RJ;
You said on post #13 that you seemed to like what I said about legends and myths on another earlier post. But then you said this on post #13 to Tom MacWood;
"No life is without warts. We must have the legends to inspire the youth to study and dream. After they study their subjects and become more familiar with less known or obscured details (the warts) they can then participate in learned circles and put things in more objective context. Myths and legends are for the youthful mind to inspire inquiry, skepticism and cynicism are for the older/mature and contrary mind to raise debate and objectivity. Both sides balance out in the end, I think."
That right there, my friend, just might be one of the most thoughtful remarks ever put on this website! I realize it isn't specifically about golf architecture and may be more about the entire ethos of this country of ours which in many interesting ways we can see DOES apply in some interesting ways to golf architecture, certainly in the past and perhaps in the present and future too.
I'd say that myths and legends aren't just to inspire inquiry in youth, myths and legends are also to just plain INSPIRE--and sometimes almost everyone! Those who used this technique and theme correctly to inspire have made much mileage and success out of it and happily so, I'm sure. Probably the best at it in my lifetime was Ronald Reagan. The things he said and imaged for all of us in this way did make us feel good about ourselves and about our whole country and our "Americanism". He did that by asking us to look back at heroes and myths that I feel are subconscioulsy within us anyway from our collective American upbringing. We all for some reasons tend to look back in time fondly from time to time---and it's generally our heroes, our myths and and the legends of old we want to look back on! They do inspire us, even if we may somewhere in our brains understand they may not be wholly true!
Who among us really believes that little George Washington really cut down the cherry tree and then admitted it when his father questioned him? Probably many actually do but even those of us who don't will never give up what that little myth alone means to the way we look at ourselves and want to look at our selves both indivudually and collectively (the way we want to see our country).
There's this wonderful little book written perhaps 30 or so years ago called "American Myth--American Reality" that tracks and talks about these types of things and the importance of them. It concludes that the myths within us, even many of those little childhood parables we all grew up with as Americans, we do truly need--they basically create our American ethos---our American image of ourselves--our American concsciousness. Is it reality? Is it always the truth, warts and all? Of course not, but we need it nevertheless, at least I think we do, as you very smartly said in your post, at least when we're youthful and need to be inspired to dream!
How can anyone deny that America above perhaps any culture in the history of humankind is the one that inspires dreams the most? And because it does, who can deny that more dreams have actually come true here than anywhere else in the history of the world?
Do we really need to take that ability to inspire and dream away from our children by telling them the unadulterated truth about everything and everybody, warts and all? Of course not, unless we want to depress the concsiouness and the virtual drive of our culture and society and our future. A chronicle such as Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckberry Finn" is as good a descriptive juxtapostion of the childhood dream and the American Reality as could ever be found!
It's a very good thread subject Tom MacWood started here, but nevertheless, and getting back to golf architecture, George Crump really is the architect of PVGC and Hugh Wilson really is the architect of Merion.
But just like the little girl said in the "Shake and Bake" ad, others "Haaalped"!