review, Dec. 1949), Leslie Fiedler observes that at "the beginning of American literature," James Fenimore Cooper "had suggested two avatars of primeval goodness: Pioneer and Indian, the alternative nobility of Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook;" though Fiedler counters that, under scrutiny, the "figure of the Pioneer becomes ever more narrow, crude, brutal; his law is revealed as arbitrary force, his motive power as--greed." But Fiedler also counters that "the sentimentalized Indian will not stand up under scrutiny either."
Fiedler's politics seem to me to be buffoonishly cold-war liberal, and his literary criticism often not much better, though sometimes nonetheless intriguing. His "Montana" essay is a bizarre "review" of equally bizarre roadside historical markers that he encountered on a trip to (or, apparently, while briefly residing in) Montana. He has in mind signs that read "Civilization is a wonderful thing, according to some people" and "The usual fork-tongued methods of the white which had deprived these Indians of their hereditary lands" and "One of the blackest records of our dealings with the Indians . . ." and " . . . are now waiting passively for the fulfillment of treaties made with 'The Great White Father.'"
These attempts "by a self-conscious 'rebel,'" as Fiedler describes the author of these signs, to memorialize the injustices committed by the Pioneer against the Indian probably seem today to be something of a parody, but were certainly sincere in their day. Fiedler acknowledges, readily enough, that the record of relations between Pioneer and Indian "is one of aggression and deceit" but he likewise asserts that "the Noble Savage is a lie." Given the one-sidedness of the examples Fiedler presents, it is a little difficult understanding what point he is making by denying the credibility of both Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook.
It is likewise difficult to understand how the idea of a Noble Savage ever became memorialized in the land Fiedler describes:
"[T]he Montanan who is busy keeping the living Indian in the ghetto of the reservation cannot afford to believe too sincerely in his nobility. The cruelest aspect of social life in Montana is the exclusion of the Indian; deprived of his best land, forbidden access to the upper levels of white society, kept out of any job involving prestige, even in some churches confined to the back rows, but of course protected from whisky and comforted with hot lunches and free hospitalis--the actual Indian is a constant reproach to the Montanan, who feels himself nature's own democrat, and scorns the South for its treatment of the Negro, the East for its attitude toward the Jews. To justify the continuing exclusion of the Indian, the local white has evolved the theory that the redskin is naturally dirty, lazy, dishonest, incapable of assuming responsibility--a troublesome child; and this theory confronts dumbly any attempt at reasserting the myth of the Noble Savage."
Okay. I've taken nearly 600 words to get to the point that I think is central to the issue of the Vietnam War and American Culture. Fiedler sort of stumbles into it above, almost before there was even a Cold War, let alone a Vietnam War. Michael Paul Rogin, in Ronald Reagan, the Movie, and Other Episodes of Political Demonology (1987), comes to it a little more directly:
" . . . [L]iberal . . . distance from primitive man was not secure. At the heart of ambitious expansionism lay the regressive impulse itself. Indians were in harmony with nature; lonely, independent, liberal men were separated from it, and their culture lacked the richness, diversity and traditional attachments to sustain their independence. The consequence was forbidden nostalgia, for the nurturing, blissful and primitively violent connection to nature that white Americans had had to leave behind. At the core of liberalism lay the belief that such human connections to each other and to the land were dreams only, subjects of nostalgia or sentimentalization but impossible to the existing adult world. Bu suggesting the reality of the dream, Indian societies posed a severe threat to liberal identity. The only safe Indians were dead, sanitized or totally dependent upon white benevolence. Liberal action enforced the only world possible in liberal theory." (135)
"In the popular culture of films, Westerns and children's games, seizing America from the Indians is the central, mythical, formative experience. Its dynamic figures prominently in the Vietnam War, providing symbols for soldiers, names for combat missions, and the framework for Pentagon strategic plans. But historians have ignored the elimination of the Indians and minimized its significance for American development. This was the one outcome American statesmen in the two centuries before the Civil War could not imagine. For the dispossession of the Indians did not simply happen once and for all in the beginning. America was continually beginning again, and as it expanded across the continent, it killed, removed and drove into extinction one tribe after another. I will focus here on the first half of the nineteenth century and particularly on the 'Indian removal' program of Jacksonian democracy." (136)
"Liberalism broke the Indian's tie to nature in the name of independence; but the destruction of actual Indian autonomy suggested a dynamic to American expansion that contradicted professed liberal goods. The separation anxiety underlying liberal society expressed itself in a longing to regain lost attachment to the earth by expanding, swallowing and incorporating its contents. liberalism sought to regain the 'dual-unity' of the primal infant-mother connection from a position of strength instead of infant helplessness, by devouring and incorporating identities culturally out of its control. In relation to Indians, whites regressed to the most primitive form of object relation, namely the annihilation of the object through oral introjection. America was pictured by defenders of Manifest Destiny as a 'young and growing country,' which expanded through 'swallowing' territory, 'just as an animal needs to eat to grow.' Savagery would inevitably 'be swallowed by' civilization. The 'insatiable' 'land hunger' of the whites struck alike critics of and apologists for Indian policy, and observers fell back upon oral metaphors to describe the traders and backwoodsmen 'preying, like so many vultures, upon the vitals of those ill-fated tribes.' Indians were emancipated from the land only to be devoured by a white expansionism that could not tolerate their independent existence." (139)
"But the centrality of Indian dispossession in pre-Civil War America raises disturbing questions about the American political core that are hardly met by viewing Indian removal as pragmatic and inevitable. Precisely such basic encounters, inevitable as their outcome may be once they reach a certain point, form the history and the culture of a country. Hannah Arendt, for example, has suggested that the prolonged meeting of 'advanced' and primitive peoples forms an important factor in the origins of totalitarianism. Consider the following as central to the American-Indian experience: the collapse of conceptions of human rights in the face of culturally distant peoples, with resulting civilized atrocities defended as responses to savage atrocities; easy talk about, and occasional practice of, tribal extermination; the perceived impossibility of cultural coexistence, and a growing acceptance of 'inevitable' racial extinction; total war, with all-or-nothing conflicts over living space and minimal combatant-noncombatant distinctions; and the inevitability of the savage people to retire behind a stable frontier, provoking whites' confidence in their ability to conquer, subdue and advance over obstacles in their environment. Noam Chomsky asks ["After Pinkville," New York Review of Books, 1 Jan. 1970], 'Is it an exaggeration to suggest that our history of extermination and racism is reaching its climax in Vietnam today? It is not a question that Americans can easily put aside.'" (140)
"The model for the white father and his red children was not a family relation permitting growth but a family with schizophrenic elements. Of the parents in such families Searles writes, 'In essence, the parent's need for security cannot allow him or her to feel the child as a separate identity, and the parent cannot give indication to the child that the child is capable of emotionally affecting the parent.' The child must be 'denied the experience of feeling himself to be an individual human entity, distinct from but capable of emotional contact with the parent.' [Tocqueville's observations about the pioneer are to the point: 'even his feelings for his family have become merged in a vast egotism and one cannot be sure whether he regards his wife and children as anything more than a detached part of himself ' ('Fortnight in the Wilds,' 339).]" (153)
No wonder Fiedler had to deny the Noble Savage!
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