I found this quote in a book review, but it resonates:
While our technology influences the means by which we live, it is the myths we believe in that determine how we live.
That is an idea that I understand. Abigale Kohn subtitled her book Shooters, “Myths and Realities of America’s Gun Cultures.” Strewn throughout that book are illuminating paragraphs like this one:
In the 2000 movie The Patriot, South Carolina farmer/landowner Benjamin Martin (played by Mel Gibson) reluctantly rejoins the colonial militia to take on the British during the Revolutionary War. With his wily bravery and unorthodox battle strategies, Martin embodies the ideal citizen soldier, displaying the kind of courage and principle that Aemricans have always imagined marked the early militiamen. The Patriot assures viewers that abstract political principles can have significant personal impact, and that American mythic history, wars and violent conflict forge timeless links between manhood, citizenship, and patriotism. Such mythic (re)tellings continue to resonate with how Americans process their own history, as the success of such movies demonstrate at the box office.
She says that almost like it’s a bad thing.
I’ve had long, involved discussions here at TSM on the subject of what “rights” are, and from my perspective they are our shared myths, and our unique, glorious gift to the world. (Don’t write letters! Oh, hell, go ahead.)
There are three things I’d like you to take time to read. None is short, so make a hole in your schedule for them. The first is Michael Yon’s latest dispatch from Iraq, The Battle for Mosul. The next is not online today, but it will be in a week. However, you should be able to find it pretty easily, since it’s in today’s Parade Sunday insert. The story is entitled Proud to be an American, and it’s about the U.S. Navy’s hospital ship Mercy and its recent tour of the tsunami-smashed Indian Ocean area. The third piece I want you to read is an AP (!) piece, Special-ed kid who won’t quit hits one of life’s great 3-pointers.
Read those three pieces. Reflect on the myths that we as Americans share that lead us to such behavior, both as individuals and as a whole people. And then compare that to the myths that lead people to drive car bombs into crowds of children killing them wholesale, or encourage them to use a child as a decoy, that let them murder foreign journalists and aid workers, that convince them that it is better for young girls to burn to death inside their schoolhouse than to allow them to escape the flames with their heads uncovered.
And tell me then, if you can, why I should concern myself over whether some guards in Guantanamo have shown disrespect for the Koran.
Contrary to popular belief, some cultures are superior to others, regardless of what the American Left espouses.