4 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2024
    1. His rescue story perfectly mimicked a popular Scottish ballad ofthe day in which the beautiful daughter of a Turkish prince rescues anEnglish adventurer who is about to lose his head.
    2. a farsexier fable in the dramatic rescue of John Smith by the “Indian princess”Pocahontas.

      extended look at the mythology of Pocahontas here

    3. Exceptionalism emerges from a host of earlier myths of redemption andgood intentions. Pilgrims, persecuted in the Old World, brave the Atlanticdreaming of finding religious freedom on America’s shores; wagon trains ofhopeful pioneer families head west to start a new life. Nowhere else, we aremeant to understand, was personal freedom so treasured as it was in theAmerican experience. The very act of migration claims to equalize thepeople involved, molding them into a homogeneous, effectively classlesssociety.

      Do some of these same types of stories and mythologies also erase the harm of an over-armed populace with respect to the lack of appropriate gun control and mass shootings versus gun rights in America?

      As a country our gun mythology is stronger than our desire to act to improve our (collective) lives....

    4. And so the great American saga,as taught, excludes the very pertinent fact that after the 1630s, less than halfcame to Massachusetts for religious reasons.