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OUR CULTURAL MYTHS

This January, 2017 mythopoetry.com is introducing guest blogging to mythopoetry’s myth & culture blogspot.  Many of the guest bloggers this year are affiliated with the arts and are cultural mythologers (my term for this mode of being in the world) or, as many guest bloggers like to refer to themselves, cultural mythologists.  All, in some way, have an affiliation with PacificA Graduate Institute where they either teach, taught or did post graduate study.

Given the political shift in the direction the country is headed after the election of 2016, and before knowing myself what the guest bloggers who’ve graciously accepted my invitation to guest blog have to say, I thought it might be interesting to journey with the help of the Internet Wayback Machine, aka, the Internet Archives, and revisit how one of the early internet cultural mythologers, Maggie Macary (mythandculture.com)  ponders myth and politics just a few years after 9-11 during the republican era of the George W. Bush presidency. 

One thing which struck me as relevant and the reason for beginning with Maggie’s reverie written and published initially in January, 2003 is its opening quote. 

The author, the late cultural mythologer, Maggie Macary, Ph.D. is a student doing her doctoral research and the person she is quoting is her doctoral advisor, Dr. Dennis Patrick Slattery. The opening quote to Maggie's "Manifest Destinies" republishing here this Sunday is taken from Dr. Slattery's essay, "Seduced By Peace" first published to one of the earliest of the on line cultural mythology literary magazines, Headline Muse, Dr. Laura Shamas, editor and publisher.
(Slattery, Dennis Patrick. "Seduced by Peace." Headline Muse. 27 January 2003.  headlinemuse.com/Culture/seducedbypeace.htm.)

Although Headline Muse, e-magazine is no longer available on line nor are we able to access it through the Wayback Machine's portal, it so happens, Dr. Slattery is a first contributor to the 2017 Guest Blog Series.  His upcoming blog ponders mimesis and painting. It will publish this March. Dr Shamas will follow with Aphrodite in an April guest blog.

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Maggie’s blog on cultural myths is also relevant to me for how it will provide my readers with an insight into how thinking mythically and thinking politically hang together and how this matters to holding together or not holding together political tensions. Thinking politically, from mythical thinking’s point of view, archetypally inheres. At the same time, each kind of thinking hangs in its own darkness. In essence, this is Heidegger’s de riss, rift or rift-design. Mythically each of us needs the other’s way of thinking just as each needs her own mythical thinking’s point of view all the way.  Politics and myth need each other, each has psychic validity and each as a mode of seeing, apprehends the world—ways of being “in” the world. Politics and myth seem together and yet differently, to paraphrase one of Dr. Macary’s ideas.

The final thought I have as to my purpose for beginning with Dr Macary’s reverie on the myths of our culture is to retrieve and place here conclusions she reaches in her final paragraph.  It is my hope  we may continue to ponder them going forward. 

COME BACK AND VISIT  Sunday, January 29, 2017 to read Maggie's 2003 blog, "Manifest Destinies".

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PECKSNIFFIAN!

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Are you wondering what the word title means?  A real attention grabber right? Good!  Now listen up!  Today's blog is about the dumbing down of meanings operating in our language that word important ideas to which the words we use in discourse refer.  I'm thinking about the word "government" and the word "politician" and a third term you cannot see operating in between these two ideas, "pecksniffian."

This may just be the right descriptive adjective for this tyranny going on that thinks systematically toward a political dismantling of representative democracy in America!  It is always to be majority rule with respect for minority rights. One elected to serve must honor the will of the people and do so by protecting equally the inalienable rights of every individual citizen.   But Arizona's leadership under Jan Brewer are pecksniffian in their approch to civic responsibilities.

PECKSNIFFIAN / [pronunciation: (p k-sn f - n)] adjective: Hypocritically and smugly affecting benevolence or high moral principles. After Seth Pecksniff, a character in Martin Chuzzlewit, a novel by Charles Dickens. To gather a sense for what I mean, compare today's Arizona Republic headlines (1.) with  AZ REP headlines this past March (2.)

(1.) Brewer Urged To Halt Medical-Marijuana Program; County Attorneys Say Licensing Will Defy Law. -by Yvonne Wingett Sanchez July 30, 2012 @ 10:59pm  The Republic azcentral.com

(2.) Arizona Seeking Pacts With Other States To Defy Federal Government. -by Ginger Rough Mar. 9, 2011 12:00 AM The Republic azcentral.com

The number two headline concerns more than just the  national, attention-getting and controversial immigration defiance as this excerpt shows...

Arizona lawmakers are working to create alliances with other states on controversial issues such as health care, immigration and firearms regulation in a growing effort to challenge the authority of the federal government.

Now my own thought here yields the notion that for these two picturings to operate opening a window framing the margins in seeing between March and the edge of August this election year, there must also be operating in the mind of the Arizona Republican party leadership currently in power in this state something between sense and nonsense swinging the pendulum of the collective governing civic mind of these folks that privately desires to dismantle the authority of We, The People in the process, something that dumbs down what government is to “mean”.

What is the meaning of government?  What is it to adopt a politically "pecksniffian" manner?  Who benefits if excluding participation of  SOME KINDS OF PEOPLES OVER OTHER KINDS OF PEOPLES OF AMERICA in SELF-GOVERNMENT were to be the normative principle of the day?  What if your story when you are old is to tell your great grandchildren how it was to be alive during the days of the Great Suppression? How is it the same group of politicians defy laws they don't want to obey against the mandate of people they are elected to serve? Pecksniffian is the attitude of the current legal campaign taking shape under the guidance of thirteen county attorneys and Jan Brewer's office. 

These same folks want us to believe their political responses are legitimate where they defy  the public mandate in what We, The People of the state which elected them to office mandate in passing this law.  Sadly, folks, they are not!  Politicians and other elected state officials (not to mention officials of high professional stature in private practices working closely with public leadership)  on the one hand build legal briefs to challenge and violate federal law due to the federal government's failure to act. On the other hand, the same, local, elected leadership in concert with county attorneys usurp the will of the people to self-govern in the face of federal law, which they now hide behind in a failure to act. Yes, folks, all that is in deed, acting!  They act like they are acting, which they indeed are, but poorly! Because it is in civic terms that the political actor masks his failure. The tragedy is doubly tragic for state elected officials fail to act on behalf  We, The People! 

Exclusions and divisions, exclusivity and derisions continue in Arizona splitting in two what kind of civic people hold power.  One must now vote with an eye for reclaiming one’s civic right to govern! VOTE with an eye for WE, THE PEOPLE as opposed to the politician 's pecksniffian approach to government.