Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2000. [Vol. 6.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Jason M. Dew: Cold War Reflections in Travels with Charley: Steinbeck's New Americanist Evaluation of Intra-Imperialist America

aggravating the "mine'V'yours" or "us'V'them" mindset would also come under fire by Steinbeck. The "America'V'Russia" binary forming the basis of Cold War ideology, as one would readily expect, is quick to fall under Steinbeck's lens. Not surprisingly, the expressly űttfr'-ideological location to which Steinbeck aspires remains the same. As with the aversion toward "Here" and the conformist subscription to confrontationalism as a means to distinguish what is "mine" from what is "yours," which is also to say "us" from "them," so were the highly mythologized "Russians" a symptom of a much more profound identity crisis. While the Russians began to be viewed, figuratively speaking, in lower-case letters, the pejorative image of them by Americans still functioned as a way to displace domestic anxieties onto a foreign unknown. Russia's stature as the epitome of evil, in fact, became an unassailable truth, heightening, as it were, the idea of American Exceptionalism to a nearly absurd degree. As a country that believed unequivocally that "God had designated [Americans] as a chosen people" (Potter 21), Russia validated the already inculcated idea that America was the new Jerusalem. This, at least in the abstract, afforded purpose to an essentially purposeless society. The "Russians," in their most basic sense, were simply one end of a two-part cycle that began with materialism and led to anxiety followed by vilifying the "Russians" by subscribing more to materialism and so on. The tic to go, albeit symptomatic of the cultural illness, was only part of the whole condition. At a time when the "nation's symbolic apparatus was breaking apart" (Pease 12) as a continued result of never having really answered the question "What is it to be an American?" but instead only sidestepping the crisis in legitimation by absently subscribing to the Revolutionary Mythos, Russia as America's natural enemy both made perfect sense and was itself an iteration of a paradigm that has its American roots in the Puritan rejection of the Anglican church and consequent movement to the socalled New World. The "dominant structuring principle" (Pease IX) of the American consciousness remained not only intact, but dangerously in place as an acceptable, no doubt laudable, ethic. Coincidentally happening upon a storekeeper in Minnesota, Steinbeck outwardly considers a mythos that restricts reality to a binary where there are those who are virtuous and those who are nefarious for no other 34