I bet they’re big enough to go to SPACE”
and Von Braun is just like “YEAH NO SHIT.”
So Khrushchev, who is the head of Russia
and Eisenhower, who is the head of the United States
both decide that the best way to win the Cold War
is to be the first country to put dudes in space
and then just be so cool as a result of that
that their enemies automatically bow down to them.
Oh, okay, I get it
THAT’S why it’s called the Cold War.
Cool War probably would have been better
but I guess we all make mistakes.
For the next four years
Russia hands the United States its ass over and over.
They launch the first satellite
(which is basically just a big metal ball that beeps)
and the U.S. responds
by blowing up a rocket on the launchpad
on national TV.
So to make up for that embarrassment
they train a bunch of astronauts
(meaning “star-voyagers”)
and start a cutting edge program
code-named “Man in Space Soonest”
(seriously)
but the Russians beat them to that too
with their team of COSMOnauts
(meaning “UNIVERSE-voyagers”)
until finally Eisenhower stops being president
and JFK takes over
and he’s like “Eisenhower was a douche bag
he gave our space program to a nonmilitary group
(suck it, NASA)
and he spent billions on it.
But I’m an even bigger douche bag than he
because I am going to take our space program
TO THE MOON
LITERALLY.
The Russians are schooling us so hard
our only hope is to pick a goal no one can achieve
and then hope all the Russian scientists die
before they can beat us to it.
We will do this incredibly stupid thing
not because it is easy
but for the same reason we play football:
That is to say
basically no reason at all.”
Then Kennedy hedges his bets
by trying to make a deal with Khrushchev
to work TOGETHER on this moon shit
but BOOM, HEADSHOT
Kennedy dies, and LBJ takes over
and Khrushchev doesn’t like LBJ
so SPACE RACE AHOY.
The U.S. starts the Apollo program
which should be called the Artemis program
because Apollo is the god of the sun
and Artemis is in charge of the moon
and also his sister
but at this time dudes are pretty sure ladies can’t math
so yayyyy 1960s.
Anyway, for nine years after that
the U.S. and the USSR take turns
flinging their best and brightest into space
(or in Russia’s case, just whoever they can find
like a dog
or a bag of turtles
or even A WOMAN)
and eventually JFK’s wildest dreams come true
because Sergei Korolev
who has basically been handling all Russia’s science
decides to die
and the scientists Russia has left
apparently learned how to make spaceships
from that old silent film A Trip to the Moon
where the moon is a guy’s face covered in cheese
and they fire a rocket out of a cannon into his eye.
So they just keep failing
while the U.S. is firing dudes ever closer to the moon.
Finally, on the ELEVENTH TRY
the U.S. gets a big shuttle into space
named after the jerk who “discovered” America
and it has a lunar module on it
with a lander, and a couple of guys
but then everybody gets impatient
and they’re like “Okay, y’all
[they’re in Houston, btw]
we’ve spent billions and billions of dollars
cooked human beings to death inside space coffins
and done WAY MORE MATH than is okay
but you know what?
Landing on the moon seems real hard.
Let’s just not and say we did.”
So they film the moon landing on Earth.
Stanley Kubrick directs it, it’s great
and they get this actor named Neil Armstrong
to stride out of the lander all majestic
like “Hey, this one tiny step I’m taking?
This is like a HUGE leap for mankind
mostly because gravity is way lower up here.
Look, I can jump SO HIGH. WHOA.”
Neil Armstrong pretty much becomes a god after that
because think about it
the moon is a thing people used to WORSHIP.
Like, the best heroes of ancient Greece
dreamed of being turned into star pictures at death
just so they could chill with the fucking moon
and this dude
just walked on her FACE.
(Uh, I mean
on a sound stage that LOOKS like her face.
THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE.)
It’s hard to compete with that
so pretty soon after the moon landing
Russia is like “Okay, fuck it”
and stops trying to put dudes on the moon
because seriously, who needs dudes on the moon?
The U.S. also stops trying very hard
because science just isn’t as fun
when there’s no one to humiliate.
Instead, they all start building cool space forts
and President Nixon makes a deal with Russia
where both countries send a ship to space
and then they link up in orbit
and the astronauts hang out
thus making the U.S. and Russia the first nations
ever to HIGH-FIVE IN SPACE.
THAT, MY FRIENDS
IS THE HIGHEST OF FIVES.
Then they sign a treaty
that says you can’t use the moon for military stuff
thus ensuring
that no one will ever give enough of a shit
to try and go to the moon ever again
so great job, assholes.
And since then, the world has been at peace
except for all the guerilla wars
and terrorism
and gang violence and covert ops
and random shelling across national borders
and arms races and air strikes
and the death penalty and American Gladiators
but that’s just what we like to call
“the spice of life.”
The lesson here
is that war is never the answer
unless the question is
“How do you get to the moon?”
CONCLUSION
A Myth in Progress
So if you’re reading this, you’ve probably read my book. Maybe you haven’t, but I don’t know what kind of person skips to the conclusion of a hilarious book of myths. Go back and read some stories, and then we can talk.
Okay, we good?
Good.
Writing this book has been a challenge, because when it comes to the United States, the mythology is still ve
ry much jumbled together with the history. Nobody gives a shit what year Zeus turned into a swan and fucked Leda, but most of the stories we tell each other in the USA fit together into a larger story, a story that’s still getting written, about some crazy idiots who decided to make a government based on equal representation and just a little bit of slavery (coincidentally, the Greeks tried to do the same thing, and the stories of how that worked out are equally hilarious).
So not only did I need to research all these stories and relate them to you in my dumb voice, I needed to actually convince you guys that the history of the United States of America is its mythology. I hope I’ve managed that. If not, here are some things to consider:
Time and time again, historical people have used mythological people to make themselves look better. Just looking at the civil rights movement—we’ve got Harriet Tubman nicknamed Moses, Frederick Douglass comparing himself to Jesus in his autobiography, and Martin Luther King wrapping his entire message in the sweet, sweet rhetoric of the Christian Bible.
If you look closely, you can see past presidents of the United States getting used the same way. During the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama was compared to both JFK and Lincoln, two revered presidents, both of whom achieved godlike status by dying in office. These guys weren’t just shot, they were martyred. The difference between death and martyrdom? Pure mythology.
And what about monuments? Every significant person in our history has a big pile of rocks dedicated to them. Four of the presidents mentioned in this book have their faces carved into a frikkin’ mountain. (A mountain sacred to the Native Americans, though that kind of disrespect probably shouldn’t surprise you at this point.) Of the four dudes on that mountain, Abraham Lincoln has another statue that looks a hell of a lot like the statue of Zeus at Olympia, George Washington has a big stone dick—I mean obelisk—right around the corner, the Jefferson Memorial looks like the goddamn Parthenon, and all four of these bastards are on our money.
Elvis’s house is a pilgrimage site. So is Michael Jackson’s. We built an obelisk on the site of Custer’s Last Stand, and dug a hole where the Twin Towers fell. Because yeah, that’s mythology too. Or it will be, once we’ve had time to digest it.
Actually, this book originally contained a retelling of the story of September 11, in full detail. It talked about the violence, and the heroism, and the mass hysteria that followed. My publisher convinced me to take it out. Why? Because not enough time has passed since that day. Some people are over it, but some people will take lifetimes to heal, and mythology can’t happen until everybody has moved on. I guarantee you that fourteen years after Honest Abe’s death, nobody was about to publish Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.
But the healing process has already begun. A couple days after the attack, Jon Stewart made a speech on The Daily Show. He was crying, he was deeply moved, he wasn’t ready to make jokes about the whole thing. But he said something important. I mean, he said a lot of important things that day, and if you haven’t seen that speech then you should put this book down right now and go find it, but one of the things he said was this:
“One of my first memories is of Martin Luther King being shot. I was five. Here’s what I remember about it: I was in a school in Trenton, and they shut the lights off and we got to sit under our desks, and we thought that was really cool, and they gave us cottage cheese. Which was a cold lunch, because there was rioting, but we didn’t know that, we just thought ‘My god, we get to sit under our desks and eat cottage cheese.’”
And people laughed when he said that. Because it was proof of how we heal from these things. We get far enough away to forget a little. We make jokes. We tell and retell the stories to each other, until the memory is replaced by the story. That’s how myths are made.
In 2011, President Barack Obama, heir to the ghosts of Abe Lincoln and John Kennedy, ordered the death of Osama Bin Laden. Bin Laden wasn’t doing a lot of terrorist shit at the time. He was holed up in Iran with about a terabyte of American porn, trying desperately not to be killed. The point of the assassination wasn’t to end Bin Laden’s threat to Freedom. It was to give us an end to a terrible story.
I’m calling it now: In two thousand years, when our descendants are living in Alpha Centauri and New York is a mythical place like Atlantis or Valhalla, September 11 will be a full-blown myth. Bin Laden will become an avatar of the Devil. The people of flight 93 will be Valkyries. And George Bush will still be an idiot. But that’s okay, because myths are full of those.
The point of studying mythology, to me, is to make us aware of how the patterns of mythology show up in our everyday lives. Being able to regurgitate the ridiculous sexploits of the ancient gods is a fun party trick, but the real trick is being able to spot a new myth as it’s being born. September 11 is the best example we have of a myth in progress, and we all have the power to shape how it ends up being told.
In just over a decade, that story has already been used by the government to justify two invasions and an assassination. It’s been used by truthers to justify hating the government. It’s been used by pundits and politicians to highlight the virtues of the American people. It’s been used by people, individuals who have told their personal stories in comic books and on podcasts, in bars and in chat rooms. Mythology, like this country, is sort of democratic that way.
When the planes hit, I was twelve years old, in a bathtub in California. It didn’t seem real to me at the time, which I guess gave me a head start mythology-wise. Now, double the age I was in that bathtub, I just hope I get to live long enough to see the story-making process through. If I don’t, though, I’m not worried. As long as there are humans, there will be bards.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It’s sort of tempting to just thank every person who did any kind of nice thing for me during the months I was writing this book, because writing a book tends to take over my life to the point where everything that happens seems like a part of it, but that would be boring and I would definitely forget somebody and then they’d get mad at me and it would just be a whole thing. So instead, I’m just gonna say a couple precision thank-yous and be done.
This book would have been impossible to write if Chicago didn’t have such a rad public library system. Seriously, there are buildings where you can just walk in and they will GIVE YOU BOOKS. One thing I learned in reading about early American history is that the most influential people were the ones who managed to get their paws on the most books. Knowledge used to be crazy hard to get back in the day, and that gives me a new appreciation for this city’s abundant free book houses.
I am indebted, as always, to my parents, Laurie O’Brien and Carl Weintraub, not only for creating me with some kind of gross sex ritual, but for being startlingly impartial proofreaders. Kristin Mann, my wonderful girlfriend, gave me time to work, bolstered my confidence with hers, and offered some key insights. Meg Leder, Amanda Shih, and the rest of the crew at Perigee transformed my napkin scribblings into something legible to other humans, and for that I am grateful. And without the intervention of Agent Extraordinaire Brandi Bowles at Foundry Literary Media, I would probably be living in a cardboard box, so there’s that.
Shout-out to my Chicago family—the BYOT bastards, and the Ink and Blood collective, for making this city livable, even in winter. Also Philosophy Bro and the Cards Against Humanity people for letting me squat in their office while I worked on this. This book was written on an ASUS X200MA, which you should never buy because I’m pretty sure the keyboard is designed to maximize typos, and it has just slightly more processing power than oatmeal. It was hella cheap, though.
And of course, all praise to Tiresias Chang, without whose prodding five years ago, none of you would be reading any of this crap.
FURTHER READING
So while I was writing this book, I read some other books in order to make my book more legit, and increase my American history cred. Some of these books a
ren’t great—I mainly just went to the appropriate shelf at the library and grabbed books with pretty spines—but in the interest of completeness and knowledge and whatever, here they all are:
American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America, by Edmund S. Morgan, is probably the dopest piece of history I read for this project. It’s a collection of well-researched essays that questions popular opinions about the Founders without just bashing on them the way a lot of pop history tends to.
Autobiography, and Other Writings, by Benjamin Franklin, edited by Ormond Seavey, is obviously something I had to read. Ben’s writing shaped early America, and autobiographies in general are great from a mythological perspective because dudes like to make themselves look SO GOOD.
Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, by Christopher Hitchens, is a pretty well-balanced account, which highlights Jefferson’s accomplishments while kind of making him look like a little punk.
Why Sacagawea Deserves a Day Off, and Other Lessons from the Lewis and Clark Trail, by Stephanie Ambrose Tubbs, reads more like a personal travelogue sometimes, but raises some interesting points about the details of the expedition. A great supplement to a wider understanding of the trail.
We Shall Remain: America Through Native Eyes isn’t a book. It’s a great PBS series that covers a lot more Native American history than what I touched on in this book.
Harriet Tubman: Leading the Way to Freedom, by Lauri Calkhoven, is a biography for kids, rife with popular misconceptions and oversimplifications. Which is sort of perfect for me, honestly, because I’m just as interested in the stuff we make up about our heroes as I am in the facts.
Abraham Lincoln, by James M. McPherson, is a straight-up, no-nonsense overview of Lincoln’s life. In under a hundred pages, McPherson packs in a lot of info, making a pretty good case for Lincoln’s sometimes questionable decisions.
Behind Enemy Lines: The Incredible Story of Emma Edmonds, Civil War Spy, by Seymour Reit, is another children’s biography, this one written as a prose novel. It’s very well researched, though, and since Edmonds’s autobiography is out of print and difficult to find, children’s books are unfortunately the main place her story survives.
Bloodshed at Little Bighorn: Sitting Bull, Custer, and the Destinies of Nations, by Tim Lehman, is a really excellent account of the events leading up to Custer’s Last Stand—the politics, the military maneuvers, and the unavoidable tragedy of the whole thing.
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