Of Myth, Genocide, and License Plates

I saw this license plate on a truck today and was shocked by the connections to some issues I have been dealing with in my composition course this quarter. One of the selections we read from the popular culture criticism collection Signs of Life is by David Goewey. It’s an article titled “Careful, You May Run Out of Planet” and, building on the work of Laurence Shames and his concept of the lust for “more” in American culture, he looks at the dumbfounding success of SUVs in the midst of environmental and economic crisis and the myths constructed around them that sustain their popularity.

As Roland Barthes argues in Mythologies, the power of myth is in its erasure of contradiction in history through the manufacture of a coherent and often nationalistic narrative that escapes past violence, inequity, prejudice, strife, struggle, and so on. Goewey connects this to the contradictions inherent in the SUV’s identification, through advertising and marketing, as the choice of rugged individualists, people interested in exploration, nature, etc. while simultaneously participating, through this identification and choice of vehicle, in the destruction of the natural world they claim to love. (What’s even more fascinating is how people turn to SUVs for security in a threatening world that is becoming more threatening via the carbon emissions created by the very vehicles they seek refuge in.)

Furthermore, Goewey points out how these vehicles are often given names connected to Native American culture or the wild west, e.g. Cherokee and Wrangler. Thus the manifest destiny virtue of America expansionism used to sell cars appropriates and neutralizes the figure of the Native American as part of, and complicit in, the ideology that lead to their destruction. Native Americans are divorced from their history as the victims of racist violence and, through the depoliticized speech of myth, semiotically connected with American frontierism.

This peculiar twist of signification that Native Americans have undergone in the popular culture imaginary now facilitates a perceived affinity between conservatives and the image of the Native American to the point where it wouldn’t be surprising to see someone with a Chief Joseph tattoo putting a Bush/Cheney sign on his/her lawn.

Which brings us back to how odd this license plate is given it was on an Iraq War veteran’s truck alongside a bumper sticker that said “Veterans are not terrorists.” Well, perhaps not now, but…

The General Custer license plate fascinated me because, on the one hand, I found it appalling that a bloody conflict between Native Americans and the U.S. Army would be something a state would want to identify itself with and, in some sense, fashion as an emblem of pride (I mean that is what license plates are about – state pride), and secondly, because I was trying to figure out what exactly the person driving the truck was thinking was worth celebrating about the battle (as futile an exercise as this might be). I find it hard to believe that he identified with Sitting Bull and the Cheyenne and their victory over General Custer since his other bumper sticker is representative of a complete failure to recognize the parallels between the Iraq invasion and the conflict between the U.S. army and the Iraqi “insurgents.” Furthermore, the license plate is from the Custer Battlefield Museum which, given its name, is playing favorites.

This can only lead to the conclusion that, in keeping with Goewey’s analysis, troubling political events like the Battle of Little Big Horn have been completely revised and now simply represent some perverse form of historical frontier action adventure. For the patrons of the Custer Battlfield Museum, purchasing that license plate has no potentially troublesome political connotations; rather, the license plate merely celebrates some kind of rip roarin’, gun slingin’, hootin’ and hollerin’ American past where genocide is, if even acknowledged, nothing more than unfortunate byproduct of an expansionist/capitalist project that had to be done.  A necessary evil.