Americans memories last 2 weeks. Guess How I know that? tRUMP is a fool, a blowhard and a narcissistic self-aggrandizer, but… one thing he knows is how to manipulate people. All he has to do is say he will “look at something strongly” and it will be ready in two weeks...
His fake “charm” has always seen him through because he is not normal. He can be whatever you wish him to be at the moment because he can change his persona on a dime and knows you will remember him for the compliments he disarmed you with. He knows because his daddy, Fred, showed him how to charm and showboat since day one.
And now we have Joe Biden running against a brash prevaricator. Biden the good. Biden the compassionate. Biden the wise. It is all too boring for the people who could not stand to wait 2 minutes for their computer to boot and the even younger generation who need faster faster faster. Who is this old guy who isn’t entertaining enough and doesn’t drone on for hours?
Biden is a person who makes mistakes. Unforgivable ones, like making people who only hear the history they want to hear gasp audibly when he told them that Edison did not invent the lightbulb, a black person did! Oh my! How dare he say anything that might tear a gaping hole into the facade of white American exceptionalism! UNCONSCIONABLE. The bubble cannot be broken!
But as Biden says, “here’s the thing.” Edison was the first to make a workable one IN THE UNITED STATES. It had a carbonized paper filament that had been invented in a light-bulb decades earlier and worked just as badly … as the lightbulbs that 20 other people had worked on for decades before. His next attempt wasn’t much better and lasted 18 hours at best.
Edison was not that bright in school. He himself would say that teachers told him he was "too stupid to learn anything." He was fired from his first 2 jobs for lacking productivity. And his failure of making a workable lightbulb “1000” times is literally a legendary tale…
Edison was a prolific inventor. Perhaps he was even a great inventor, but his greatest achievement was to stand on the shoulders of others and then jump off and claim the fame … Tesla found that out, thinking that Edison would be a perfect boss to help him see his visions come to fruition.
Edison cared about his brand, his reputation, money and fame. That’s it. Edison threatened and coerced inventors he hired to give up their ideas, and stole their work, often without recompense. He was a greedy person; you won’t read THAT in the history books…
He had the ear of the press and knew he had to be his own publicist to sell his inventions. (Mostly inventing his talent and fame and, it worked!) Money and fame is a great motivator for someone who thinks himself a genius. Hmmmm This guy is starting to sound very familiar…
Speaking of geniuses, these guys should have had the fame, but, being actual inventors, their expertise lay in inventing, not publicity. Using other people’s genius, Edison finally had a light-bulb that would remain lit for an extended amount of time…
On July 24, 1874 a Canadian patent was filed by a Toronto medical electrician named Henry Woodward and a colleague Mathew Evans. They built their lamps with different sizes and shapes of carbon rods held between electrodes in glass cylinders filled with nitrogen. Woodward and Evans attempted to commercialize their lamp, but were unsuccessful. They eventually sold their patent to Edison in 1879.
America… land of the history made (up) by white people for white people. Sorry Joe Biden. Your faux pas of trying to raise up a black man who actually did improve the lightbulb (Lewis Howard Latimer… pictured right) will likely be remembered more than the reality, which is that many other people invented and improved the light bulb… but Edison took all of the credit and America happily basked in it.
It makes one want to go hug a flag, yes? History is written by the victors. It is embellished, rewritten, hidden, censored and controlled … especially in schools. What is reality?
Edison was himself a great promoter of his image, and it was important to claim to be the sole inventor in order to win the crucial patents that would determine which person got to control the market share. Also, I think that people wanted to believe in the idea of an inventive genius. Edison certainly was, by any stretch, an inventive genius, but people were very drawn to this idea that Edison was a wizard.
Speaking of schools… I always wondered about the curriculum in the US, being I had to study about American history in High School and learn American geography, GDP by state and memorize facts … which I am Suuuuuuuuuuuure you all learned about Canada as well … right? No, you barely got snippet of reality and likes of Mel and Norma Gabler choose your books.
Their work was commended by Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell, father of that great and horny “christian” jerry Fallwell jr, anti-ERA activist and Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly, who fought for the right of women to stay home and bake bread. After all , family and religion are what are important in Texas. California and Texas were the textbook influencers and decided what you read, what your kids read and what history would be taught…
The Gablers also objected to "statements about religions other than Christianity , statements emphasizing contributions by minorities , and statements critical of slave owners."
Revisionist history! You have to love it! Conservative principles! You have got to love them!
US History textbooks look very different in the two states, even though they come from the same publisher and include the same authors. Yet the differences can be glaring. For example, in a section on the Constitution, the California edition notes that there have been some restrictions on Second Amendment gun rights. The Texas edition leaves that part blank. The California editions emphasize African American struggles and LGBTQ history far more than do the Texas ones.
That might be because white people love to emphasize white American exceptionalism and leave out the other nasty bits where they were racist slave owning monsters, and all too ordinary humans. There is another term for that, but it is not coming to me…
Let these conservatives help you see what shaped Americans… and while watching, remember that DeVos is trying to make sure that revisionist history and religious ambiguities are taught in ALL of America… Mike Huckabee must be tingling… still.
Here is tRUMP, pretending to fire a faux-Obama he hired for his lame video. It has been on YouTube since 2013 and he made it in 2012 for the RNC convention… However did we miss this schlock? (Did the Apprentice production crew also do this crap as they did this year’s RNC convention?) Perhaps this will be considered real in 2080 and the memes of him as young, muscled and with hair that looks normal … standing atop a tank… will be revered. (As revisionist history has done for Reagan) I can see it now. Americans in their cement houses raised on stilts, with those meme pictures on the walls, gazing at them longingly and sighing… remembering the “good old days” when tRUMP was king and fired Obama...