This book comprises two studies. One is an attempt to understand the deep structures of the allusions to U.S. history employed by contemporary U.S. leaders. This semiotic investigation is complemented by a close examination of the Reagan administration’s effort to gain domestic support for its policy of removing the Sandinista regime from power in Nicaragua.
The early chapters on myth attempt to demonstrate the dangers of employing in contemporary hemispheric relations, either consciously or unconsciously, foundation ideas about the birth and goals of the United States. The myths on which U.S. leaders draw (and which U.S. citizens often share) are several: that the Americas share a common project and destiny; that this project (impelled by God, providence, history, or racial and cultural talents) is the advance of freedom and progress (as defined by Western Europeans); that the natural leader of this project is the United States; that under such leadership (and protected by it from nonhemispheric influences) the nations of Latin America will become more like the United States.
Whereas many studies of hemispheric relations emphasize Anglo-Saxons’ conscious desire for dominance or racial and cultural disdain toward peoples of non-European or mixed racial heritage, this explanation of U.S. hegemony focuses on the effort not to stigmatize through otherness but to seduce through sameness. The United States attempts to maintain its leadership of the hemisphere by emphasizing the common origins and destiny of the “Américas.” If the hemisphere is a family, if we are sister republics, if we all seek greater freedom and material progress, then U.S. prescriptions for a healthy hemisphere are not those of Washington but of the “Américas.” Erasing the distinctions between the United States and the hemisphere’s other states allows for a consensual view of what is in reality a hegemonic project.
Eldon Kenworthy links the concept of control through sameness to the Reagan administration’s effort to undermine the Sandinistas by showing how historical myths were channeled through the techniques of contemporary advertising. He sees the goals of historical myths and those of advertising as similar, even though advertising is a much more consciously produced process. In this case, advertising “sells” policies by rhetoric (and images) that tap culturally embodied emotions, and frames issues in such a way that these emotions lead publics toward a particular policy choice. The remainder of the book traces how advertising based on foundation (and twentieth-century) myths was used to manipulate public and Congressional opinion, along with the covert practices that are now well known because of the Iran-Contra scandal.
If such usage is problematic, Kenworthy finds no easy solutions. After all, foundation myths cannot be eliminated; and in any event, they carry both the positive and negative work of which a nation is capable. Inclusionary rhetoric, derived from a physically expanding, preindustrial United States, denies difference and, by extension, the need for accommodation to the goals and values of others. Moreover, the “vanguard” myth (that the United States is the natural leader of the hemisphere) also diminishes the nation’s ability to hear dissonant discourse, except when such discourse is taken to be of “alien” origin. The inter-American struggle with sameness and difference, it might be added, runs parallel to a similar conflict within the United States.