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So why the pretense—why the evident pleasure—in seeing the country as a collection of loners? It may just be a game, a casually preferred national image requiring no analysis, like English gentlemen or Latin lovers. It may be a holdover from the country's beginnings. Any institution that starts out with a Declaration of Independence may feel obliged to uphold the standard. The myth may also arise from a logical contradiction in a revolutionary society; that once the revolution is done, every rugged individual must be whittled down to a mere citizen for the revolutionized society to function. Thinking of oneself as a rugged individual may preserve the revolution as we cross at the green.
Or it may be part of an effort to keep life simple, especially when simplicity swims increasingly out of reach. The simple life, too is a basic American myth, but it was a lot closer to being realized before the age of genetic finagling, test-tube babies and nuclear arms. Complex social problems do not harry pioneers. The constant conflict between capitalism and Christianity, for examaple, could be resolved, at least in words, by the figure of the rugged individual who gives to charity of his free will, not by paying his taxes. No socialists here. Perhaps we just seek to preserve our distinctiveness from the Old World. The American Dream, the American Novel, the rugged American Self.
Perhaps the Pilgrim nation has run out of places to wander to, and thus clings to a term that implies a perpetual future.
The fact is that the country has consistently shown its best face and best strength when it has defined rugged individuals as those people rugged enough to come to the aid of their fellows, and intelligent enough to recognize when they need such aid in return. Could there be some national embarrassment in that, a Wallace Beery blush suggesting that Americans risk becoming sissified when they acknowledge normal human dependencies? Who should be called a rugged individual these days? Lee Iacocca? All Iacocca needed was a billion dollars from the Government, and he was ready to stand alone.
It must be said that people like Iacocca add nerve to circumstances, and that it helps to work in a country where individuals have room to stretch. But standing alone often means mere hollow defiance.
Do we preserve the loner ideal as an act of national defensiveness, to protect the country from conceding that it is too much alone in the world? Before the Second World War, a great many Americans sought international isolation. Once the nation be came a superpower it achieved more isolation than anyone ever dreamed of; in a bipolar world, both poles are alone. The individualist Henry David Thoreau called America "The Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow." Do they indeed? All right, then, says the proud country: If we would be left alone, let us be' alone gloriously, ruggedly. And by extension: Let every individual be alone. Prop him in front of his Apple II, and point him toward the prairie.