CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Essential American Soul, Wyoming Version

A Wyoming man stabbing a wounded coyote, after running it over, flinging it in the air and kicking it. (Screengrab from a video posted by Cowboy State Daily.)

…He lives by death, by killing the wild things of the air and earth. It’s not good enough. But you have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted…A man who lives by death, by killing, but who is pure white. This is the very intrinsic-most American. He is at the core of all the other flux and fluff. And when this man breaks from his static isolation, and makes a new move, then look out, something will be happening. –DH Lawrence, “Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Novels,” Studies in Classic American Literature

…He lives by death, by killing the wild things of the air and earth.

It’s not good enough. But you have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted…A man who lives by death, by killing, but who is pure white. This is the very intrinsic-most American. He is at the core of all the other flux and fluff. And when this man breaks from his static isolation, and makes a new move, then look out, something will be happening.

–DH Lawrence, “Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Novels,” Studies in Classic American Literature

The US is a violent country.  Every American knows this. We need violence to get through the day. We need to watch it. We need to play at violence in games. We need to hear it and feel it. We need to believe we’re more violent than anyone else. We need the security of thinking no one can take our violence away. We’re frightened by the violence around us and turned on by the violence done to others. Many of us are scared we’re not violent enough, that when push comes to shove, when it comes time to prove our violence, we won’t measure up. 

Violence is the American pathology. Killing is our pathogen. No masks allowed. Let it spread.

We celebrate our violence in national holidays. Put on violent displays on the lawn of the White House. We light up the skies above us with simulated missiles and explosions and ooh and awe in tones reserved for the sex Americans can’t seem to enjoy unless it too seethes with more than a touch of violent domination. Hollywood has trained us to think of our orgasms as fireworks going off, bombs exploding. Sex and death are conflated in our minds, forever merged. Our pleasure principle runs on the desire to inflict pain, to demonstrate our power, even as the power of the country fades. The American male feels empty and impotent without it.

We take our violence with us. To work. To the bar. To the football stadium. To the bedroom. To Europe. To the Middle East.We must demonstrate who we are, wherever we go.. To ourselves and to others. We take our violence into the woods. Into the mountains. Into the deserts. We inflict violence whenever we can against any living creature that passes our way. But it’s no good to merely kill. We must prove we’ve killed. Others must know. So we take home the skins, the heads, the bones of what we’ve killed as trophies. We film our acts of killing. We pose with the carcasses. We broadcast the images. We kill for the sake of killing. Our way of life is a bloodsport.  Though few who act out the scenes in its pages have read it, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian has become our Holy Text, the how-to guide to becoming an all-American white man, white in the mind, I mean, bone white in the soul–a post-modern Deerslayer, primed to go off on full-automatic.

We sanctify ourselves in the blood of what we’ve killed. Mark ourselves with it. We initiate our children with stories of bloodshed. We sit them in front of a screen where they will see more than 12,000 violent acts a year, 33 killings a day, day after day, some of the snuff films produced almost weekly by our own Department of War. We indoctrinate our children into our violent ethos. By the time they are 12, they are as drenched in virtual blood as was the young Ike McCaslin in Faulkner’s “The Bear,” one of the best stories ever written about how endemic violence is to the American character and the way violence defines how we think of ourselves.  Americans tell themselves tall tales about how heroic our killing is and we believe that the stories are real. That they are history. Our history. Our birthright.  Inscribed in our Constitution, as it were. Ritualized. The world is there for us to kill and consecrate ourselves with its blood. 

We need to “get” our deer, our elk, our salmon, our trout, our fox, our beaver, our coon, our wolf, our bear. We see ourselves as failures if we don’t come back with something dead in our bag, over our shoulder, on a sled, in a cooler, in the truck bed, or strapped to the hood of the SUV. We’ll kill birds and insects and reptiles and trees and cacti and rocks. We’ll kill entire mountainsides.  We’ll kill rivers. We’ll kill each other. We’ll even kill the dead. We count the kills in our games and share the scores with others. We must kill more today than yesterday. We will kill until there’s........

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