Elizabeth Clare Prophet did want violence, vengeance against those who failed to see her. She just wanted someone else to deliver it. That desire, as we will explore, is one of America’s most enduring legacies. In the mid-1960s, at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa, Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence discussed the Vietnam War. They wondered how and why the nation could tolerate such extreme violence. Then they made a startling discovery about narratives of violence in popular culture. It eventually became their 1977 book, The American Monomyth.11 Basically, Jewett and Lawrence
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