No doubt some parts of Hollywood and Madison Avenue prefer a Jungian interpretation of myth. A follow your heart, personal growth, discover a true sense of self, the assurance that vulnerability is strength, blubbing like a baby is healthy and on into other cringe worthy expressions of sobriety. Other parts of Hollywood and Madison Avenue would prefer to reaffirm male authenticity by sending Clint Eastwood or John Wayne to prove their metal on the Eastern Front to look tough and smoke cigarettes in Stalingrad rather than endure the alternative of dying in a kitchen while making a vegetarian quiche. My own view, the Paleolithic Age started coming to an end about twenty thousand years ago, yet still lingers around like a mother's boy who misunderstood that head stone for the Paleolithic, that book for all and none, Thus Spoke Zarathustra which came from the devious mind of Friedrich Nietzsche who after eleven years of mental issues died childless at the age of 55 from complications of syphilis in the August of 1900. The final eleven years of his life and his legacy was left to his sister, Therese Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche to manage. Therese's husband was a teacher and an anti-Semite activist who'd dreamed of creating an Aryan colony in Paraguay. He killed himself in San Bernardino, Paraguay, in 1889 at the age of 46. Mr and Mrs Förster were not exactly Joy to the World and bunny rabbits. As Lutherans they fundamentally approved of eternal struggle and the value of the end times. More exciting, Therese's selective misinterpretations of her brother's work supported her husband's activism and finally achieved a moment of fulfillment in 1933 when President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler Chancellor of Germany. The result, trains ran on time and Germany not Paraguay was hedged to become a blue eyed blond Aryan paradise. Therese had no children she died of a stroke and either syphilis or dementia in 1935, she was 91. The German Chancellor and a number of other fascist big-wigs, to add a veneer of veritas to their frail and unsupported understandings attended her funeral. Of interest, usually it takes about twenty years to die of Syphilis, which means, if it was Syphilis, Therese would have contracted it sometime in the First World War when she was around 71.
