Myth, Millstone, Machine

American Identity in the Age of Symbolic War

There's a photograph of Jimmy Stewart in uniform, standing beside his father behind the counter of the family hardware store in Indiana, Pennsylvania. A recruitment poster looms behind them—"Time for Service"—while shelves lined with medicines and tools frame the scene. An American flag hangs in the corner. It's 1945, and Stewart has just returned from flying bombing missions over Germany. His father, Alexander, tends to the family business that raised the boy who would become America's most beloved everyman.

The image radiates everything we're supposed to remember about the Greatest Generation: duty, sacrifice, family, small-town virtue. It's Norman Rockwell made flesh, a moment so perfectly composed it feels mythic even as documentary. But here's the thing about myths—they don't just record reality. They prescribe it.

This photograph didn't just tell you who Americans were. It told you what kind of story you were supposed to belong to. And like all sacred texts, it offered salvation—but only if you conformed. If your life didn't fit the narrative, you became either invisible or a threat.

I. The Myth as Sacred Text

The Jimmy Stewart photograph functions as more than nostalgia. It's a training manual for citizenship, a visual catechism that teaches proper roles, relationships, and values. The soldier son returns home. The merchant father tends the store. Authority is quiet but unquestioned. Service is rewarded with belonging. The flag presides over it all like a benediction.

This wasn't accidental. The postwar period demanded consensus-building imagery that could stitch together a traumatized nation. Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the federal government collaborated—sometimes explicitly, sometimes through shared cultural DNA—to manufacture a vision of America that felt both nostalgic and aspirational. Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post covers became a kind of secular scripture, teaching Americans how to see themselves.

But myths are sticky. They accumulate emotional weight across generations until they become not just stories but identity itself. The hardware store becomes sacred space. The uniform becomes holy vestment. The phone call home becomes ritual communion with a lost world where things made sense.

The myth instructs: be like Jimmy. Serve without question. Return to the fold. Take your place in the great chain of American being. It's beautiful, in its way. It's also suffocating for anyone whose story doesn't fit the frame.

II. The Tribal Schism

Fast-forward seventy years and that same photograph triggers radically different responses. For some, it remains a beacon—evidence of when America worked, when people knew their roles, when sacrifice meant something. For others, it's a horror show—a tableau of exclusion that celebrates the very systems that erased them.

For the Mythbearer, critique is collapse. For the Mythbreaker, reverence is erasure.

This isn't just disagreement about the past. It's mutual incomprehension about the nature of reality itself. The Mythbearers see a foundation under attack. The Mythbreakers see a prison requiring demolition. Both are responding to genuine trauma—one the trauma of displacement from meaning, the other the trauma of never being allowed inside it.

The result is mutually assured illegibility. Rural and urban America might as well be different countries now, each reading the same symbols with reversed polarity. Confederate monuments become heritage preservation versus celebration of white supremacy. Pride parades become community celebration versus cultural invasion. January 6th and the Stonewall riots become mirror events—patriotic resistance versus destructive riots, depending on which tribe is doing the looking.

Once the myth becomes contested, it doesn't shrink—it hardens. Nuance becomes betrayal. Complexity becomes weakness. The photograph that once unified now divides, each tribe claiming exclusive interpretive authority over what it means to be American.

III. The Cargo Cult Problem

Here's where things get really cruel. In our desperate attempt to recapture meaning, both sides end up reenacting the forms without access to the function. We build replicas of meaning and hope the gods return.

This is the cargo cult trap—ritual without result, symbols without substance. During World War II, Pacific islanders observed Allied military bases and concluded that the planes, uniforms, and radio equipment caused the abundance that arrived with them. After the war, they built replica airstrips and wooden control towers, hoping to summon back the cargo planes filled with goods.

American political culture has become a similar exercise in sympathetic magic. We wave flags and expect patriotism. We share outrage and expect justice. We perform the aesthetics of resistance, community, tradition—but somehow never get the actual substance.

The left builds elaborate critiques of power while engaging primarily with other critics. The right celebrates working-class values while supporting policies that devastate working-class communities. Both sides mistake content for praxis, confusing the map for the territory.

Social media accelerates this process, turning political engagement into performance art. We've inherited rituals of citizenship—voting, protesting, debating—but they've become content, not conversation. TikTok activism and Fox News patriotism are mirror phenomena, each side building increasingly elaborate replica systems while the actual mechanisms of change remain untouched.

The Jimmy Stewart photograph becomes another cargo cult artifact—something to venerate or denounce rather than understand. We argue about the symbol while ignoring what it was supposed to symbolize: actual community, actual security, actual belonging.

IV. The Evidence Apocalypse

Faced with this breakdown of shared meaning, well-intentioned people reach for the Enlightenment toolkit. Surely we can solve culture war with fact-checks, policy white papers, data-driven discourse. Surely evidence can cut through mythology and restore rational debate.

But facts themselves have become mythic tokens, deployed not to understand reality but to prove the other tribe wrong. We weaponized empiricism. Now the only thing people trust is narrative.

The war on "misinformation" assumes agreement on baseline values—which no longer exists. When one tribe sees statistical evidence of systemic racism and the other sees statistical evidence of cultural decline, they're not disagreeing about data. They're disagreeing about what constitutes a problem worth solving.

COVID-19 became the perfect test case. Public health experts presented evidence and expected compliance, but evidence divorced from trust is just noise. Mask mandates and vaccine requirements weren't received as health measures but as loyalty tests—symbols of tribal allegiance rather than medical interventions.

Climate science faces the same fate. Economic inequality data gets dismissed as "class warfare." Educational statistics become ammunition in the culture war rather than information for problem-solving. Even academia itself has become a symbolic battleground, with universities cast as either bastions of knowledge or factories of indoctrination.

The Jimmy Stewart photograph resists fact-checking because it's not making a factual claim. It's making an emotional one: this is what home feels like. This is what safety looks like. This is what America should be. You can't debunk a feeling with data.

V. The Hidden Engine

And here's the sucker punch that makes all of this especially tragic: while we fight over whether Jimmy Stewart represents fascism or freedom, the real problems keep winning.

The myth distracts us from the machine.

Economic precarity hollows out communities regardless of their political affiliation. Housing costs crush young families in red states and blue states alike. Climate change doesn't care about your voter registration. Surveillance capitalism harvests data from Mythbearers and Mythbreakers with equal enthusiasm.

But cultural tribalism ensures we won't coordinate responses to these shared challenges. Instead, we're busy litigating identity while landlords raise rent and corporations write laws. The culture war isn't just pointless—it's functional. It keeps us divided while power consolidates.

Consider gun violence, the ultimate culture war flashpoint. Mythbearers focus on mental health and cultural decline. Mythbreakers focus on access and regulation. Both miss the deeper question: why do so many communities feel unsafe in the first place? What are the underlying conditions—economic stress, social isolation, institutional failure—that create environments where violence feels like a solution?

The gun debate becomes a perfect distraction machine. While people argue over AR-15s and background checks, nobody examines the systems that leave people feeling powerless, disconnected, and desperate for agency. The manufacturers profit from both sides of the debate while the conditions that create demand for their products remain untouched.

The same pattern repeats across every major issue. Immigration becomes a fight over border walls versus sanctuary cities while nobody addresses why people flee their homes or why American communities feel economically threatened. Education becomes a battle over curricula while schools crumble from decades of disinvestment. Healthcare becomes an ideological litmus test while people die from rationing insulin.

Power thrives when people don't coordinate. And cultural mythology, weaponized and amplified by social media algorithms that reward engagement over understanding, ensures they won't.

VI. The Conversation We're Not Having

There's a different photograph we could imagine—one that might serve both tribes better. Not because it resolves the contradictions, but because it admits them. A hardware store run by people who know that tools can build and destroy. A flag that acknowledges the gap between ideals and implementation. A phone call home that doesn't require pretending the caller's story is the only story that matters.

The tragedy isn't that we have competing myths about America. The tragedy is that we've forgotten myths are supposed to be starting points for conversation, not ending points for thought.

Both tribes are responding to the same underlying fear: that they don't matter, that their way of life is under threat, that the future has no place for them. But instead of talking about that fear directly, we argue about symbols. Instead of addressing shared challenges, we perform loyalty to competing narratives.

The Jimmy Stewart photograph becomes a Rorschach test—not because it's meaningless, but because it means too much. It carries the weight of every conversation we're not having about class, race, gender, power, belonging, and change. It becomes a lightning rod precisely because it can't actually solve the problems it represents.

We mistook the myth for the enemy. But the real tragedy is this: both sides were trying to solve the same fear. They just forgot that the story was never the solution—just the start of a conversation.

The conversation we need isn't about whether the photograph is good or bad, progressive or reactionary, inclusive or exclusive. The conversation we need is about what comes next. What stories might serve us better? What myths might help us coordinate rather than divide? What images might capture not where we've been, but where we're trying to go?

Because the cargo cult only works if you believe the planes are coming back. But what if instead of building replica airstrips, we learned to grow our own food? What if instead of fighting over inherited symbols, we created new ones? What if instead of building monuments to the past, we built infrastructure for the future?

The myth was never the solution. It was just supposed to help us remember what we were trying to solve. Somewhere along the way, we confused the map for the territory, the symbol for the substance, the story for the struggle itself.

The hardware store is still there, still selling tools. The question is what we're going to build with them.