Of course, it takes advantage of the groundwork laid down in the rhetoric of the Obama campaign but there are a few further points within the myth itself, I think, that are worth considering. For these thoughts to be relevant at all I would need to better deconstruct the print ads and commercials themselves and to fully reference sources. For now, let it stand as a meandering thought that explodes to life and at once trails off. Hopefully, I will come back to this and write more coherently and intelligently about the subject.
"Should mostly illiterate trappers be considered witting "Agents of Empire" working to expand the reach of a political entity whose ideas and intentions they did not comprehend? Is it reasonable to present men who demonstrated little interest in creating communities as farsighted individuals who played crucial roles in the settlement of the American West?"
S.L. Udall, 'The Forgotten Founders: Rethinking the History of the Old West'
In order for the frontier myth to function successfully and to offer a sense of meaning to the largely city dwelling middle classes whose imagination it captures, certain cornerstones of its story must feel relevant to the culture it pervades and ultimately 'serves'; Specifically:
- The city as a place of corruption, class struggle, and oppression
- vs. -
- The countryside and its workers as being pure and living closer to 'the truth'
- the reasonably educated white 'everyman' holding inherent god given values
- vs. -
- The untamed foreign savage
- Society in progress
- vs. -
- Society in decay
It is important, I think, within the myth that the modern worker comes to identify himself with neither the city nor the countryside. Rather, he must recognise the wrong in both and come to understand the answer as existing within himself, on the boundary between the two. In many ways it draws on the old Garden of Eden myth: we traded the countryside for knowledge and with this we built the city. Of course we now recognise the city as corrupt and must reject it but we still cannot identify with the savage nakedness that we have left behind. What then can we do? Well, the Innocent and relatively educated 'men' among us (not too educated of course, the more knowledge, the more evil as it were) must turn back and try to fix things.
So, it is important that the city desk worker position himself between the two extremes as it were, he must identify with the rural man of the field, he must believe that good honest work is the answer to all problems and he must have a nostalgia for a time when things were simple when we were all good.
It is important to consider why we need a myth invented by politicians in the late 1800s (Theodore Roosevelt's The winning of the West and Frederick Jackson Turner's The Significance of the Frontier in American History) and rolled out time and again in times of social crisis. The important thing is perhaps what it actually offers us in a time of crisis. The frontier myth does two things well: it seems applicable to contemporary society and it provides meaning to people who feel both confused and abandoned. If the everyman asks:
- Why has my economy collapsed?
- Why are the stores all closed on my street?
- Why have I lost my job?
He is soothed by the good people at Wieden + Kennedy agency who tell us quite simply in their Levi's campaign (whispered through the hoarse voice of a hopeful child):
"Maybe the world breaks on purpose, so we can have work to do."
This is important. For the everyman who feels both stupid and guilty in not understanding how dividends work and who feels that he should be fighting against something, here is his answer. Of course, he will feel a little sheepish now when he remembers telling his wife of how he would take the boss to issue on firing all of he co-workers and freezing his pay two years ago. He has work to do. Here the idea of the problem and how it is to be fixed becomes further entrenched in the moral rather than economic sphere. Is he really going to ask questions when there is so much work to do? When so many people need his help?
The everyman stumbles into another problem as well. He has distanced himself from the amoral bankers, he has looked to the west and seen himself tilling the fields and rebuilding the barns of the frontier but should he actually up and go? Does the myth require him to join a caravan of wagons heading out toward the horizon? Or should he be fighting in Iraq? Is there actually a frontier like in the old movies? I mean, he has a mortgage and the kids don't travel so well and he hasn't even told his wife about this yet... Anxiety sets in for a moment... It builds... And then Levi's step in once more and calmly whispers:
"People think there aren't frontiers anymore. They can't see that our frontiers are all around us."
Everyman let's out a sigh of relief and allows himself to laugh. That was embarrassing! But it's not just he that struggled to imagine the modern frontier, 'People' thought the same. He's not an alone in his moments of idiocy after all.
It is this idea of the frontier as everywhere coupled with the offer of meaning in an otherwise incomprehensible world that I think has led a few bloggers to declare the campaign as fresh and new. There is a newness here but perhaps only in that in the sense that the enemy is missing. Historically, the Frontier Myth is rolled out whenever progress seems challenged by a tangible enemy, whenever the distinction between good and evil seems clear and evident as it were. The Western films of John Ford of the 30s and 40s existed in a world which pitted Democracy vs. Fascism. Soldiers fighting in Vietnam could very well draw on the Frontier myth and justify it as Democracy vs. Communism. But who is our everyman fighting against? Surely not the very economic system he has served under for so long?
It could perhaps be argued that the key success of the myth is to maintain the status quo and to deter actual society changing questions to be answers. People frightened by the inability of their economic system, who would either fall into despair or approach it critically, are either buoyed or held at bay by the myth that what they really need to do is work harder. It builds feelings of national pride and it subscribes to the Christian belief that the illiterate meek are the answer to life's problems and further questions needn't be asked. The enemy is unknown but the answer is work.
To develop this line of enquiry further We need to consider:
- Violence and the Frontier myth. There is no doubt that violence is integral to the image of the cowboy but how does this fit into today's retelling of the story? Other Levis ads even go so far as to include what could be gunshots (see below). The important thing I think, is that the Everyman feel that the work he is doing is somehow equatable with war and struggle.
- The use of Walt Whitman. The campaign uses text from Walt Whitman which talks of fighting, though is of course concerning the Civil War. What was Whitman's political stance? Orwell tells us in his essay 'Inside the Whale' that Whitman strove to maintain the status quo. What does it mean to uphold the status quo then and now?
- What is progress?
- Why do the Middle classes, in their romancing of the working class, ignore the city proletariat and look to the fields (this is probably linked to innocence and 'truth')
- The role of women and non-whites in the Frontier myth.
- Obama and the myth
- Addressing problems seriously vs. having fun. Specifically in the campaigns of Diesel and I forget the brand, but there is an image of a man dressed in bunny ears with the tagline "Man must be brave".
- The myth within a myth: Christianity and moral capitalism
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