Substantive Post: Manifest Destiny

Reading Manifest Destiny right after The Martian Chronicles it was not difficult to see parallels between the books, as Jackie pointed out. “The Indians have melted before the white man, and the mixed degraded race of Mexico must melt before the Anglo-Saxon,” said William Ellery Channing in his critique of destinarian justifications for westward expansion (50). The word melt stood out for me – the analogy is clear, the humans in Bradbury’s book have imposed themselves on Mars, making the Martians disappear before them and quite literally melt before them in the story “The Martian.”

Manifest Destiny made even more evident to me the distinctly American quality of the colonization of Mars. As Stephanson argued, the belief in American exceptionalism has lead Americans to seek to spread their cultural influence or be a shining example of a highly evolved society. Along these lines, homogeneity of beliefs and races under the American and Anglo-Saxon was ideal. “Races and spaces alien in every sense could not be incorporated…Republics could not have subject populations and stay healthy: they had to be homogenous. Furthermore, colonialism would infect and degrade the consciousness and culture of the colonizer (103).”

That is precisely why Benjamin Driscoll in “The Green Morning” must terraform Mars and why the settlers build their own towns away from old Martian ruins. There never really was a melting pot in America as Theodore Roosevelt liked to declare, it was really a “cookie cutter” in that immigrants were forced to assimilate and become more like the dominant culture if they wished to progress in society.

On another note, I was especially struck by the end of Manifest Destiny. Stephanson suggests that our idea of ourselves as the “Israel of our time” may be coming to an end because our commodity driven society has left us void of purpose. His last paragraph was especially poignant – “we are perhaps on the verge of some new and diffuse epoch where such projections will have limited moments in the sun because all that matters in the end is the perpetual present, a virtual reality empty of value, a postmodern world where destiny cannot be manifest and certainly not managed. When transcendence itself becomes nothing more than a commodity” (129). What is Stephanson grieving (and he does seem troubled)? Is it a feeling of a lack of purpose in our day and age? Yet we do seem continually driven. Indeed, Obama ran on a slogan of change – implying that we feel we have lost our way and must return to our purposeful and righteous path. If you have 20 minutes to spare, check out this artistic clip:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-weiner/america-at-a-crossroads-a_b_482416.html

I think it encompasses our current cynicism and exhaustion with government and postmodernism. “There is no more myth-making in America, only the tearing down of heroes. Reality television, punditry, and cynicism saw to that,” according to the video.