Back at the start of the year I spun out an argument about The Wizard of Oz and American magic, which was to say that it was always there, and not here. Pursuing related themes I was thinking this afternoon about American archetypes — as you know, the main traditional ones are the Yankee, the backwoodsman, and the minstrel (also known as the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion).

We also have in Johnny Appleseed a frontier version of the Fisher King (which is to say, the Jessie Weston version of the Fisher King, not the original). Yes, he was a real person, but there is a myth there — like the Fisher King, he is associated with fertility and an obscure hurt; “some absolute misery of the heart.”

And then there is John Henry, the backwoodsman conquered by the machine (the Tin Man shares some of this story).

We have others, like the “super-duper magical negro.” And also, the Star, the Sinner Redeemed, and the Gangster.

One could readily point out that McCain and Giuliani are pretty clearly trying to out-do Bush as the Gangster. Thin Huckabee is the Sinner Redeemed, but that’s not the only Huckabee on display. Obama is of course trying not to be the magic negro. And Hillary is trying hard to get all the boys to quit telling each other “come back to the raft ag’in, honey.”

You can’t look into the issue of American archetypes without finding some marvelous theories about the 1974 SRI report, on which Joseph Campbell was one of the authors, Changing Images of Man. But if you sink too far into that sort of thing, you never come out.