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What are some other aftershocks of Crusoe? In William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies, the British schoolboys are stranded on a Crusoesque desert island, and they soon degenerate into a horde of murderous savages. We should remember The Lord of the Flies. Every single day, while adult Americans walk around for all intents and purposes blind as bats, our children are doing battle with the forces of Good and Evil.
In South Central Los Angeles, where a third of all the city's homicides take place, gangbangers kill schoolchildren for not wearing the "right" colors. Right now in America, the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, 25% of all black males — those between the teenagers to college-age — are in jail or under arrest.
In every ghetto, teenage boys think and act as if they were thugs and gangsters and not "the lost boys" they actually are. They think of themselves as outlaws. Too many of these boys are fathers. Meanwhile more than half of all gang murders are innocent bystanders or robbery victims.
In many of its advertisements the United States Navy takes pride that its men and women are out there defending the American Way of Life. Trust the military to be brutally pragmatic, clearly focused and precisely empowered.
Who we are is more than just a majority of dialects of the English language. Our American Way of Life is the general atmosphere we live and breathe in. It is a set of assumptions we and all our ancestors have made and do make. Our descendants will continue this practice.
 Illustration by N. C. Wyeth, from Robinson Crusoe  |
Our Way of Life is how we live every day. How we work and how we play and how we dress up and dress down. It is how we eat and what we eat and when we eat. It's what we watch and read and talk about when we get together.
Our Way of Life started as no single individual strand of thread. Our Way of Life is a fabric woven by billions of all races and colors, deliberately if not consciously.
Our Way of Life is the American monomyth, the Master Narrative, the white folks' way of life, the Robinson Crusoe mystique. It is Our Side of the Story over a Long Period of Time.
Our Way of Life is a Cultural Consensus. But it has a vein of racism and elitism and oppression built in that runs clear down its length from its earliest days on another continent half the world away.
Our Way of Life exerts its influence over us and undercuts our individuality. It pressures us and influences all of our choices and our opinions. We conform to it, and our unthinking loyalty makes us helpless before it.
Our Way of Life interprets the world so we don't have to. It dictates moral and ethical principles, thus constructs a foundation to stand upon. It is the voice of the collective mind of our culture, about what that collective mind sees itself as, as where that collective mind thinks it came from, and where the collective mind wants to go next.
We speak this narrative and we behave according its underlying assumptions and assertions. We never notice this narrative, and so we never challenge it. The problem comes when we are blinded by obsolete mythologies. When what we believe in is a dangerous relic.
Naturally enough, a few of the words of Thomas Jefferson are written on the walls inside the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D. C. His Greatest Hits, so to speak.
My favorite Jeffersonian quotation is also on the walls inside, but it is not the one most Americans remember. It reads: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free."
In 1968 the Kerner Commission said there would be two Americas, one black and the other white, if racial injustices were not remedied. In 1993 the Milton S. Eisenhower Commission said these two societies within America had prevailed.
Justice is a most curious beast. Our opinions are filtered not only through our personal experiences, but they are also manipulated — programmed — by our Master Story. A white sees a black in handcuffs: he's in handcuffs because he's guilty. A black sees a black in handcuffs and registers: he's in handcuffs because he is black.
We may be racists. But we do not know (i.e., recognize) how deep our prejudices run because we do not know (i.e., recognize) the power behind a Master Story steering us. We dance to the Master Story as if it were a tune. It is the background music of our lives, as well as the lives of our kith and kin.
The Master Story is based on blind faith. It's based on not questioning who we are, how we got here, and where we are going. To recognize the symptoms is almost impossible. When you hear the bell, you are Pavlov's dog.
Twenty centuries ago Julius Caesar groused about his "impedimenta" when he was barreling his way through Gaul back in the years before Christ. His army could march like the Dickens, but his "impedimenta" was the supply train that followed behind. "Impedimenta" slowed his army down. Our word "impediment" is baggage carried. What baggage do we carry? What slows us down? What part of our precious cultural baggage must we dump in order to survive as a nation?
* * *
Well, what do the ethnic sidekicks want? Ethnics want to share the wealth and share the power. On New Years Day, 1994, the Zapatista National Liberation Army launched an assault against the government of Mexico. The Chiapas rebels claimed they were rebelling in specific against terms within NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which their government, the Canadian government and the government of the United States of America had all recently signed and which was going into effect on that day. They never said they were against it; they just didn't want to be left out.
How many of the top 100 country clubs in America have black members — and how many "members" are there altogether? Are there any black managers in major American sports? How many? Are there any black owners of major American sport franchises? Are there any blacks (male or female) with the power to say "Yes" to a movie in Hollywood?
Is there a black vice presidential candidate for either the Democrats or the Republicans looming on the horizon? Or would a black vice president be the ultimate ethnic sidekick? Has there ever been a black candidate for president of the United States who ³could have been a contender²?
George W. Bush
and Colin Powell
Can a black man, a man of "color" become President? The recent political saga of Colin Powell gives us a tentative "yes." But then his parents are Jamaican immigrants, not native black American. Is there a distinction between being black and being Jamaican-born and being black and American-born? Is a distinction perceived? How else do we explain that one of The New York Times' editorials to celebrate Powell's achievements during the autumn of 1995 was headlined "Colin Powell's Jamaican Journey"? How else do we explain that "Jamaican" now seems always stapled to his achievements?
Can a woman be President? Can a woman of color be President? Can a Jew? How about a Muslim?
Robinson Crusoe still enslaves us all. His racism is part of the cultural baggage we carry. It is our "impedimenta." It is a fiction that may destroy us.
The day I began this essay in 1994 was an ordinary Wednesday; the best said about it is that it was the Wednesday after Memorial Day. And yet … while I wrote, CNN ran a story about the resort island of Hilton Head in South Carolina. There, the white-owned and operated golf courses are fully developed with watering systems for both sewer and irrigation, while the black islanders who lived on the island of Hilton Head long before the real estate developers came to develop it do not have any sewer facilities.
After a half-dozen years has Hilton Head experienced any changes?
Or does Crusoe still echo across the land?
Literature teaches a sense of worth. To see your own story in words is a wonderful thing. To see your own story retold is to touch your own immortality, what little of that we can get. Novels like Roots and Beloved make us all feel what slavery was like for that person.
But who defines the worth? Who computes the worth? Who knows what part of our precious Way of Life we may have to jettison in order to survive as a nation. But if we fail to analyze who we are, how we got here and where we want to go next, if we let ourselves be influenced and manipulated by self-flattery — (I will not say, "blinded by self-delusion," but you can) — we will be helpless pawns pressured by larger forces, either more powerful individuals or social groups whose agendas, hidden and otherwise, may not be what we want — but may actually injure or kill us.
The puppet masters will have free rein.
October 2000 | Issue 30
Copyright © 2000 by Frederick Zackel
Frederick Zackel is a contributing editor to the literary website January magazine. He has published two novels, one of which, Cocaine & Blue Eyes, was made into an NBC movie in 1983. He teaches at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He can be reached at fzackel@wcnet.org.
ACCESS: The text of DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe can be found at many sites (since it’s public domain), including bibliomania and webnexus. If you want the text with N. C. Wyeth’s famous illustrations (from the Scribner’s edition), try the grid. If you’re a student, the "Cliff’s Notes" version from barronbooknotes is a must. A brief bio and bibliography of DeFoe can be found at the kirjasto site. For a bio on the guy whose life DeFoe stole for his — I mean, who inspired DeFoe’s Crusoe — look at this good Alexander Sellkirk page. Readers interested in a bizarre modern-day rethinking of the story should check out Barbara Einzig’s bizarre novel Robinson Crusoe: A New Fiction. The inimitable Internet Movie Database provides reviews of most of the films discussed here (the majority available from reputable dealers on VHS and/or DVD). But wait! You can also try the lesser-known but better movie review site, the always impressive Movie Review Query Engine.
