(February 14, 2013 at 12:41 pm)Minimalist Wrote: But the myths about Washington are more subtle.
"I never told a lie." Horseshit. He was a military commander. He lied to everybody.
"He threw a silver dollar across the Potomac." There were no silver dollars when Washington was growing up and further his boyhood home was on the Rappahannock not the Potomac.
Yea but the point is humans take real people and real places and stick them into their legends and myths to over conflate reality and delude themselves into ignoring realities like what you mention.
It is the same horseshit which was sold far too long in public schools about the "settlers", sounds placed, but the truth was that the west was invaded and the Natives were driven off their land and murdered for it.
It is why while I value Thomas Jefferson's ideas for example, he still was a human being and took part in the very inhuman and vile practice of slavery.
Ultimately humans should not be worshiped, they are never all good or all bad and they certainly do not need to be elevated to mythological pedestal status.
Reality is quite ordinary and mundane, but humans throughout our history in every culture far too often are not satisfied with mundane reality and have to sex up events by turning them into magical events and gloss over any bad that might have lead to the legend itself.
Naked assertions get peppered with real events and real people and get turned into legends and even cults that go onto become organized religions. Politics too can be elevated into a utopia because of such ignorance.
