Mythic Stories: The Free Lunch

I just touched on it in the preev ( i.e., "previous") post " Hot Man". The world proclaims there is no free lunch. As we proclaim it, we yet feel our profound faith in a free lunch, whether catered by God, or Fate, or Gaia, or what-not, there is a free lunch...oh, God almighty, amen! We know it. American Exceptionalism is a variety of the Free Lunch Myth: Americans are spiffy, therefore they are entitled to just about everything they may lay their hands on. The Sun never setting on the British Empire reflects Free Lunch & White Man's Burden, as well. These are variants of the Chosen People mythic motif. (As a child, I thought this referred to Koreans, meaning the people of Chosen. This was not the case.) Again, when we speak of Mythic Stories, we do not say anything about Truth, Falsity, or the determination thereof. Thus, when we speak of a Mythic Story of the Chosen People, there is nothing said as to whether a statement of the form " x is the chosen people." is true or false. Now: Very Important!! Note that often within the Myth of American Exceptionalism, we catch the distinct notion of entitlement. God's in His heaven, the sun shines on the US of A, and all's right with the world!! The British notion was a bit more extensive, combining Burden with the Profits, the profits often coming from opium, by the way. However, within the story of the Chosen People, there are other strains present, strains of responsibility, liability, and pure, downright suffering. Job comes to mind. Perhaps the story of The Chosen is not in the same symbolic grouping as American Exceptionalism and the British Empire, after all. Perhaps we shall not build a New Jerusalem on England's green shores, nor on America's waving fields of grain...nor anywhere else at the rate we are going. To my mind, we live in a degraded state. While it is true that times were rather savage and difficult when Moses led the people of Israel, and while it is true that there was a general dickensian and malthusian distress across the face of the globe in the times of the British Empire; still the mythic stories of those times, the stories of Entitlement AND Responsibility were ever so much more complex, ever so much more complete and satisfying as a structured and detailed picture of God's world... ...ever so much more than the truncated and brief version of Exceptionalism, a form which is exceptional only by its perverse uni-dimensionality of character.