"There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either." - Robert Graves

Imagine being alive in the days of Ancient Greece (roughly 500 BC - 600 AD) and trying to figure things out.  With no smartphone, World Book Encyclopedia or cable television to explain why the grass is dewy in the morning (they said it was because Memnon was killed in a fight with Achilles, and Memnon's mother, the goddess of the dawn, wept tears that became dew) and why the seasons change (because Persephone, the daughter of the goddess Demeter, who was kidnapped by Hades, and was torn between being a protected girl and loving her husband) the Greeks were smart enough to make up mythology to explain things they didn't have the resources to know about. 

Robert Graves, a British poet and scholar of more modern times (1895 - 1985) said, "Myth has two main functions. The first is to answer the sort of awkward questions that children ask, such as 'Who made the world? How will it end? Who was the first man? Where do souls go after death?'…The second function of myth is to justify an existing social system and account for traditional rites and customs."

To a certain extent, we still use mythology today to explain things that might be difficult for the young among us to comprehend (where babies come from, why all those crime scene investigation shows are still popular.)  

But lately, we are dealing with a backward phenomenon in which people make up an untrue fact and then create the myth to justify it.

There is no way that people really believe that white people are the superior ethnicity, yet there they are, making that false claim to justify their klanishness.  

In the long history of the papacy, there has never been a pope who made an endorsement as regards an American presidential election, yet millions of us were snookered by a fake story that claimed that Pope Francis had come out for a certain real estate developer this fall.

Not one single scintilla of a shred of an iota of evidence has been presented to verify the involvement of one of the people who ran for president this year in some heinous child prostitution ring operating out of a pizza restaurant in the Maryland suburbs of the District of Columbia.  Not one. But people make up these fake stories and this leads to a self-appointed volunteer policeman shooting up the pizza place in his demented search for a truth that does not exist.

If it's ok with you that people are making up silly myths to cover up lunacy, be my guest.  But I have friends in other parts of the world who are starting to wonder what's going on in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, and I'm running out of explanations.