Mythic Forgetfulness

If everything is up for self-determination — from gender to religion to expectations about marriage — then there can be no unity, no community, no single America, no universal peoplehood.
Well, there probably never was as much national unity as mythologizers like to remember.  This is a nation that has always spoken hundreds of languages.  This is a nation that fought a civil war over the enslavement of one-third of its people.  Indeed, the most famous and celebrated of the The Federalist Papers, the intellectual cornerstone of America’s very founding is James Madison’s treatise on “factions” describing the inevitability (and productivity) of America’s intensely competitive special interest groups.
—    Mark J. Penn
Quoted from: “Microtrends” by Mark J. Penn with E. Kinney Zalesne
[For another take on errors in perception, see:  “In Broken Images“, by Robert Graves.  And yet, as an American I believe “E Pluribus Unum“, (“Out of many, one”) is fundamentally correct!    —    KMAB]
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