JUST A MYTH?

Nicolas-André Monsiau's The Twelve Olympians, courtesy of wikipedia.

El Cabrero thinks it's unfortunate that the word myth has come to mean something widely believed but untrue. Would that widely held beliefs were as cool as real myths...

The word, by the way, comes from the Greek term that means something like a spoken story. Classicist Elizabeth Vandiver defines myths as "traditional stories a society tells itself that encode or represent the world-view, beliefs, principles, and often fears of that society."

According to the scholar Walter Burkert, "Myth is a traditional tale with secondary, partial reference to something of collective importance."

Here's my shot at it: myths are stories that convey deep meaning.

Among human cultures, myth is about as universal as language, to which it is obviously intimately related. Humans seem to be hardwired for story or narrative and we construct them all the time, often unconsciously (which is literally the case when it comes to dreams). When I teach the occasional sociology class, I usually point out that humans have three main ways of making sense of the world: narrative, reasoning, and science, with narrative holding pride of place.

I don't think we can do without myths any more than rituals--when we don't have real ones, we seem pretty good at coming up with cheesy ones.

Some scholars separate myths from other kinds of traditional tales by suggesting that myths are mostly concerned with gods and religious rituals, while legends are traditional tales rooted in facts and folktales are entertaining narratives about things like unusual people or talking animals. In many and maybe most cases, they're pretty intertwined and hard to separate.

More on all this tomorrow.

UNHAPPY ANNIVERSARY. This week will mark the fifth year of the unnecessary war in Iraq. Here's Linda Bilmes with an op-ed on its mounting costs.

MICROLENDING and its limits are the subject of this New Yorker item by James Surowiecki.

THE END OF AN ERA? Let's hope so. Here's a piece that suggests the age of economist Milton Friedman is coming to an end.

DON'T PANIC is the theme of two recent books.

BACK TO THE ORIGINAL SUBJECT. Here's a nod to the uber-bard Homer from the Washington Post.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

INTRODUCING THE HILLBILLY HEALTH CLUB, AND LOTS MORE

At this time of year, lots of people join gyms. El Cabrero is all set to cash in on this trend. I hereby announce the founding of the Hillbilly Health Club. It's all right there in the perty picture.

It has the latest in exercise equipment--including sledge hammer, wedge, splitting maul, wheel barrow and sycamore stumps--and offers a comprehensive exercise program with the following elements:

*Resistance. Splitting and chopping wood. Sycamore is all about resistance.

*Flexibility. Bend over, pick up the split wood, and put it in the wheel barrow. If you are anything like El Cabrero, this can be the hardest part, especially after an hour or so of splitting and chopping.

*Aerobics. Push the wheel barrow to the woodpile.

Holistic health--Appalachian style!

Annual memberships are now available, with special discounts to Goat Rope email subscribers. Ask about special family rates.

SHOCKED, SHOCKED. El Cabrero would like to round out the week of New Year by mentioning three 2007 books that are worth a look. Today's choice is Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Her basic thesis is that economic, political, and ideological elites have taken advantage of human-made and natural disasters to impose an extreme version of unregulated capitalism on populations that would otherwise have rejected it.

Klein does an interesting job of weaving the history of shock therapy and other efforts at mind control with the rise of the Chicago School of economics as represented by Milton Friedman until his recent death. Friedman opposed unions, social programs, public education, business regulations, safety laws, etc. in the name of the "free" market.

He acknowledged that most people would find this distasteful, and said that

only a crisis--actual or perceived--produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

Friedman got the chance to put his ideas into action when General August Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected president of Chile in 1973 and imposed a military dictatorship. Then, with the help of mass murder, repression, and torture, he was able to advise the regime on how to impose the blessings of the "free" market.

Klein's book looks at several examples of disaster capitalism in the U.S. and around the world. Katrina was a classic case in point, as was the development of Iraq's "Emerald City" as a free market utopia under the direction of Friedman disciple Donald Rumsfeld in Iraq. Both of those went over real well...

It's interesting that in WV, some advocates of "Unleashing Capitalism" have tried to create a climate of panic and crisis in the hopes of pushing through a political agenda which includes attacks on union membership, worker safety rules, etc.

SAD NEWS from Kenya.

PUBLIC OPINION ON IRAQ is at odds with the views of many presidential candidates, according to this item.

THE STATE OF THE NATION in the Bush years is the subject of this New Year's Eve NY Times editorial.

LABOR UNDER ATTACK. Here is some info on the anti-union bias of the Bush Labor Department.

TWO YEARS AFTER SAGO, mine safety is still an issue. As Ken Ward reports in today's Gazette, 67 US miners have died since that disaster.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED