...mythos...

the aptly titled and confusing Talking Heads spread so many goddamned myths
it's kind'a hard to sift through the sea of their bullshit
and honesty's taken a shotgun blast to the gut, it seems, because everything's just a game of splicing hairs and using incorrect lenses on fucked up microscopes to narrowly look at a sliver of an issue

for instance, the myth of black on black crime.
y'all are quite aware that every racial demographic is more apt to be killed by a member of their same race, right?
we cannibalize, y'see, and if you don't believe me just research that shit for yourself. never been too great at math, but this time i finally got the numbers right.

and i get how that myth got spread before we had information at our fingertips, but nowadays it seems kind of silly to let people who get paid obscene amounts of money to flap their clumsy gums and bloviate in grotesque ways to manipulate us, or am i just being that annoying kid reminding everyone that 'you know, cows have lives, too', at a mcdonald's?

or when you remind someone who denies climate change that somewhere between 97-99 percent of climatologists agree that it is indeed happening, whether or not the denier wants to drive their SUV, they may say,
'yeah, but in his day, Galileo was against the scientific community as well'
no he wasn't
he was against community writ large, numbnut
you're conflating the terms, 'scientific community' isn't colloquial and don't you  misuse her pretty name such, it's embarrassing.
there was hardly even a scientific community to speak of in the days where people thought the world was flat, so to say that 'if you were a dissenter then, you weren't taken seriously, and thus to not take those in disagreement with the scientific community today seriously is an equal sin' is disingenuous dribble, yet the myth persists

seems like bein' logical and bein' genuine is either getting harder for us, or when we aren't either of those things, it's easier for everyone else to see
i can't tell for sure which it is, but i know we get spoonfed myths
they promised us it would trickle down by now if we just
fucking tightened the belt on the lower class just a wee little bit
give a few tax breaks to the disgustingly rich
which we could totally do as long as we gave a few less
bologna sandwiches to the homeless

and they used such a pretty word- trickle. the kind of rain you like. the sort that comes with teenage memories of kissing your significant other on the first day of autumn. before the warm of summer burned off and kept the water from getting cold all the way down.
trickle. doesn't it sound pretty?
but it never rained. and maybe some of those duped into the mythology of reagonomics just so deeply invested their hearts into the idea (because their stomachs were empty and so were their heads, because the brain is hungrier than the gut) that they couldn't reasonably let go. it had been decades of drought. they were hoping for that storm that happens during those conditions of climate.
it always rains the hardest after so many days of dryness, right?
right?
it has to be, and so maybe they cling

here's the trick to selling a myth,
it helps to come from a place of power.
if you're going to lie, it helps to rhyme
good slogans are easy to devour

you dole out bits of truth that have been adjusted just ever so slightly obtuse
never too much but just enough to latch onto
find the tribe with which a certain group identifies and then vilify the opposing side
'cause every good story needs conflict
'specially the ones we tell our kids at night

oh, that's another thing! like tobacco and religion, hook 'em while they're young.

i'm sure each of you remember when you found out certain stories you were told weren't true,
the tooth fairy was probably the easiest to stomach, because how long can that charming little story last?
the easter bunny is a little bit more harsh, innit?
santa usually hurts.
some people can never get away from their inducted religion, and no one can blame 'em.

but the nastiest lie of all the myths we have to buy is that we're more different than we are the same.
we share half of our genetic code with fuckin' bananas, for cryin' out loud. 60% with fruit flies. 75% with those pesky mice we lay down poison for.
if we can't reject the narrative that's being written for us
by some really ugly fucks on radio stations
or some really pretty people on t.v.
maybe we don't deserve to think for ourselves

let rush limbaugh and bill maher do it for you, why not? what's the worst that could happen?
it's not like we're capable of destroying every last person and our entire surroundings.

our stories are mirrors of ourselves,
and which ones we decide to create
and which ones to listen to and believe
is exactly how history will remember us

so which myth do you want to pick?