The New American Story-introduction and Chapter 1

We are, all of us, prisoners of the way we talk about things. Greed, fear, ambition and- all too rarely- love and kindness shape the stories we tell about our reality and about our lives. Once the stories are told-in person or in the media-they become the reality to which we relate.
The most extreme example of this is the process of story-telling by which we turn other people into one-dimensional demons. ‘Liberal are unpatriotic’ is the title of one such story. ‘Conservatives are selfish’ is another. There are dozens of smaller stories. Most of the stories are about ‘us’ or ‘them’ although there are also stories with titles like ‘possible’  and ‘never’.
The great strength of The New American Story lies simply in Bill Bradley’s recounting of The Story We’re Told. That is, he makes explicit the assumptions behind the heavily-funded discourse that shapes the way we Americans think and feel. In the process of simply making that story explicit, he makes it less powerful and clears the way for another, more generous story.

What’s the difference between the Story We’re Told and The New American Story? Essentially it’s a matter of sentence structure. TSWT says that the market is the best allocator of resources, so we should leave it to operate without government interference. TNAS says that while the market is indeed efficient and the proper engine of economic growth, it’s not the answer to every economic problem. TSWT says that you’re either a patriot or a peacenik, TNAS says you can be both. The New American Story, at its simplest, sounds like the story most of us would tell if we stopped shouting and spoke in sentences instead of slogans.

Bradley doesn’t stop with demolishing the power of current political stories and their titles: He injects into his discussion a few titles that haven’t been co-opted or demonized yet. He re-introduces the word ‘progressive’ (perhaps hoping that no one will mistake it for the now thoroughly ruined term ‘liberal’) He talks about the need for action as a ‘community’ (maybe hoping to avoid the stigma of  the word for the formal expression of community that we call ‘government’)

Bill Bradley is a man of obvious good will and manifest frankness. It may be difficult for him to acknowledge that the stories we’re told are supported by the economic self-interest of financial giants like the oil and auto industries. It may also be dispiriting for him to struggle with the fact that as long as media are both persuazive and purchaseable, stories will rise and fall according to the same logic by which hemlines, movies and pop music move in and out of public awareness. In any case, he isn’t hopeless in the face of these realities.

Will new stories, or even The New Story set us free from the inefficient, slogan-based ‘discussion’? Can our political ‘debate’ become more than a discourse between competing advertising agencies and focus-group watchers? For Bradley’s New Story to take hold, a ground-level shift in American culture is necessary. Having just written a novel that tries to make a change in the culture of guns in this country, I’m very sympathetic and even a bit hopeful. Along with the predictable calls for citizen participation, he focuses attention on the places in the world where stories are created and shared. Internet communities like Gather.com and consensus and community builders like Essembly.com. are the places where we talk to each other and shape our understandings of things, the places where we get together, create communities and yes, tell new stories.


--Lynn Hoffman, author of THE NEW SHORT COURSE IN WINE  and
the forthcoming novel bang BANG from Kunati Books. ISBN 9781601640005