Modern Mythology
Jan. 21st, 2005 02:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
forsythI have realized part of why Bush and company drive me to great anger on fundamental levels. It's not really a realization, sort of an unfolding of other realizations.
Bear with me, I'm going to wander a bit to get where we're going the right way.
People are story-making creatures. I don't remember where I heard that, but it's a Truth. People create stories all the time, just listen to little kids. They'll make up stories about anything, out of anything. Now, stories have always been divided into "high" and "low", with the "low" peasant stories, everyday things, and the "high" aiming for bigger things, explaining the reasons for the world, the legitimacy of kings, and so on. Which is, frankly, irrelevant to this discussion, I said I was going to wander. Oh, wait, I remember. So, the "high" myths were usually held by specific people designated to remember, interpret, and share the myths with everybody else. And most people lived within ten miles their whole lives and lived in areas of no more than a thousand people, so the myths tended to be the same for everyone.
We don't have that any more, most of the old myths have fractured or warped, we walk across the bloody rubble of centuries of stories every day, a civil war of memes. We live closer now, literally and mentally. The story-keepers of old have fallen by the wayside, the network anchors and "establishment" media, hollowed by cowardice, technology, and unremitting attacks from outside. So we're all free now, in theory, to build our own myths from the pieces of a zillion thinkers before us. That's what writers and storytellers down through the ages have done, but usually then it was only when two tribes met, or at trade cities.
But anyway, enough with romanticizing storytelling and myths, on to my point. I don't believe the religious stories of the world (no, not even Discordian), but one of the main sections of my patchwork myth is one most everybody reading this should know, the myths of America we're presented in school. Hell, even the people outside the US probably know a good bit of it. More than anything else, my mental grazing fields have been American popular culture. Yeah, I read a lot, but so? Do you have ANY IDEA how many books we've printed in the past two hundred and some years? All the myths of the Founding Fathers, "Life, Liberty, Pursuit of Happiness," Freedom of Speech, Press, Assembly, Religion, "Truth, Justice, and the American way"? "All Men are Created Equal", the sense of the common man, Watergate, exposing evil to defeat it, Politicians who'll do the right thing or get tossed out of office, laws, not men, the right of people to demand answers from their government, the Shining City on the Hill, We Are The Good Guys.
That got a little incoherent, but I'm sure you got the general gist of things. And Bush and his company fight everything in the list. They lie to us. The lie to the world. They seized power because they could, without any regard for law, or the Will of the People, or anything else. They invaded Afghanistan, to bring Freedom to the people, and then abandoned them to a land even more bombed than it had been. They lied to us and the world and invaded Iraq. I have literally no idea how many Iraqis have died, anywhere between 10,000 and 100,000. 1000 soldiers, my age and younger, most of them. For "Weapons of Mass Destruction" that weren't there, and run so badly things descended to the chaos it is now. And they've gotten away with it. The media rolled over and cringed submissively, got played by propaganda and lies, and have shown themselves more inept than the Keystone cops. The People aren't allowed to Question. They lied their way through the presidential campaign, and won. They refuse to admit they're wrong, and run up disasters to ruin our futures. My future.
They have taken words like "Freedom", dear to my heart, and overused them, mangled them, twisted them until they're meaningless. "Freedom Tower" is supposed to be replacing the WTC, but the name doesn't bring any kind of surge of any emotion, except apathy. It's not a celebration of freedom, it's not inspiring, it's just a cliche. The Freedom we've been bringing to Afghanistan and Iraq is a poor and shoddy thing, not something I'd want for myself.
And yet they won. Barely, through lies and the amazing suckitude of the press, plus unscrupulous manipulation of the rules. But they won. And by that, they make me wonder. Does the America I liked exist still? Did it ever? Are people really so quick to run to a familiar last name and a promise of safety, even if it is a lie? Could they, immoral as they are, be right? Could I be so totally wrong, and their ways the way the world is, and should be?
I don't think so. But they attack my myths, my country, and they seem to be winning. They pervert language and ideals I honour, which seems to be their stock in trade. It isn't just people I've never met, who I know are important in the abstract, they're attacking ME, my identity, selfish as that may be.
And they've made FUCKING TORTURE national policy. Maybe they're right, maybe their twisted religion is true, but if that's the price of their heaven, fuck 'em. I'll dare to dream of better things. And it's long past time I started making them real.
Bear with me, I'm going to wander a bit to get where we're going the right way.
People are story-making creatures. I don't remember where I heard that, but it's a Truth. People create stories all the time, just listen to little kids. They'll make up stories about anything, out of anything. Now, stories have always been divided into "high" and "low", with the "low" peasant stories, everyday things, and the "high" aiming for bigger things, explaining the reasons for the world, the legitimacy of kings, and so on. Which is, frankly, irrelevant to this discussion, I said I was going to wander. Oh, wait, I remember. So, the "high" myths were usually held by specific people designated to remember, interpret, and share the myths with everybody else. And most people lived within ten miles their whole lives and lived in areas of no more than a thousand people, so the myths tended to be the same for everyone.
We don't have that any more, most of the old myths have fractured or warped, we walk across the bloody rubble of centuries of stories every day, a civil war of memes. We live closer now, literally and mentally. The story-keepers of old have fallen by the wayside, the network anchors and "establishment" media, hollowed by cowardice, technology, and unremitting attacks from outside. So we're all free now, in theory, to build our own myths from the pieces of a zillion thinkers before us. That's what writers and storytellers down through the ages have done, but usually then it was only when two tribes met, or at trade cities.
But anyway, enough with romanticizing storytelling and myths, on to my point. I don't believe the religious stories of the world (no, not even Discordian), but one of the main sections of my patchwork myth is one most everybody reading this should know, the myths of America we're presented in school. Hell, even the people outside the US probably know a good bit of it. More than anything else, my mental grazing fields have been American popular culture. Yeah, I read a lot, but so? Do you have ANY IDEA how many books we've printed in the past two hundred and some years? All the myths of the Founding Fathers, "Life, Liberty, Pursuit of Happiness," Freedom of Speech, Press, Assembly, Religion, "Truth, Justice, and the American way"? "All Men are Created Equal", the sense of the common man, Watergate, exposing evil to defeat it, Politicians who'll do the right thing or get tossed out of office, laws, not men, the right of people to demand answers from their government, the Shining City on the Hill, We Are The Good Guys.
That got a little incoherent, but I'm sure you got the general gist of things. And Bush and his company fight everything in the list. They lie to us. The lie to the world. They seized power because they could, without any regard for law, or the Will of the People, or anything else. They invaded Afghanistan, to bring Freedom to the people, and then abandoned them to a land even more bombed than it had been. They lied to us and the world and invaded Iraq. I have literally no idea how many Iraqis have died, anywhere between 10,000 and 100,000. 1000 soldiers, my age and younger, most of them. For "Weapons of Mass Destruction" that weren't there, and run so badly things descended to the chaos it is now. And they've gotten away with it. The media rolled over and cringed submissively, got played by propaganda and lies, and have shown themselves more inept than the Keystone cops. The People aren't allowed to Question. They lied their way through the presidential campaign, and won. They refuse to admit they're wrong, and run up disasters to ruin our futures. My future.
They have taken words like "Freedom", dear to my heart, and overused them, mangled them, twisted them until they're meaningless. "Freedom Tower" is supposed to be replacing the WTC, but the name doesn't bring any kind of surge of any emotion, except apathy. It's not a celebration of freedom, it's not inspiring, it's just a cliche. The Freedom we've been bringing to Afghanistan and Iraq is a poor and shoddy thing, not something I'd want for myself.
And yet they won. Barely, through lies and the amazing suckitude of the press, plus unscrupulous manipulation of the rules. But they won. And by that, they make me wonder. Does the America I liked exist still? Did it ever? Are people really so quick to run to a familiar last name and a promise of safety, even if it is a lie? Could they, immoral as they are, be right? Could I be so totally wrong, and their ways the way the world is, and should be?
I don't think so. But they attack my myths, my country, and they seem to be winning. They pervert language and ideals I honour, which seems to be their stock in trade. It isn't just people I've never met, who I know are important in the abstract, they're attacking ME, my identity, selfish as that may be.
And they've made FUCKING TORTURE national policy. Maybe they're right, maybe their twisted religion is true, but if that's the price of their heaven, fuck 'em. I'll dare to dream of better things. And it's long past time I started making them real.
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no subject
Date: 2005-01-20 11:19 pm (UTC)Find me a radioactive spidermonkey, K?
no subject
Date: 2005-01-21 07:38 am (UTC)This isn't about demigods fighting it out on the planes of myth. This is about us.
Even if they are attacking on the planes of myth, too.