(Un)Real American Heroes

Brits have King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table; the French have Charlemagne and his Paladins; What about Americans?

Americans are suffering from an identity crisis. We need heroes, and not ones in capes, but ones rooted in our history.

We are approaching a quarter millennium since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and a record low proportion of the country, less than 60%, say they are very proud to be American. I can’t say I don’t understand why.

Increasingly, thought leaders on the left say America’s founding was a lie built on upholding oppressive power structures. Newer voices on the right say it was a mistake, a doomed attempt to build a society based on an ideology that acts as a “universal solvent” to societal bonds.

This all adds up to an outright rejection of any shared “American” identity.

It’s often said that the best way to unite people is to give them a common enemy. And this is true right until that enemy is defeated. Instead, we should give Americans common heroes. And more than that, a common mythology.

There is historical precedent for national mythmaking in times of uncertainty.

The most interesting national mythmaking project in my mind is King Arthur. The tale of Arthur, a Romano-Britain battling Anglo-Saxon invaders, was drawn from Welsh legends and popularized after the Anglo-Saxons had settled the most of the island and the Normans had conquered it. Despite the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture, King Arthur grew to become a prominent national figure.

As an analogy, this would be like Americans adopting figures Tecumseh or Sitting Bull or others fighting westward expansion as national heroes. This might not be surprising among those on the left who view the United States as a villain, but the legend of King Arthur became part of the British national story not in a rebellion against their country but in celebration of it. The ruling Normans might have intentionally chosen to focus on Arthur precisely for his opposition to the Anglo-Saxons, so that they could portray themselves as restoring Britain’s lost connection to the Roman world.

That political dimension of national mythology is often impossible to disentangle from the art itself. Virgil’s Aeneid, completed shortly after the end of the Roman Republic and amid the turmoil of Augustus’ rise to power, traces the founding of Rome - and Caesar Augustus’ Julian dynasty - back to the Trojan War.

In the leadup to the First Crusade, whose troops were largely made up of Frankish warriors, the Song of Roland chronicled Charlemagne’s clashes with Moorish Spain.

Beowulf, the oldest known piece of Anglo-Saxon literature, was composed sometime between when they were clashing with or occupied by Vikings, takes place entirely in Scandinavia. It could have been commissioned by the first King of the Anglo-Saxons Alfred the Great as part of a diplomatic outreach to the Danelaw, or by the Danish King Canute as a way to link the culture of his Anglo-Saxon subjects to the rest of his North Sea Empire.

But a shared American mythology need not serve a top-down political agenda. To the contrary, most prominent partisans seem intent to hammer at the seams or to erase any discernibly American identity altogether. And in today’s world of independent publication and crowdfunding, we are more capable of bottom-up mythmaking than at any other point in history.

A Challenge

With that in mind, I am throwing down the gauntlet for all the American and/or Americophile creatives out there: let’s develop some national mythology to put out by the time the 250th Independence Day rolls around.

Do you have cool ideas for candidates for a unifying American mythology? Let me know!

And if anyone is interested in collaborating on something like this, send me a DM. This was just an idea that was brewing in my head for a while, but if enough authors and/or readers are interested, I think we could put together an organized effort.