20101227.1019

Now that one of the major holiday weekends is past us (and I had a fine one, thank you very much), it is time for a bit of a return to work. It won't last too long, of course, since National Hangover Day is coming up, and not long after that, I, at least, will be back to my actual job.

Until then, though, I intend to be doing a lot of writing. And, as usual, some of it will have to do with what goes on in the world.

In my small part of it, snow is on the ground. In abundance. My backyard IS a snowdrift, one nearly as tall as I am. Out front, the road and sidewalk are near-unbroken mounds of fluffy whiteness. It's pretty, really, and makes me happy that I get to stay inside for a while.

Also in my small part of the world, my local paper ran this editorial, "The Repeal Amendment." Towards the end of it, the writer (for convenience, I'll pretend it's one) articulates the ideas 1) that, in a bit of cliché, the Constitution exists to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts, and 2) the kind of past that the current conservative movement seeks a return to (in a manner reminiscent of the Reagan who is so widely idealized) is a myth.

Myth is a powerful thing. It has a powerful hold on the collective cultural consciousness of the group which gives rise to it--and upon the groups claiming descent from them. Witness the continued invocation of Greek and Roman cosmology in the names of the heavenly bodies or our depiction of extreme efforts as "Herculean." Witness also the very names of the days of the week in English, which are most of them derived from the names of Asgardian indwellers (with another coming, again, from the Greco-Roman cosmology). Note also the pervasiveness of the idea that "Columbus discovered America" (about which, as I discuss such things with my students, I note that "You can't discover something where people already are") or that the Founding Fathers were actually committed to the idea of universal freedom (Washington and Jefferson, remember, both owned slaves) and opposed federal overreach (note the Whiskey Rebellion, in which Washington himself led federally-authorized troops against American citizens to assert federal authority to tax).

But myth is myth precisely because it is not fact. Certainly, there are truths embedded in the myths we tell and are told, and even in their exaggerations and untruths, they show us much about ourselves. But they never show us all of what we need to see, and that is one of many reasons that it is dangerous to base our concepts of reality and where we ought to go upon such things.