On the morning of 1 July 2011…that “whisper became a shout.”

What started out as a regular weekly spotlight on one of our great culture warriors at BigDawg Music Mafia – this time on the amazing music of our good friend Chip Murray, a truly gifted singer/songwriter who also happens to be a delightful, down-to-earth blogger – has turned out to be so much more.   We are reminded not only of God’s incredible Grace, but we are also reminded of the sacrifices of our fallen brothers and sisters that enable us to celebrate our freedom.   May this story–Chip’s story–lift your spirits and give you hope.

It is a pleasure and an honor to introduce our friend, Chip Murray.

Chip’s Biography:

Chip got his first guitar (a Stella) at the tender age of 13.  It may have been a cheap guitar, but he quickly found it to be a great tool of expression and a very cool way to connect with people.  Growing up in the turbulent 60’s, the guitar became his life raft and steady friend through the whitewaters of adolescence…. And while the rest of the world seemed to be finding themselves, making their marks and staking their claims, he was tasting the silent sweetness of nowhere.  And yet, by 35 he had lived everywhere from Boulder to Reseda, to Morgan City and the Houston suburb of Bacliff.  He lived, worked, loved, fought, and danced with “the people” on every coast of this great land.  He became one of them, assimilating their culture by inhaling their music and stories into his heart and soul… “Gone Wishin‘,” the debut CD from his band Cavern was his first public “exhale” and but a glimpse of what’s inside.  From “Devil in Me” to “Deja Vu Blues,” Gone Wishin’ is a metaphor for our journey from the darkness to the light….and after “we rest on the wind, we’ll come right back to our mothers again.”- Gibran.

By 2010, Chip was back in the studio again, this time with Producer/Engineer Adrian Holtz (The Bravery, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, The Ravonettes, Neil Dorfsman), his former Cavern bass player Peter Verutes and fellow Warwickian keyboardist Glenn John Arnowitz.  The result is a new 15 track CD, Wide Awake, released 5/1/11!  His new material from “Wonder Why” to “Home,” and “Tip Jar” is less personal and yet from a deeper and more connected place that is sure to touch you in places long forgotten…leaving you completely satisfied, wanting only a smoke!

If the world hasn’t heard of Chip Murray yet, they’re going to. With lyrics as powerful as Bob Dylan (yes, that powerful), an earthy, warm, weathered voice that sings about love and life and everything else in between, and wonderful, acoustic, honest production, “Wide Awake” is one of the best albums of this decade.~ Bobby Jo Valentine

In His Own Words:

It gets awfully lonely up here in New York for an out-of-the-closet Conservative like myself.  I recently had a liberal friend of mine passionately encourage, advise, and counsel me to actually “SHUT UP ‘n sing!”  LOL!!!

I made a promise to myself in early 2008.  I felt that if some kid could strap on body armor and leave his home, family and friends to go dodge bullets in some God-forsaken desert foxhole, then the least we could do is stand and engage the even more ruthless enemy here at home!  The Ballad of John Hall was my first politically inspired song…reflecting my experience at the first 9/12 march on Washington and my complete disgust with our local Congressman at the time, John Hall (Former front man for the 70’s band, Orleans).

I’ve never truly felt purpose in my life…until now.  At 58, I’ve always been a late bloomer, but the truth is that I didn’t become a serious musician until 8-10 years ago.  My wife saw something in me that nobody else (including me) saw.  That seeing gave birth to I Believe, and the rest is history!  Now it is clear to me that God has blessed me with a voice to sing, a pen to write, and the heart to empower both!  Everything else is just bugs on the windshield!

I wrote Independence Day on July 3^rd, 2009.  It came to me as I was putting the flag out and wondering where had all the honor gone?  “My cousin Rocky” was a helicopter crew member who was shot down and killed during his 2^nd tour in Vietnam.  The fact is that my consciousness has evolved from those turbulent years to a point where I have learned to question everything and develop the courage to stand, even if it means standing alone!

What I have come to LOVE about BigDawg Music Mafia is the fact that Independence, Courage, and Common Sense aren’t exceptions here…they are the rule here!  It has become a very cool sanctuary…a place to re-charge, re-generate and energize!  Kindred Spirit is the warm glow of candle light there…

Chip had sent a copy of his new CD Wide Awake to me shortly after it was released and there is not one song on the CD that I don’t enjoy thoroughly.  His warm, melodic lead vocals and perfectly blended harmonies, his thought-provoking and heart-warming lyrics, and his beautiful acoustic arrangements are amazingly soothing to one’s soul and need to be shared.

When I first heard Independence Day, I really had hoped to share his story in time for the Independence Day weekend.  Unfortunately (or fortunately as it turns out) he had no video for that song to include in this spotlight piece so I offered to do one for him and began scouring the internet for photos to accompany his lyrics.  When I got to this this verse…

My cousin Rocky who I never knew…Fell from the sky for me and you…Rice paddies are soft but can’t break the fall…the weight of freedom, heaviest of all.

…I decided to include a photo of the Vietnam Memorial.  While searching for one I wanted to use, I regretted that I didn’t think to try to find out Rocky’s real name early enough for me to drive to Washington, D.C., pay a visit to The Wall, look up where on the wall his name appears, snap a photo, and use it for the video.  So in lieu of that, I looked at literally hundreds of photos and selected the two I liked best.

Here is where the goosebumps come in…

On the morning of July 1, 2011, a few hours after I sent the just-completed video to Chip, he sent an email to me saying he absolutely loved it.  About an hour later, I learned that he had exchanged emails with Rocky’s brother, Steve, where he asked Steve to look carefully at the photo of the wall at 1:29-1:32 in the video…and asked if Rocky’s real name was James R. Dean, Jr.   As Chip mentions in his song, he never met Rocky…nor did he know his real name.  Yet, Chip later told me that when he watched the video for the first time, when the images of The Wall appeared, something made him pause and go back to take a closer look.  He saw the last name “Dean” upon closer scrutiny and recalled he had an Uncle with that last name, called his mother and asked if she knew Rocky’s name but she did not.  She did, however say that Rocky’s father’s name was “Jim.”  Chip told me his hands were trembling as he typed out the email to his cousin Steve.

This was Steve’s reply:

Oh my gosh!  It is!  Rocky’s real name was James R. Dean, Jr.  My dad was Sr.  I have been to the wall and looked at & touched his name. The odds of this happening are unbelievable.  A song that mentions Rocky, a friend does the video not knowing anything about Rocky, does a random wall shot on a huge wall….wow!!!!!…Makes the song even better and more meaningful and it was already incredible.

When Chip told me about this, he said we just “witnessed one of God’s miracles” and added:

God truly has us secure.  I don’t even know what to say….This is the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me…How do I sing tonight without crying???  You captured Rocky at 1:29!!!!

Yes, the tears welled up and a few spilled over…and I had chills that would not go away in spite of the very warm temperatures that day.  A mere coincidence?  I think not.

Consider this:  There are 58,272 names on The Wall and “about 4,330,000 results” that came back on a Google search for images of the Vietnam Memorial.  I looked through several of them before I found the ones I wanted to use.  I’m no mathematician but figure the odds of my using one that actually had the name of the person Chip sings about in his song.

As Chip said to me later that day…”God went from a whisper to a shout”…and he emailed the following to some of his close friends and family members:

“…there is a light in what I am about to share that transcends everything…and I want the purity in the newness of this revelation to shine directly into your deepest hearts with a nourishment that no one could appreciate as much as you…The person who made the Independence Day video for me knew NOTHING about my cousin Rocky other than what the rest of you knew from the song lyric.  She alone picked out “The Wall” footage you will notice at 1:29 to 1:32 in the video.  I DID NOT KNOW until this morning that my cousin Rocky was James R. Dean, Jr.!  Now I do know, as now do you…and we now know a whole lot more when you really think about it.”

That very evening, Chip performed several of his songs at his Wide Awake CD release party.  He shared the following with me the next day:

Our CD Release was amazing on Friday night…I chose a farm, Pennings Farm, for my release party…A big flag draping the back of the stage overlooking corn fields…kids…ice cream…it was open to the public so we had an amazing turnout…the Liberals looked like they were going to implode when we played “The Ballad of John Hall”, but there wasn’t a dry eye in the crowd when I told the “Rocky” story before playing Independence Day…

God’s timing is always…perfect.

Comedian Sean Kleier went around New York City’s hot spots with a megaphone and a camera. In each location he began reciting the president’s epic speech from the movie, Independence Day.

Let’s be clear – Battle: Los Angeles is a terrific action film that makes no bones about its pro-American, pro-military agenda.  And that fact has invited carping from the usual suspects, lefty movie critics who work themselves up into a lather over the portrayal of better men than they will ever be.   

And note that when I use the term “men” here, I include the fighting women of the US armed forces – don’t worry, critics:  Heroines like Sergeant Leigh Ann Hester will protect you . . . just move to the rear with the children and try not to get in the way. 

The fact is that science fiction has long been a tool to comment on the present, including the relationship between our warriors and our society.  Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers was a fascinating depiction of military life as well as what the author saw as a degrading, decaying culture.  The Paul Verhoeven film of the same name, though different in tone, had its own insights into military vulture, including coed showers and a machine gun-packing Doogie Howser.

The Forever War mirrored Joe Haldeman’s Vietnam War experiences.  Aliens, back before James Cameron decided that American troops were an enemy to be exterminated, has a solid take on military life.  Even the popcorn flick Independence Day, superficially similar in theme if not tone, demonstrated the military values of courage and honor – plus it featured a 9mm M9 Beretta-firing Adam Baldwin.

As awesome as Battle: LA is – and it is awesome – it is also sad that the only way Hollywood will depict the brave men and women of our modern armed forces is in the context of a fantasy.  There’s no need to create hideous villains – they exist.  Too bad the people who greenlight movies can get behind zapping space bugs from Venus but dare not depict the struggle of our troops against the buddies of the scumbags who flew planes into our buildings a decade ago.

There is nothing wrong with Battle: LA itself.  It is highly entertaining and visually spectacular, especially to those of us who live in Los Angeles and know the area – I drove through one of the battle locations this very afternoon.  And, most importantly, it gets the troops right. 

The tough sergeant is dead on in many ways, while each of the characters is a distinct individual that anyone who has served in uniform will recognize.  The critics’ whining about “cardboard characters” is simply nonsense – the fact is most of these limo liberals probably don’t know any warriors.  If there was any doubt their “criticism” is simply agenda-fueled cheerleading, their “Eek, a mouse!” reaction to Battle: LA proves it.  Frankly, its characters (thanks in no small part to a team of talented young actors I look forward to seeing again in the future) were more authentic than the hipster smartasses of the insufferable Juno or the fake cowpokes of Brokeback Mountain.  But then, it might take a little courage to stand up at a Manhattan cocktail party and say “You know, I really felt the camaraderie of the Marines in Battle: LA…wait, are you ok?  Someone call a doctor!”

—–

It hit me personally as well, especially in the form of the young lieutenant taking his unit into theater for the first time – because twenty years ago that was me during Desert Storm.   Here’s a special shout-out to actor Ramon Rodriguez as Second Lieutenant Martinez – he got it.  The desire to accomplish the mission, the responsibility for his platoon, the knowledge that as a lieutenant he really didn’t know anything – and further props to Aaron Eckhart as Staff Sergeant Nantz, who helps train his lieutenant  as generations of noncommissioned officers have trained their officers (including this one). 

What’s interesting too is how the Marines learn and adapt to fight the invaders.  In an early scene, they are nearly routed in an ambush sequence so well-directed that I almost shouted “Get that %$#&%$ machine gun firing!” at the screen when everyone went to ground.  But the unit pulls together and they do what US troops always do – they adapt, improvise and overcome. 

The end scene is particularly welcome – let’s just say that Kumbayah ain’t on these guys’ iPods.  Battle: LA, in a way, commits two acts of Hollywood sacrilege.  It shows American troops as heroes, and it proudly says that our country is worth fighting for.  No wonder Roger Ebert is spazzing out on Twitter; this kind of thoughtcrime is a million times more transgressive than all the pretentious “Let’s freak out the bourgeois squares” art film nonsense he’s defended over the years.

Also appreciated – the scene where the Marines link up with a Soldier who announces he’s part of the 40^th Infantry Division – the California Army National Guard unit whose patch I wore for nearly two decades.

As exciting and fun and welcome as Battle: LA is, it’s just too bad that the only time American fighting men and women seem to get treated with any respect in Hollywood is if the war that’s being depicted happened a half-century ago, or if the enemy has tentacles.  Well, there is a real enemy out there, one who wants us enslaved or dead.  When is Hollywood going to display even one one-hundredth of the courage of America’s warriors and dare to tell that story?

Say what?

National Treasure foreign receipts: $174.5 million
National Treasure 2: $237.4 million

That’s right kids. Captain America will be out there fighting the real evil of the world: corporations, Tea Partiers, global warming, and those who oppose gay marriage.

Even the L.A. Times notes that the decision to not make Captain America “jingoistic and flag waving” is a personal choice by the filmmaker. After all, it’s hard to demand that change in the name of commerce. Marvel’s own decidedly libertarian franchise “Iron Man” has earned nearly two billion dollars world wide.

Director Joe Johnston wants to make a film that “entertains without borders.” Cute. But the simple fact is the folks who run much of the entertainment industry have let their personal biases interfere with their ability to serve their customers. If they really want to entertain the world, and maximize their profits, they would abandon their slavish devotion to leftist talking points. I know this because I’m the guy in the trenches. Unlike studio producers, living in the bubbles of L.A. and New York, I live and die directly by foreign sales and dealing one on one with the overseas buyers. The notion that American films should be “global” is a false one. I’ve heard as much from the very people the Hollywood elites are trying to appease.

Evolving technologies have allowed filmmakers all over the world to make product that rivals the production values of American films. Take a look at some of the blockbusters coming out of Asia. Look at any Luc Besson, French-made action adventure film. In the past, Hollywood held the monopoly on epics, special effects, and movie “stars.” That’s no longer the case. Yet, American films remain popular, dominating overseas multiplexes and television sets.

It’s true that many around the world hold American ideology, iconography, and policy in contempt. But those people are disgusted by the very existence of American films in their countries. They lament the lack of local product at the mall theater. Making content tweaks isn’t going to change their opinion. They’re definitely not going to see a film called “Captain America,” even if the finale involves the Avengers firebombing Bush’s Crawford ranch and Dick Cheney’s underground bunker.

Iron Man foreign receipts: $266.7 million
Iron Man 2: $304.7 million

But the folks abroad who do enjoy American films far outnumber the cultural snobs who wouldn’t be caught dead watching the latest “Pirates of the Caribbean.” Indeed, they really like American movies. And that’s the point. If a film isn’t decidedly Hollywood, why bother? Why fight the subtitles or overdubbing when locally produced product now has the same raze dazzle as their American counterparts?

They love American films because they are American. Uniquely American.

I spent some time in Japan, hanging out with one of the major buyers of low budget horror and sci-fi films. I was picking his brain about what would sell better there. I suggested that maybe we shoot a couple films in Japan. Nope. He wanted to see Venice Beach, the Windy City, and the Big Apple. Ok, how about bringing some Japanese actors over here. I spent most of my time in the hotel studying their television shows. Surely, a well cast soap star or J-pop musician would make the film more attractive. Negative. He liked our actors. He liked blondes and redheads. And if I wanted a “star” to boost sales, forget about casting Ami Suzuki, he wanted Kiefer Sutherland.

Independence Day foreign receipts: $511.2 million

Flash forward a couple years. We were about to shoot a film that I wrote and would produce. I got a call from the Exec Producer. “Hey, I’ve been thinking,” he says (always a bad sign), “since one of our investors is German, you better ditch the whole bit with the vampire Nazis. I don’t want to offend him.” Damn it, I thought, that part was awesome. Everybody hates Nazis. How much more evil can you get than vampire Nazis decked out in SS uniforms? But it wasn’t worth the fight.

When the German investor arrived to check out the set, we grabbed lunch. “What happened to the Nazis?” he asked. My heart sunk. He read an early draft and he was offended. I replied that it just wasn’t working, and I acted surprised that he had read such an early version of the script. “Oh, that’s a shame. I thought that was really cool. And the way the heroes reacted to them was hilarious.” I breathed a sigh of relief, then confessed that we took it out as not to offend him. He seemed more offended that we would have thought he we be offended. “I’m not a Nazi. Everybody hates Nazis,” he explained. No, duh!

Every time I’ve encountered producers and executives trying to get inside the minds of the audience, be it Latino teenagers, the French, or a random buyer in a Sub-Sarahan country, they’ve been flat out wrong. They don’t rely on data. They don’t rely on communication. They don’t rely on historical evidence. They make their conclusions based on “conventional wisdom” born in an echo chamber that exists solely on the island of Manhattan and roughly 100 square miles of California.

Basically, Hollywood is run like the federal government.

The leftist bent of Hollywood films has nothing to do with sales. If it did, “The Green Zone” would have performed as well as a Bourne film overseas. It didn’t. It also has little to do with the actual tastes of foreign audiences and buyers. They love our movies. They love seeing our cities. They love it when the good guy wins and the bad guy loses. They love to see our superheroes zooming past oversized American flags. They love muscle cars. They love cowboy tough guys, and impossibly glamourous girls.

It’s the executives and filmmakers over here that do not. Don’t let them tell you any different.

Maybe it’s the “bombs bursting” in the Star Spangled Banner, or the evening fireworks, or simply that the smell of barbeque in the afternoon reminds me of napalm (actually, it’s either victory, or lighter fluid).

—–

So when the wiener hits the grill, I’m hankering for some Heartbreak Ridge.  I’m weak-kneed for a little Where Eagles Dare.  I’m jonesing for a piece o’ that… Johnny Tremain.  (You try and find a good war movie that starts with a “J.”)

Most of all, I pine for Patton.  Few celluloid moments can top that iconic opening scene for patriotic bliss.  First off, you’ve got that humongous American flag backdrop.  And you’ve got the general himself in full fruit-salad regalia, delivering the greatest pep talk since Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day speech.

The script, co-written by Francis Ford Coppola, is endlessly quotable.  “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country.  He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”  “Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!”

And a personal favorite, which Patton cribbed from the French Revolution:  “L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace!“  Try saying that next time the wife nags you to get off the couch.

The movie is thick with ironies, not the least of which is that it was intended as an anti-war film.  Patton (the movie and the man) is a true American original, a human Rorschach test.

Liberals see in him a dangerous blow-hard who should be locked up; everybody else just wishes he were alive today and commanding in Afghanistan.  (And then on to Russia!)

Chinese premier Zhou Enlai studied Patton to learn about America’s character before his historic meeting with Richard Nixon.  I like to think that when the commie bastard realized what he was up against, he crapped his Mao suit.

Roland Emmerich, when he still used to make movies that entertained, pitted nerdy Jeff Goldblum, heroic Will Smith, and sensible Bill Pullman against massive enemy spaceships that were all but invincible until, ala War of the Worlds, Smith and Goldblum –  the Marine fighter pilot and the computer programmer — fly a captured alien fighter ship up to the mother vessel to impregnate it with a computer virus.

Smith’s lines remain classics to this day: after opening the hatch to a downed enemy fighter, he punches the slithering alien in the, well, face, and says “welcome to earth,” and while dragging the tentacled, smelly creature back to the base, he shouts, “I coulda been at a barbecue!” While ostensibly the movie pitted “humankind” in a struggle for survival, which Pullman, in one of the film’s lamest scenes, likened to our Independence Day, audiences knew the truth: the United States solved the problem with good old American insight, practicality, innovation, and Big Hollywood’s own Adam Baldwin.

Two relatively average people, not the speechifyin’ president,  account for the victory, with a great deal of help from a suddenly sober Randy Quaid, who has a few of his own choice lines (“Hello, boys. I’m baaa-aack.”)

Those of us old enough to remember the theatrical release also recall that in those days of Bill Clinton’s falling popularity, audiences cheered when the aliens blew up the White House. But President Whitmore (buffed up in the movie as a former fighter pilot himself) escaped the death ray, and more than a few noticed how conveniently the first lady was wiped out in the attack, leaving the president free to, well, date.

Despite the preachy subtext of environmental-wacko-ism, and the unlikelihood of a hungover Quaid winning the day, Independence Day reminded us that even if it is only survival itself, there are things worth fighting for.

In the world of Barack Obama, that message seems much further distant than a mere 14 years.

“Independence Day” is one of the most profitable films in history — and after the original “Poseidon Adventure,” one of the greatest bad films ever — but there was no sure-fire, money-making blockbuster sequel because President Bush — The Abraham Lincoln of the Middle East — won the presidency:

“In Independence Day, it was about a king who leads his country into a fight against an outside invader. I didn’t want to make that movie during the Bush years. It was not thought that George W. Bush would have made a great king. Now with Obama, it’s another story.”

That’s straight from the director, the ball-less Roland Emmerich.

Sure, Hollywood is packed with the worst kind of greedy people who demand higher taxes as they shelter millions — who intend to hang on to their platinum health-care plans as they push rationed care – who demand Big Business pay their “fair share” as they beg for tax incentives… Sure, Leftist Hollywood wants to make money, bucketloads if possible, but…

….not at the expense of The Leftist Cause.  

If “G.I. Joe” and “Superman Return”s can make money, great! But if Americanism is necessary for them to make money, no way in hell.

Make a gajillion off an “Independence Day” sequel? Not if it helps Bush. In other words…

No Obama. No sequel. No gajillions.

Hollywood understands this is an ideological war. And if you look at their behavior through that lens, it all makes sense.

I don’t agree, and I think it matters that I be right and they be wrong.

It matters because in a world where the power of images and ideas is becoming stronger every day – where people defend themselves against men with guns by using cellphone cameras – we seem to be fresh out of ideas.

There’s a physical war going on out in the world with us on one side – and on the other a group allied in large part by their rejection of our beliefs as much as their rejection of our power. They are fighting us with bullets and bombs – and with YouTube videos, discussion forums, and impassioned manifestos. They believe, alright. If you ask them, they will clearly tell you that they do and tell you in what.

So as a counterbalance, what do we believe in? On this 4th of July, it’s worth asking – is it just baseball, hot dogs, and light beer?

It’s not, you say – it’s much more than our prosperity – it’s…our freedom. It’s…and then the words run out. Why can’t we say it? Why is it that the people who shape our culture can’t talk about whatever it is that culture is defined by, and instead talk endlessly and with pleasure about those whose only joy is transgressing the culture they can’t express?

Expressing our culture matters. Look, at the end of the day, this war won’t just be won killing those who would kill us. It will be won by converting those who would join them to join us instead. But what do we offer to make it worth joining us, exactly? What makes our side worth joining? Who are we, and what are we trying to do in the world? Why can’t we talk about that?

That’s not a new question. I read a lot – my wife would roll her eyes and say “only a lot?” – and in the course of reading, I tripped over an interesting and little-known book…a political think piece commissioned by Time Magazine founder Henry Luce in 1959 called Beyond Survival. In the first chapter, author Max Ways (a Time political correspondent) talks about the inability of the United States to formulate policies that were not responses to crises from the outside, and what that would mean as the Cold War drifted to deadlock. What would happen to America as its foreign policy drifted into a dead end?

That, precisely, is the question. For if the fault in our national policy-making process is not to be found in the government itself nor in the public itself, it must be in the way these two are connected. Are the people being asked the right questions by their leaders? Is it possible under present circumstances for leaders to ask the right questions or for the people to answer? Can the great public issues that affect our destiny be framed in a way that allows helpful public participation?

Every citizen feels free and easy in expressing his opinion about specifics of what the government does or proposes to do; but we have become timid about discussing the ends and the fundamental beliefs that condition political action. This reticence shuts off the public from that part of political life with which it is most capable of dealing, the moral part. What can the citizen be expected to contribute to a discussion of how many aircraft carriers we should build or how we should handle the technical diplomatic problems of the Berlin crisis? Topics such as these are unprofitably kicked around in public argument while a near silence prevails upon the larger questions of what we are trying to do and the moral relations between our goals and the means we choose.

The only people breaking that near silence today are those on the left who seem to believe that our national goal should be to provide redress to the masses of the world who have been wronged by the power relationships in the past century, and those on the right who simply seem to believe that national power – in and of itself – ought to be our goal. And that, having kicked down opposing powers and established our primacy, that the people of the world would simply stand with us.

Both of these dangerous delusions seem to be based on the postmodern interpretation that power relationships are all, and that highlighting them, and where possible inverting them, is man’s noblest goal (note that I think there’s more to postmodernism than this – but not a lot more to postmodern politics).

The people who matter in this are, more than anything, the mythmakers – the Hollywood folks who this site is supposedly about. Because what we have misplaced somehow are the American myths that matter. I can’t lay them out here – I can’t even find my car keys, much less missing myths. But I think I know just a bit what they look like and can set out a post office sketch in case you happen to trip over them and care to bring them back to our attention.

But if instinctive patriotism and the patriotism of the city cannot be ours, what can be? Is there a type of patriotism peculiarly American: if so, is it anything more than patriotism’s violent relative nationalism? Abraham Lincoln, the supreme authority on this subject, thought there was a patriotism unique to America. Americans, a motley gathering of various races and cultures, were bonded together not by blood or religion, not by tradition or territory, not by the calls and traditions of a city, but by a political idea. We are a nation formed by a covenant, by dedication to a set of principles, and by an exchange of promises to uphold and advance certain commitments among ourselves and throughout the world. Those principles and commitments are the core of American identity, the soul of the body politic. They make the American nation unique, and uniquely valuable among and to the other nations. But the other side of this conception contains a warning very like the warnings spoken by the prophets to Israel: if we fail in our promises to each other, and lose the principles of the covenant, then we lose everything, for they are we.”[emphasis added]

That’s leftist professor John Schaar, from his essay on patriotism – ‘The Case For Patriotism.’ Schaar was one of my professors in college – sadly, on that I didn’t pay enough attention to back then – and one thing about his teaching was that it was largely based not only in texts – the Federalist Papers and Mill and Locke – but in novels that he felt encapsulated a greater truth about America and American politics – novels like Moby Dick and The Great Gatsby.

Because he understood that what it takes to understand America is to understand myths.

And I’ve got to tell you that everywhere I look in popular culture – movies, television, books, music – the only myths I see are ones that define themselves in opposition to this unstated myth, and leave it to be defined as a negative – defined by where it isn’t.

Where are our American myths today? How can we prevail in this conflict, except by brute power, without them? How can we refashion them, with proper reverence to the myths that brought us to this place and with relevance to a wider world that suddenly connects us to cultures far outside our own? What American myth can a young Palestinian child find to compete with the hateful death-embracing myths that he is being force-fed today?