You can't keep a good myth down

Excerpt

Can anybody even imagine a book where it's the District Conservationist or the County Planning Director who is “the man” to straighten things out?

What I want to look at here is the power of myth and in particular the power of the popular myths that inform and motivate the ordinary people of Arizona and her sister western states.

Myths are stories that tell us how we should live. They tell us, as the great student of mythology, Mircea Eliade, put it, of “what is fixed and enduring in the universal flux.”

“To know the myths is to learn the secret of the origins of things. In other words, one learns not only how things came into existence but also where to find them and how to make them reappear when they disappear. [An idea to which we will return.]”

—Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality

One way …