I know there’s probably a pithy patriotic statement from Jefferson or Lincoln or Arthur Schlesinger Jr. for me to pivot off here, but in sympathy with vacation minds this holiday I’ll keep it simple and instead just quote Sam Cooke*:
Don’t know much about history
Don’t know much about biology
Don’t know much about a science-book
Don’t know much about the French I took
Scene #1/Take#1
Dissolve to Michelle Bachmann as her glassy eyes gaze upon the Statue of Liberty
What I do know is that I love you
And I know that if you love me too
Cut!
Statue of Liberty…gift from the French, pro-immigration.
Scene #1/Take 2
Dissolve to Michelle Bachmann as her glassy eyes gaze upon the Liberty Bell:
What I do know is that I love you
And I know that if you love me too
Cut!
Liberty Bell…actually not rung on July 4, 1776, and its inscription “Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof” was added decades after 1776 by abolitionists calling for the liberation of those the Founders did not work quite tirelessly enough to free--America’s slaves.
Scene #1/Take 3
Dissolve to Michelle Bachmann as her glassy eyes gaze upon the American flag.
What I do know is that I love you
And I know that if you love me too
What a wonderful world it would be
And a wonderful world it would be indeed if we could edit history as they edit movies. It’s for sure some are trying to do just that. Sarah Palin’s and Michelle Bachmann’s respectively screwy takes on American history (Palin’s on Paul Revere’s ride to warn the British that America was well armed and Bachmann’s on the founders tireless efforts to end slavery) have brought this effort stage front. Both ingénues, Sarah and Michelle, bring an improvised flair to their attempts to remake American history to suit their uniquely dubious views of it. But their daring improvisations cannot disguise the fact that they are mere supporting players in a scripted, sharply directed drama to rewrite American history to suit a particular ideology. In the past year or so, right-wing politicians in Texas and Virginia have sought, respectively, through tampering with schoolbooks, to remove Thomas Jefferson’s advocacy for the separation of church and state at the founding and remove slavery as cause from the Civil War.
In his essay Making History, Elbert Ventura describes right-wing assault on reality:
They turn out for school board elections and meetings to get the right kind of history in our children’s textbooks—a history that says the Bill of Rights was inspired by Jesus Christ, that the slave trade was actually the “Atlantic triangular trade,” that Thomas Jefferson and his Enlightenment ways were less important than we’ve been led to believe. In a profile of [Glenn] Beck in The New York Times Magazine by Mark Leibovich, a woman waiting in line to get free tickets to a Beck event at the Kennedy Center yells out, “We hate Woodrow Wilson.” That a president from nearly a century ago has become the object of a tailgate jeer underscores just how deeply the conservative rendition of American history has penetrated the public. And thus do obscure and wrong-headed arguments become the foundation for our political discourse.
Beck and company are filling a void left by progressives. The progressive movement for a long time now has failed to develop “a coherent vision”... We have grown complacent about our accomplishments. Yes, we may have won the culture war, and the achievements of the New Deal and the Great Society are so monumental that we are tempted to think that they are enduring—that that history is settled. But we forget what conservatives know: that everything can be—is—contested.
I don’t entirely agree with Ventura that progressives have left a void for an audience craving a coherent vision of American history. First of all, any true progressive…any true intellectual…knows that there is no coherent vision of this or any other country. Histories of nations are compilations of accidents, innovations, disasters, triumphs, wars, laws, mass movements, exceptional and exceptionally rare individuals, and luck. The attempt to impose a coherent vision is the work of storytellers, not historians. Sometimes storytellers work from benign intent. The story that George Washington never told a lie was the very first “history” I ever learned in school. I literally can still recall the illustration in my kindergarten reader of the little pony-tailed boy who would grow up to be the Father of the Country handing the ax he used to chop down the cherry tree to his father. I’m fond of myth, especially myth that is instructive, as this one was. And the fact that the first history I ever learned in school—about the boy who never told a lie—turned out to be a lie has bothered me less than it has amused me for the delicious irony of telling a lie to children in order to teach them the virtue of telling the truth.
That George Washington story of course was one of the more innocent attempts at Founding Father hagiography. The real whopper was in how American history traditionally handled the Founding Fathers’ slave holding and their bartering the lives of blacks and women to achieve a very rough political compromise. How it was handled was to ignore it. No one until turkey-necked Mrs. Bachmann seemed ready to go so far as argue that those men who owned slaves before, during and after the founding worked tirelessly to end it. That takes remaking history to a whole other level and brings Elbert Ventura and me more in line with each other because I agree almost entirely when he says, “…we forget what conservatives know: that everything can be—is—contested.” I say almost entirely agree because I’m not ready to blame all conservatives for this perversion of history. I’ve read enough to know that there are still some true and honorable conservatives who are troubled by what’s going on. That’s why after careful deliberation, I’ve decided to call the people who mess over our common history like this Turkeys—not in reference to the bird that was second to deer on the bill of fare at the mythical first American Thanksgiving, nor in reference to the good cheer and camaraderie the holiday inspired between the Native Americans and the God-fearing English invaders who a generation later would drive them from their lands. I call them Turkeys in reference to the nation of Turkey which in recent times has made a fetish out of passing laws that forbid citizens from saying anything negative against the country, its government, or its history, especially in regards to its well-documented history of attempted genocide of Armenians.
This is the lie that becomes a country when ideologues take over its history. Progressives, contrary to Elbert Ventura’s suggestion, have been fighting the battle against warped versions of American history for decades. Sitting on my bookshelf alone are Legends, Lies and Cherished Myths of American History by Richard Shenkman, Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen, and Howard Zinn’s essential A People’s History of the United States. The lefty bloggers and irreverent comedians have been doing their part to push back against this insidious madness. And I am pleased to have a circle of friends and acquaintances who courageously take to social media pages, kitchen tables and office break rooms to vigorously and intelligently fight this battle against the forces of whitewash, dumb-down, and happy face. It’s not an easy battle because the Turkeys have some very finely honed battle tactics. When you try to correct them with facts, they dismiss your sources as elitist and biased. When you introduce conclusive evidence, they offer opinion as the intellectual equivalent. When you suggest that Americans have flaws, America sometimes has ulterior motives, and that fuck-ups are inevitable in the chain of human events, even American human events, they accuse you of always being negative. It makes for a frustrating, dispiriting debate when core bits of hard-earned knowledge and essentially indisputable facts are disallowed because they conflict with your opponents’ fervent, yet tenuous, hold on reality. But it’s a necessary debate…maybe the most necessary debate of all.
My man Norman O. Brown, as always, has something to say about it that makes up in pithy what it may lack in patriotism: "Truth is error burned up; a light shining in darkness; darkness overcome. The everlasting bonfire. The truth and the life and the joy is in the overcoming. Not in perfection, but in the transmutation. Man is born a Spectre or Satan and must continually be changed into his direct contrary.” And then, as he often does, Brown quotes Blake: “Establishment of the Truth depends on the destruction of Falsehood continually.”
*In the interest of historical accuracy, I should point out that Herb Alpert and Lou Adler are listed as co-writers of the song, and for the sheer sake of trivia, I should point out to the unititiated that Lou Adler is the guy in the funky hats who always sits next to Jack Nicholson at Laker games.