This week we conservatives are worried about moms taking their daughters to see the fairy tale of Barbie as a wokey feminist. Why, they'll learn to hate the patriarchy for the rest of their lives! Maybe. But wasn't the original Barbie doll a teenage fairy tale of clothes and makeup and boys, instead of baby dolls as a preparation for motherhood?

And if they like Woke Barbie there's always Disney's Woke Snow White next spring.

Let's get one thing out of the way, first. Retelling myths and fairy tales to bring them up to date is nothing new. Scholars agree that the Catholic saints were created in an effort to make Christianity more relatable to the illiterate peasants and farmers and slaves of Christendom.

And scholars were mad as hell when Wagner destroyed the Nordic myths in his Ring cycle. The experts reckoned that Wagner had completely lost the plot, as the Brits like to say.

Serious people like you and me are a bit hesitant to re-stage the myths and fairy tales in modern dress, because we believe that understanding the minds and the culture and the beliefs of our ancestors in the olden time helps us understand ourselves. And we know that something always gets lost in translation.

Still, I'll bet that the experts were all over the Brothers Grimm back in the day when the brothers collected and retold a bunch of traditional folk tales from Aschenputtel to Schneewittchen (that's Cinderella and Snow White for you Disney fans). Romantics like the Grimms wanted to reconnect with the old folk tales as a reaction against the logic and reason of the Enlightenment. I wonder what the experts thought when Disney started cartooning the Grimms' fairy tales? Today, of course, they wouldn't dare complain about Woke Snow White.

Wouldn't you know, I've been reading all about it in recent weeks. And just the other night we streamed CS Lewis: the Most Reluctant Convert. What was the axial moment in Lewis's life? Picking up Phantastes: a Faerie Romance for Men and Women by George MacDonald in a railway station used book store. Reading that book is what converted him from an Enlightenment materialist into a religious believer. And it made Lewis into a myth teller, as in retelling Christianity in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe children's book series.

Meanwhile, I'm nearly at the end of Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane. It's about the tales that humans have told down the ages about the founding of the world, and the attempt of modern scholars that live in a profane world to understand and to recapture the experience of living in a "sacralized cosmos" in the olden time. And then a couple weeks ago I read Alain de Benoist and On Being a Pagan. The endnotes say: "Benoist contrasts the heroic pagan worldview with Christianity's attempts to hobble everything that is beautiful and strong."

Hmm. But aren't our wokey friends busy trying to hobble everything that is male and strong, and condemning Nietzsche as "the Nazis' favorite intellectual"?

And wasn't Rousseau retailing an Enlightenment myth in his Discourse on Inequality, with the following origin myth in Part Two?

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying "this is mine" and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.

So, the world began when modern man started privatizing medieval lands in the Enclosure Movement. Thanks Jean-Jacques, you're a real pal.

And don't get me started on the Founding Myth of the Sacred Negro that is recited on all feast days by the Priests and the Nuns of the Convent of Lived Experience.

In the end, I think, our wokey friends will leave a cultural desert behind them, because they are forcing myths and fairy tales to tell stories of lefty politics. Back in the day, Star Wars creator George Lucas was a follower of Joseph Campbell and his "Hero's Journey," and Campbell comes from Jung and Nietzsche. I doubt if Lucas assistant Kathleen Kennedy, famous for wrecking the Star Wars franchise, has a clue about myths and heroes.

It occurs to me to suggest that myths and fairy tales are not about politics; instead, they are trying to understand something much bigger and more mysterious: life, the universe, everything. The sacred. God.

It also occurs to me to understand storytelling in the Age of the Left as a terrifying descent into Hell, turning upside down the age-old human effort of constructing stories and myths and fairy tales that try to understand the world. For the story the left tells has always been the story of how they are going to force their vision of the future down our throats, and how we are going to like it, or else.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.