Thread by @leahmcelrath

Many are mistakenly conflating history and myth today:

History is grounded in fact.
Myth is grounded in belief.

Both are important.

History documents the past.
Myth unites a people as they create a future.

Both are important.

Together, history and myth create a truth.

In modern life, we under-recognize the role of myth in human experience.

At its core, mythology is storytelling.

The beliefs we hold shape the myths which guide our own decision-making and the stories we convey to our children about themselves, the world, and their place in it.

Mythology – storytelling – is far older than rational analysis. Myths are how humans first communicated truth to one another.

Myths often contain facts, but they are not limited by them. This, of course, can be a wondrous and a terrible thing, be used to inspire hope or fear.

To be clear: while history is grounded in fact, it too is interrelated with myth.

Which facts are chosen as history and how those facts are interpreted are based in large part on the beliefs of the respective historians and the stories those telling the history tell themselves.

(Some in my mentions are saying fact is fact/history is a telling of fact/fact is truth, but the field of history itself – and the evolution thereof – proves them wrong. They need to open their minds, listen to historians/psychologists, research comparative religion, read more.)

Why is this important today?

Because the #McCainMemorial is bringing to the fore discussions of America.

And, while the United States is a fact with a documentable history, the concept of "America" is a myth.

Which does not make it not true or unreal.

America is VERY real.

Since history and myth are two different things, Meghan McCain saying "America has always been great" was perceived VERY differently by those thinking she was talking about the entirety of U.S. events and those believing she was speaking about the promise of a more perfect union.

In addition to histories differing based on the historian, myths likewise differ based on the believer and the storyteller.

There is more than one America.

Always has been. Always will be.

What matters is this:

Do our separate myths overlap enough to unify us going forward?

Was there ever a time in the history of United States’ government when there was overwhelming decency and humility? When there was a total absence of personal, partisan, or national malfeasance?

Of course not.

All the #McCainMemorial speakers, reporters, and pundits know that.

Nonetheless, there *have* been times when a critical mass of federal lawmakers shared an idea of America similar enough to enable them to respect each other as human beings and to work to benefit (at least sometimes) the people they represented.

This is not one of those times.

Trump has taken the conservatism myth of America shared by many of his GOP predecessors and stripped it of all compassion, pluralism, and forward-looking features.

It didn't have many such features to begin with, but the shift still matters.

It matters profoundly.

Trump has dismembered the GOP myth of America. He severed its areas of mythic overlap with Democratic and progressive American ideals.

In addition, rather than attempting to unify and to instill hope, he has purposefully harnessed the power of myth to divide and to empower hate.

Such a seemingly small change in rhetoric has to potential power to destroy both the BELIEF in the possibility of a more perfect union and the FACT of the existence of the United States.

The myth of America matters. It matters that much.

Precisely because the United States is and always has been a pluralistic entity created as a set of ideas and evolving over time, Americans are defined by myth rather than by other identifying factors.

If our individual myths cease to overlap at all, we cease to be a people.

To bring this thread out of the space of rhetoric and theory, I will close it with a personal illustration of how myth unifies and creates Americans out of people with vastly different backgrounds.

One of my heroes is the great late Barbara Jordan.

We share being women, lesbians, and having grown up in Houston.

Other than that, our backgrounds could not be less similar.

I am white. My ancestors include slave-owning signatories to the Declaration of Independence that began the creation of this nation.

Congresswoman Jordan was black. Her ancestors were brought to this land as slaves and survived generations of torture and disenfranchisement.

Despite our disparate backgrounds, our respective beliefs in America – our mythologies – overlap and unify us as Americans.

During the 1974 Congressional Watergate hearings, Barbara Jordan expressed this more powerfully than I ever can:

(Some in my mentions are caught up in semantics and quibbling with my use of the term "myth." 1st: this is Twitter, not a book. 2nd: I encourage you to read this short and excellent excerpt from a dialogue between Joseph Campbell and @BillMoyers: mythsdreamssymbols.com/functionsofmyt…)

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