Sarah Palin's Myth of America - TIME
Mr Klein actually comes very close to stumbling over the truth here. He sees half of it--successful Republican politicians use the power of story and myth to get their points across. The part he doesn't see is that Democrats do absolutely the same thing, often with even more power due to Hollywood and the MSM compliance of guys like Klein that see their own story as "fact" and the other guys as "myth".
FDR is WAY more mythology than truth. The "New Deal" never worked, it was WWII that bailed us out. FDR did give us gigantic vote buying social pork programs that have killed a lot of the American spirit of individual responsibility and have bills that continually come due in bail-out after bail-out, because the old adage that there is "no free lunch" is unfortunately still true in the universe of reality as opposed to myth.
The idea that the "ideal" must be something that is "reality" for most Americans is very strange. There is no reason at all that Americans can't rally around the values of "small town America" even though they don't live there. "Values" are quite transportable--our forefathers transferred mostly the enlightenment version of European Judeo / Christian values to this continent. They didn't have to start a "new mythology" because they no longer lived in Europe. Indeed, Christianity is largely not of this world at all--yet for over a billion people, they profess that it applies even though in reality they live here and not in heaven.
Politics are ALWAYS heavily tinged with mythology--as are sports, the arts, romance, products, and everything else that humans deal with. We convert an effectively infinite cosmos into a set of "myths" or "stories" that make sense to us at a level that we can grasp as humans. Our ENTIRE reality is and can only be "human" ... coming into a very limited gray matter brain through sense organs that have have very minimal bandwidth and being processed WAY short of "real time". Klein uses the common "man in the street" connection of "Myth = lie" and for the audience that he is trying to reach, I'm sure that has the effect he wants.
He is no doubt aware that for the more educated, "myth" is often a positive description of truths that are more significant than "mere fact" -- Joseph Campbell has done a few books on that subject.
Mr Klein actually comes very close to stumbling over the truth here. He sees half of it--successful Republican politicians use the power of story and myth to get their points across. The part he doesn't see is that Democrats do absolutely the same thing, often with even more power due to Hollywood and the MSM compliance of guys like Klein that see their own story as "fact" and the other guys as "myth".
FDR is WAY more mythology than truth. The "New Deal" never worked, it was WWII that bailed us out. FDR did give us gigantic vote buying social pork programs that have killed a lot of the American spirit of individual responsibility and have bills that continually come due in bail-out after bail-out, because the old adage that there is "no free lunch" is unfortunately still true in the universe of reality as opposed to myth.
The idea that the "ideal" must be something that is "reality" for most Americans is very strange. There is no reason at all that Americans can't rally around the values of "small town America" even though they don't live there. "Values" are quite transportable--our forefathers transferred mostly the enlightenment version of European Judeo / Christian values to this continent. They didn't have to start a "new mythology" because they no longer lived in Europe. Indeed, Christianity is largely not of this world at all--yet for over a billion people, they profess that it applies even though in reality they live here and not in heaven.
Politics are ALWAYS heavily tinged with mythology--as are sports, the arts, romance, products, and everything else that humans deal with. We convert an effectively infinite cosmos into a set of "myths" or "stories" that make sense to us at a level that we can grasp as humans. Our ENTIRE reality is and can only be "human" ... coming into a very limited gray matter brain through sense organs that have have very minimal bandwidth and being processed WAY short of "real time". Klein uses the common "man in the street" connection of "Myth = lie" and for the audience that he is trying to reach, I'm sure that has the effect he wants.
He is no doubt aware that for the more educated, "myth" is often a positive description of truths that are more significant than "mere fact" -- Joseph Campbell has done a few books on that subject.
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