Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 6, 1993 TAG: 9309020334
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARSHALL FISHWICK
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
``Angels in America,'' by Pulitzer-prize winner Tony Kushner, has been widely acclaimed as an ``epic.'' The play's heroine, Harper, is hooked on drugs and going crazy. Other characters include a onetime black drug queen, a plague victim from the 13th century and an Eskimo. When the Angel finally appears, she crashes through a bedroom ceiling, sending chunks of plaster onto a bed where a young man is dying of AIDS. It is a story of deeply depressed characters living in a deeply unhealthy country, drifting toward oblivion.
Close by, Jose Rivera's ``Marisol'' is playing to equally enthusiastic audiences. In his New York, men get pregnant, apples are extinct, banks run secret torture chambers for people who exceed their credit card limits, and skinheads roam the streets torching the homeless. Marisol, the heroine, has been abandoned by her guardian angel and left to deal with a man in a wheelchair who has no skin.
Rivera makes no bones about his obsession with violence. ``I have been struck in the past few years,'' he writes, ``by the enormous violence we live through on every level.''
We see it wherever we look. Violence dominates the front pages of our newspapers and magazines. Television networks show us series with names like ``Crimes of Passion,'' which feature ``docu-re-creations'' of stabbings, shootings, rape, sodomy and wife-burnings. MTV glories in vulgarity. If you prefer your violence live, look at the latest reports on the evening news from Bosnia or Somalia. Or watch reruns of the shoot-out and burn-out near Waco, Texas.
Mayhem! Terrorism! Satanic cults! Rape! Racial uproar! Have we become panic gluttons? Is there a new linkage between polls, politicians and the public that threatens our very survival?
In what sense, you may ask, are these hair-raising examples ``mythic?'' Because, like all myths, they give glimpses of essences and tell us who we are and what we like to imagine. Myths are the glue that holds the body politic together. They are the platform on which our popular culture rests.
People live and die by and for their mythology. The Greeks had their Olympus, the Romans their empire, the early Christians their martyrs, the Middle Ages its saints, and the 17th century its scientific revolution. What myths have guided and sustained America since then?
Our mythic core is mobility. This movement is physical, psychological, spiritual and institutional. ``Outward'' mobility gave us our Manifest Destiny. ``Upward'' mobility gave us (in economic terms) the Success Myth and (in spiritual terms) the Salvation Myth. Central is the notion that we are a Chosen People, a seed sifted out of the world's people, destined to create a New England, a New World.
America was the land of goodness, liberty and plenty. They merged into the ``M Factor'' - movement, migration, mobility. This restless temper proved to be the dynamo of our mythology.
There was also the myth of the Rugged Individual, the Self-Made Man, the Liberated Woman. And there is the all-encompassing myth of the Garden - a whole continent wide open and ripe for the plucking. The mythic Statue of Liberty invites the homeless and oppressed to come and enjoy the Garden.
That myth got a big boost on June 12 when the Norman Rockwell Museum was opened in Stockbridge, Mass., only a few hours north of Broadway. What a different feeling! The sky was blue, the weather was temperate, and the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Kiwanians and Rotarians lined up for an All-American parade. At the right moment everyone sang ``America the Beautiful.''
Rockwell, who did 321 covers for the Saturday Evening Post over a period of nearly 50 years, freely admitted presenting America in an idealized form. ``I just painted life the way I would like it to be.'' And that's the way we like to remember it.
The new museum, a $9.2 million complex on 36 acres, was built because the picture-perfect town couldn't accommodate the visitors in the older, smaller Rockwell Museum, which attracted 5,000 visitors in 1969, and more than 150,000 in 1992. Nothing apocalyptic here - instead, the Norman Rockwell myth is beatific.
It is also nostalgic, and nostalgia is in. We are witnessing the Revival of the Fittest. We all know that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. So are those, we might say at the century's end, who remember it all too well. ``Tommy'' is back on Broadway, ``Hair'' is being revived in London, the Velvet Underground is regrouping, and the kids are out buying bell-bottoms. Clinton and his staff are trying hard to revive the mythic charm of the Kennedy years. Hillary is our new Jackie. Or is she?
As we get into the 50th anniversary of cataclysmic events of World War II and the beginning of the Atomic Age, we seem to be going forward by going backward.
Observe the two strains of mythology competing for our attention: the apocalyptic vs. the beatific and nostalgic. Which shall we favor? Which will serve us best?
Neither. Myths must be of and for the people - the living, and not the dead. They must grow out of hope, not despair. We can read and write about the America of Jefferson, Roosevelt or Kennedy, but we can't live in their America. We must live and work in Clinton's America, with all the problems that presents.
Electrified, computerized, televised and facing new situations, we must also remythologize. We can't go home again, and we won't accept oblivion. Pondering these lines from Hart Crane's poem, ``The Bridge,'' might help:
``Mythical brows we saw retiring - loth
Disturbed and destined, into denser green
Greeting they sped us, on the arrow's oath
Now life incorrigibly what years between ... ''
\ Marshall Fishwick is professor of humanities and communication studies at Virginia Tech.
by CNB