Word: myth
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Meaning of Myth. In Reason in Religion (1905) and Skepticism and Animal Faith (1923), Santayana had tried to strip life of all illusion - which included religion - and then proposed that the reader "entertain the illusion without succumbing to it." He held that religions were myths but that myths embodied great wisdom...
Moonlight's People. By the time Pericles became chairman of Athens' general assembly in 460 B.C., the pallid, inanimate population of the Acropolis might almost have been mistaken, by moonlight, for real people. Sculptures like Aphrodite (see cut) made the Pygmalion myth credible...
Most rankling of all is the war record of the Dutch army in Java. Built into a formidable myth by misleading propaganda, it yielded quickly to the Japanese. Now Indonesian papers fling taunting jibes like: "We pitied the Dutch when the victorious Jap hordes sent Dutch soldiers fearfully fleeing in sarongs and pajamas or underwear, hurriedly throwing their equipment away...
...speech, thoughtful Columnist Walter Lippmann wrote: "The blunt truth is that the men nearest [the President] do not have enough brains, and have practically none of the wisdom which comes from experience and education, to help him to be the President of the United States. . . . There is an American myth and legend . . . that the 'plain people' like mediocre men in their government. . . . This is a politicians' fable. . . . The cult of mediocrity, which is a form of inverted snobbery, is not democracy. It is one of the diseases of democracy...
...Myth v. Fact. The Russians may be stripping Manchuria's factories, but there is no evidence of it in Suichung. This southwestern outpost of Jap and Russian occupation has only one factory-a mercury refinery erected years...