Folklore in a Box

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The oldest version of the narrative glowed with a confidence of divine sponsorship: America was lit from within. Later, Americans adopted the more aggressive myth of Manifest Destiny. Curiously, the members of the baby-boom generation came to believe that the ideas of divine sponsorship and Manifest Destiny were intended to apply to them. Now the boomers, who transform every moment that they encounter and every twig that they step upon into unprecedented trauma or revelation, have arrived at midlife crisis. Noises of the generation's falling hair and its disillusionments -- is that all there is? -- are muzzing in the American background. A certain unease with grownups maybe: in JFK, Oliver Stone took apart a representative American myth with a chain saw and reassembled it in strange shapes. During the '60s, the boomers watched in some wonder as American authority (the university system, for example, and the presidency of Lyndon Johnson) seemed to fall before them. But they have been slow to install their own authority in its place.

America is littered with the unorganized and unassimilated marvels and griefs of recent years. Enormous questions about the relations between men and women, for example. The country is changed. It has taken a lot of curves very fast, on two wheels. Many old habits are useless and even destructive now.

Much of folklore and myth is embedded in oddments of visual memory (stereotypes, propagandas, stray entertainments) and in a few national epics like the story of the Kennedys, with its bright, shining moments and its darker subplots and disgraces. The narratives that Americans need may be somewhat more advertent, and morally organized. People invent stories to explore their own behavior and to imagine their own possibilities. Few moments in America's moral life have surpassed the soliloquy, product of Mark Twain's imagination, in which Huck Finn agonizes over what to do about turning over the runaway slave Jim to the white authorities. Huck ends by accepting the consequences of his decision not to do so: "All right, then, I'll go to hell."

Especially when venturing into new territory where mere habit will no longer suffice, people require the stabilizing, consoling, instructing influence of other human tales. People without a surrounding atmosphere of myth and example are prone to the stupidity that arises from being isolated and incurious about the nuances of others' experience.

It misses the point to say that Murphy Brown is not a real character. Fiction is real enough in its powers. When Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, he said, "So this is the little lady who made this big war." That, at least, is the legend. Little Eva perhaps belongs to a higher order of symbolism than Murphy Brown's baby, but the simple principle, the power of stories, remains the same.