H. Lawrence, a stranger in a strange land: But you have there the myth of the essential white American. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust are a sort of by play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. It has never yet melted. Slotkin uses this citation to distinguish between the kinds of created mythologies America characteristically requires to “do what it has to do.” The good sheriff, a strong peaceful man; this is pop myth. The killer-stoic who lurks just below the surface of an essential collective consciousness is the real
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