Modern fairytales

Maybe it was a clip of the current US Attorney General in all of his Puck-ishness. Or perhaps it was my full avoidance of a terrifyingly massive project that I needed to have finished months ago. Whatever the catalyst, I had a stray thought about what constitutes a Modern Fairytale. 

If we think of fairytales as a type of story we tell ourselves to make sense of a ridiculous and nonsensical world, what are those stories today?

I know the big trend is to re-tell the old stories we know with “updates” to more closely connect to our current lived realities. And these are a way to try to make sense of the world. But the best known tales reflect a smaller portion of the mass society, and they’re still rooted in a lived reality we are generations distant from with all the erasure that makes up the predominate values.

And I think, like the countries and communities and cultures that we palimnsest to create the current US culture, we’re still collectively creating our fairytales.