Our adventure in Iraq, at a cost of billions, has brought that country to the verge of civil war while earning us more enemies than ever before. And tax money earmarked for security is being dumped into pork-barrel projects anywhere somebody wants their own SWAT team. Detonation of a nuclear bomb within our borders--pick any big city--is a real possibility, as much so now as five years ago. Meanwhile, many Democrats have conceded the very subject of security and positioned themselves as Guardians of Our Forests and Benefactors of Waifs and Owls, neglecting the most basic job of government, which is to defend this country. The peaceful lagoon that is the White House is designed for the comfort of a vulnerable man. Perfectly understandable, but not what is needed now. The U.S. Constitution provides a simple, ultimate way to hold him to account for war crimes and the failure to attend to the country's defense. Impeach him and let the Senate hear the evidence. --posted March 3, 2006

Garrison Keillor is an author and the radio host of "A Prairie Home Companion."

© 2006 Chicago Tribune

If you’ve ever watched a western or a war movie staring John Wayne and felt a touch of pride in being an American, then you are aware of the power of icons. And if you’ve ever heard a deafening clap of thunder and felt the force of a lightning bolt striking so close by that you feared for your life, then you can appreciate the enormous amount of energy that is dissipated in an electrical storm. Indeed, it’s because lightning carries both positive and negative properties that the lightning rod serves as an effective metaphor in the context of public opinion.

As an icon, John Wayne is hard to surpass when it comes to the patriarchal aspirations of mainstream America.  And as a lightning rod, Hillary Clinton may represent the mother of all metaphors when it comes to illuminating societal angst. Icons are distinctive because they negate the need to think; they are used politically to stir feelings. Metaphors, on the other hand, help us to learn; they are tools of language used for the sake of comparison. I think it’s safe to say that currently most people relate to Hillary Clinton as a lightning rod and to John Wayne as an icon, but I hope my granddaughter lives to see the day when most people can distinguish between icons, metaphors, and reality.

One of the biggest breakthroughs in my own learning I attribute to comprehending the significance of metaphor. Notice that in saying “biggest” breakthrough I’ve made the assumption that big is good.  Our ability to communicate derives from metaphor and analogy.  In general up is thought to be better than down, warm better than cold, we associate seeing with understanding and most of us in the Western world perceive of life as a journey of some sort. Our ability to understand anything and everything rests on a labyrinth of muddled metaphors that we have internalized without noticing that we have done so. In short, a metaphor is primarily a way to make sense of one thing from having understood another.

Icons fill in the gaps of our respective worldviews by causing us to relate or react in a certain way when we encounter them. The trouble with icons is that for many people they become more important than what they are supposed to represent. For example, national flags have a way of trumping ideas. The trouble with metaphors is that sometimes we take them too seriously. A metaphor becomes an icon when people care deeply about it; when it is a reflection of the meaning they find in the world. But one nation’s sacred signs and symbols are often just adjectives for their neighboring countries.

A lightning rod as a metaphor has the capacity to gather public indifference into an electrically supercharged storm of contempt, while the appearance of an icon invites awe and respect. Hence, for many mainstream Americans, images of John Wayne bring forth feelings of patriotism, but when they see Hillary Clinton, they hear thunder. Why?

It’s my observation that nothing reveals the negative properties of societal angst better than the unstable and antagonistic expanse between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. The fuel that feeds public anxiety and misplaced hatred and bigotry is something I’ve come to regard as mainstream indifference—a psychological wasteland where thoughtless people are bound together by a yoke of stupidity that’s wholly accepted as plain old common sense. The social realm is anti-intellectual to the bone, feeding upon a disdain for eloquence in literature, the arts, and all serious endeavors that require cerebral verve. Such thinking frequently manifests as seething hatred, complete with public demonstrations of contempt for “others,” when actually, a lack of curiosity is the real culprit. This is what I call mainstream indifference, and I submit that indifference of this kind is a byproduct of egoism—a form of narcissism so extreme as to drive from conscious reality everything but self-centered actions that leave little room for focusing on anything else.

Furthermore, upon closer inspection, this frame of mind can be seen to contain an unacknowledged undercurrent of self-loathing.  It’s a kind of disdain for oneself for one’s own laziness. The person knows at some deep level that the indifference and laziness are contemptible but nevertheless makes no effort to change.

Here we come face-to-face with the great unspoken denial of American culture—an inconsistency so glaring, so blatant and so ubiquitous that for the most part it goes unnoticed. I’m referring to a tacit contempt for the compassionate ethos of Christianity that pervades our culture. What most Americans have been raised to admire (brotherly love and meekness notwithstanding) are bold acts of violence that are decisively un-Christian. Values don’t just fall out of the sky. We don’t find them in books, and we aren’t given them by others. We learn to value by valuing—specifically by acknowledging what we admire. When we admire something in the company of others, we are bound together by the experience.

The ethos of the rugged individualist, who shoots first and slugs the other’s cheek instead of turning his own, is antithetical to the teaching of Christianity. Yet this is the kind of person who becomes lionized among the populace. This contradiction turns out not to be much of a worry, however, since an apparent hallmark of Christianity is to preach one thing but do another.  As we’ve all seen in everyday practice, loving one’s neighbor actually means loving only those who follow the same beliefs and hold the same values as one’s own. Indeed, what is forgiveness if not a method for getting closer to what a person really wants and truly values without guilt for one’s own indiscretions?

It should come as no surprise that nothing reveals American values better than American cinema, especially westerns. In his erudite book, Cowboy Metaphysics, Peter A. French shows in vivid detail how the western genre is made up of factions split apart by opposing worldviews and by radically different ideas about death. Recall those muttering but scarcely audible mobs of people in the typical western, the townsfolk who are helpless to act in the face of oppression, but who are dependent upon the silent hard-hearted stranger who, without blinking, will leave their oppressor face-down in the mud, chest full of lead, and the air filled with gun smoke.

Of the passivity of the townspeople French writes, “You can be exceptional and flawed and therefore doomed, or you can be average and weak and scrape by. Those are the only options. The homesteaders and the independent miners (and in some Westerns, the townspeople) are chorus.” This gets us to an even deeper reason for the self-contempt I’ve mentioned, and it’s not flattering: the muttering crowd of townspeople, those who are obviously too submissive to do the un-Christian deed that needs to be done, don’t really count. These folks aren’t heroes—they don’t get speaking parts—and it’s hard to be proud of yourself if you’re considered one of them. But when you rally around the hero, identify with him and shun and ridicule those who appear to hold different values, a self can be redeemed, if only marginally, and indifference will see you through until a challenge arises or a lightning rod is brought to bear.

The chorus is large. Millions of people in America are neither gunfighters nor heroes. Moreover, many do nothing, whatsoever, that might be considered a citizen’s duty. They don’t vote; they know nothing of history, nothing of politics, nothing about the nuts and bolts issues their country faces, and yet they believe they know everything there is to know about Hillary.  And so it goes for all of those who do not read newspapers, magazines or books, those who do not seek out an in-depth study of anything, ever, but who know with religious certainty the righteousness of their own indignation over matters about which, for all practical purposes, they know absolutely nothing.  People hate Hillary Clinton but don’t really know why. They just hate her. She represents something they don’t understand and can’t articulate—not only that, but they are often proud of the fact that they can’t explain it.

They can’t explain their reaction because it’s a reflex—a very old one.  Many of our frontier traditions in America derive from herding cultures of previous centuries. In depicting the Old West, our filmmakers have glorified these conventions as larger than life, and mainstream Americans have internalized them, resulting in something just short of a red-state sensibility. Sheep herdsmen during Biblical times had a lot in common with cowboys: lose your herd and your honor is lost along with your livestock.  Moreover, in periods of social unrest, herdsman societies were win-lose cultures, where status was everything. The use of violence to protect one’s sense of honor has carried over to become the driving force in the western movie genre.

Western movies typically pit a feminine, East Coast, Christian worldview against the quiet and stoic stranger who’s willing to risk everything, even eternal nonexistence, often for the want of nothing more than a little self-respect, or in other words, honor.  In his last movie, The Shootist, John Wayne explains the code of the West to his co-star Ron Howard: “I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted, I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do these things to other people; I require the same from them.” This succinct characterization sums up the unspoken premise of honor in nearly all western movies—it’s the archetype for the Hollywood version of macho. Perhaps because I grew up with this mental picture of honor myself I still find it suitable for a civil society.

Unfortunately, in modern society, treating other people with respect is not where the macho ethos stops. A simplified but exaggerated form of today’s paternalistic and testosterone-driven ethos fuels the swagger that George W. Bush adopts when he spouts, “Bring it on.” The same unconscious impetus prompts him to walk with hands extended from the side, as if he imagines himself a gunfighter.  And it’s the same attitude that induced him to try to appoint a buffoon like Bernard Kerik as head of Homeland Security in 2004.

Deeper still in the psyche of those charmed by the philosophy portrayed on the silver screen is the notion that action or a fast gun nearly always triumphs over the better argument. Intellect and articulation are to be shunned; worse, they are feminine virtues. Those perceived as being too good with words are not to be trusted. And thus it’s not surprising that so many American males hate Bill Clinton for no better reason than he has a remarkable ability to sound as if he knows what he’s taking about. Even though George W. Bush can barely speak above a kindergarten level in a public forum, his supporters see him not as a man of words, but as a man of action. It is indeed ironic that Bill Clinton was one of the most articulate presidents in American history, and many people hate him for it. George W. Bush is one of the most inarticulate presidents in history, and yet he is forgiven this indiscretion because a man’s man is perceived to exist behind his simple facade. Bush acted after 9/11, even if it meant attacking a country that was not involved. His supporters can forgive this mistake more easily than if he had not acted at all. The townspeople often forgive the heroic stranger for a few moments of recklessness; it’s just the way of the West.

Now you might be thinking, “Wait a minute. We aren’t herding anything these days, and cowboys are long gone except for the drug-store type.”  You’re right. Even westerns are out of style. But westerns carry a powerful legacy about men being men and staying that way. The culture of the quiet man of few words comes through loud and clear to the present day. For example, one of the high points of the Harrison Ford movie Witness occurs when Ford, who plays a cop in hiding, disguises himself as an Amish farmer. When some local punks make fun of a group of Amish men for their willingness to turn the other cheek, Ford thrashes them, breaking the nose of one of the culprits. The satisfaction felt by the audience is palpable, and we are made to think that even the Amish are secretly happy these punks got what was coming to them.

My thesis may seem like a gross oversimplification, but a befuddled internalization of an ancient flock protection ethos, combined with a patriarchal, religious fundamentalism and Hollywood’s American West underlies what most of the men with pickups, gun racks, and Confederate flags attached to their antennas define as what it means to be a man. It’s a significant part of what paints the states they live in red.

Don’t get me wrong. I liked John Wayne and most of the movies that he starred in. But long ago my quest for objective knowledge made me painfully aware that, by and large, we celebrate a West that never was. I was more than a little disappointed to learn that John Wayne hated horses, and that he avoided active service during World War II to advance his film career. But the truth is that anyone who makes a serious effort to learn more about the world cannot help but be amazed that nothing upon close examination is as it appears, and there is no better example than the fantasy of the American West as depicted in movies. Growing up in Texas in the 1940s and ’50s, I knew the propensity for violence where I lived was very different from that in other parts of the country. It was easy to see. Those loud, gesture-rich arguments frequently depicted in media, and considered routine by residents of large northeastern cities, would result in immediate fisticuffs in the South, no doubt about it. There was no shouting or finger pointing in Texas, unless of course you were prepared to fight to back it up.

Regardless of the rhetoric about what Hillary is supposedly up to, she is likewise perceived as a threat to the patriarchal family. She is the archetypal Easterner; she speaks in complete sentences and is married to someone who speaks so well it makes him slick. If we translate the Easterner values from the 1950s westerns into today’s terms, we encounter individuals who try their best to find the better argument, people who give the notion of brotherly love something more than lip service, people who are unafraid of criticizing their own government, people who in fact believe that it is their civic duty to hold their leaders’ feet to the fire. In other words, I am describing the metaphorical  nemesis of the rugged individualist in western cinema: liberals. And this is why so many men, and some women, bristle simply at the mention of Hillary’s name. They know essentially nothing about her, and yet they believe that she is a threat to everything they care about. Among herdsmen, and in patriarchal societies in general, men are owners of the flock or the herd and all that goes with it, women and children included. This stuff comes right out of the Bible. It’s what George Lakoff characterizes as “the strict father morality” in his book Moral Politics.

The family in red-state America is a metaphor for male dominance; that’s what they think God intended. So, if you still have some doubts about my lighting rod metaphor, spend some time paying particular attention to the language used to describe Hillary Clinton by those who hate her passionately. Notice that the words they use to frame their arguments presuppose a protectiveness of their flock culture by speaking directly about a strict father morality and that they abhor a feminine point of view regardless of the subject. Even in matters where a woman would be thought virtuous, such as preserving a marriage despite infidelity, Hillary was ridiculed for standing by her man. The lesson for those of us who disagree with the strict father view of morality is that to engage conservatives in debate using their language to frame the issue is as futile as throwing stones at stones.

If Hillary Clinton were president of the United States, I don’t profess to know what kind of leader she would be. But I don’t think she would lie to us to get us into a war so that her legacy would have the potential to remind us of John Wayne.  I don’t think she would turn over the welfare of American workers to big business. I don’t think she would consider it business as usual that more that 45 million Americans are without health insurance. Moreover, I think she would go full steam ahead for stem-cell research. I don’t think she would support laws that make it impossible for the average citizen to seek legal redress in the courts.  I don’t think she would undermine social security under the guise of reform. I don’t think she would champion the idea of democracy while presiding over one of the most undemocratic administrations in American history. Nor would she opt for being the most secretive administration since World War II. I don’t think she would implement a foreign policy that would cause America to be seen as a self-absorbed bully. I don’t think she would go along with undoing years of environmental protection, giving the petrochemical industry license to do as it wishes. I don’t think she would deny the scientific evidence for global warming. I don’t think she would let the oil industry write the rules for our energy policy. I don’t think she would argue that Intelligent Design should be taught alongside evolution. I don’t think she would confuse the boundaries of church and state. And I don’t think that millions of people would cringe with embarrassment every time she spoke in public. I don’t think her impromptu remarks to the press would incite a jihad, as was the case when Bush spoke of a “crusade.”  And finally, if Hillary is elected president, millions of people will continue to hate her, they will still wince when they hear her name, but, unlike the case of President Bush, I don’t think a significant number of her detractors or supporters around the world will really and truly believe, at a gut level, that she is egregiously incompetent.

All of this speculation reflects my own wishful thinking, of course. But the truth of the matter is that for any woman to be elected president of the United States, she will have to be seen by a significant portion of the population as more decisive than thoughtful and more hawkish on all matters of defense than most men are, just to be seen as remotely qualified.  She will have to be viewed as an iron-skirted Margaret Thatcher before most red-state people will consider her to be a viable candidate. All you have to do to verify this for yourself is to watch Geena Davis in Commander in Chief and witness the great lengths the show’s writers go to in making this point clear.

Respect, honor, toughness, and a willingness to act decisively are very important aspects of leadership. But when an immature and adolescent worldview results in a ready, fire, aim, war policy for the sake of appearing presidential in the eyes of a constituency of indifferent townspeople inspired by Hollywood heroics, it amounts to a slap in the face of reason and a stain on American history.

I don’t believe that maturity as a nation is possible until such time as it is commonplace for average citizens to achieve a level of objective thought that enables them to deconstruct the metaphors and icons that shape the everyday reality of popular culture. Metaphors and icons are wonderful tools of expression, but if we can’t see through them, then it is more accurate to say that instead of having ideas, our ideas have us. Being a prisoner to an ideology makes us vulnerable to anyone and everyone with a political agenda who know full well which lightning rods will get our attention and which icons will cause us to stop thinking. --posted Feb. 18, 2006