Can You Hear Me Now

Note. The underlying article can be found at https://ajprokop.com/2026/08/17/a-myth-understanding/

Pip: There’s a slab of concrete near a waterfall in Minneapolis, and the question of whether a president ever stood in it is doing more philosophical work than most graduate seminars.

Mara: Andrew Prokop’s recent writing takes that question somewhere worth following — into what myths are for, how we build them around ourselves, and why facts alone don’t always get the job done.

Pip: Let’s start with the footprints.

A Myth Understanding

Mara: The frame here is that myths aren’t just false stories — they’re tools. The post opens with Rollo May: “A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.”

Pip: That’s doing a lot of lifting before we even get to the waterfall. So what’s the concrete case, literally?

Mara: Minnehaha Falls, Minneapolis. President Johnson visited during a drought — the city fed water through fire hydrants to keep the Falls running for his photo-op. Near the commemorative sign sits a slab with two shoeprints and the words “President Johnson’s Footsteps.” No photographs of the act exist. No documentation. Four competing explanations circulate among local historians, the most plausible being that the slab was added during a late-nineties rebuild.

Pip: So the footprints are probably fake, and the post’s author tells curious visitors they’re real anyway. Honestly, that’s a defensible position — possibly the most honest thing you can do with a good story.

Mara: That’s more or less the argument. The post puts it this way: “The sign presents the facts and the footsteps create the myth. While it is possible for them to exist independently, told together they become a story greater than the sum of each.”

Pip: The whole is greater than the parts — except one of the parts might be a pair of generic men’s shoes dunked in wet concrete.

Mara: Right, and then the post widens the lens considerably. There’s a section on his mother, who spent her final years describing a difficult marriage in warmly revised terms — framing a hard life as a good one. The post calls that a myth of coping, and treats it with genuine care rather than correction.

Pip: Which is where the argument gets real traction. Myths aren’t just for waterfalls and presidents — they’re the stories we build to survive complicated truths.

Mara: The post names imposter syndrome directly as the shadow side: myths that don’t lead to healthy places, ones that outlast a working life and follow you into retirement. The phrase used for the antidote is “old strong stories” — a minister’s term for the narratives, whether the prodigal son or Odysseus at the mast, that reframe your own behavior from the outside.

Pip: And the post lands somewhere that isn’t cynicism and isn’t naivety — facts become perspectives that evolve rather than carved certainties.

Mara: Thomas Aquinas gets the closing epigraph: “Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables.” The post earns that quote by the time it arrives.

Pip: Standing in the footprints — real or not — turns a placard into something you can feel. That’s the whole argument in one image.

Mara: What stays with me is the distinction between facts as anchors and facts as signposts — useful, but not the whole map.

Pip: More magic, less concrete certainty. Possibly literally. More next time.