THE AMERICAN STORY, SPLINTERED, AND THOSE VYING TO TELL IT

What does the United States of America mean?

Perhaps it’s Storyline No. 1: Americans are part of an epic tale of equality, of optimism and trajectory, a steady path toward prosperity that includes everyone from the melting pot working together to form a more perfect union. Its best days are still ahead.

Maybe it’s Storyline No. 2: The United States was brutal, unfair from the get-go, colonized by quarreling white European factions that shared little but a tendency to overrun indigenous cultures and hold human beings as property. Its best days, if there really were any, are receding.

Or is it somewhere in between: countless shades of gray — infinite competing and overlapping visions of America, including many from those whose stories have been muzzled for a long time.

The hard times that have befallen this nation in 2020 — a deadly pandemic, millions unemployed, political warfare, the upheaval after George Floyd’s death — have revealed an increasingly evident truth: The storylines that have long held the nation together are coming apart.

“The United States is essentially a collage culture. And if you were a certain group, you had the comfort of the solidity of the great American story. It had a coherence,” says Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. “And it’s now been broken apart into a million little pieces.”

Since its inception, a nation lacking an existing shared culture instead built its identity on a series of stories. Exceptionalism. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Equality. Manifest Destiny — the Godgiven right to expand. The American dream.