This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
--T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men
This is the way America ends. Not with a war or an epidemic, not with the bang of a terrorist attack, but with the whimper of stupidity, standing idly by while the temperature ticks up slowly, one degree at a time, until we forget ourselves--until we forget how to be Americans. And when we finally boil over with nonsense, we can look back on March 12th, 2010 and find an answer to the question we'll all be asking each other: when did we cross the line?
"[W]e are a Christian nation founded on Christian principles. The way I evaluate history textbooks if first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel. Then I see how they treat Ronald Reagan--he needs to get credit for saving the world from communism and for the good economy over the last twenty years because he lowered taxes."
So says Don McLeroy, the deeply moronic fundamentalist/dentist largely responsible for this unbelievable mess. Much has been made of the Texas State Board of Education's decision to rewrite history and turn the textbooks that will be read by the next generation of American children into ultra-conservative tracts, but many in the press and elsewhere have failed to appreciate the potential ramifications of their actions. Turning public school social studies classes into unabashed propaganda sessions goes beyond mere political ugliness. It is craven. It is foolish. It is madness. And it is not a stretch--not even close--to worry about the threat that this reckless decision poses to the future of America.
I've been hearing the word "Orwellian" thrown around a lot recently, mostly by conservative commentators in reference to President Obama's Big Brother-esque desire to help lower- and middle-class Americans not die. I'd respond to that bizarre rhetorical charge, but fortunately the great Inigo Montoya already has. What is Orwellian is revisionist history of the sort being perpetrated by the Texas Board--quite literally, in fact. As every attendee of ninth grade English class knows, the most famous example of a powerful group rewriting the past in order to dupe future generations into unquestioning subservience to a political ethos comes from Orwell's Animal Farm, in which the pig Napoleon (standing in for Josef Stalin) rewrites rules and reinvents history at will to suit his needs. Of course, the real Stalin did it too; the CPSU notoriously doctored photographs to remove officials who had fallen out of favor with the Politburo, thereby ensuring that the people, when looking back, would forget that these leaders-turned-pariahs ever existed at all. Like the pigs, the Soviets did it to remove the threat of nuance, to keep the truth of history from their young so that they might not divert from the only acceptable view of the world.
It was one thing when it was Trotsky, Yezhov, and Snowball, but now Thomas Jefferson has vanished before our very eyes. He's been replaced by John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas, religious figures deemed to be more appealing to the conservative message than the deist former president. Gone too is Cesar Chavez. And women's rights leaders. And the constitutional separation of Church and State. And the word 'capitalism' (it's now a 'free-enterprise system,' which apparently carries a less negative connotation). All these and more, simply and unceremoniously erased, and all with the explicitly expressed, fundamentally ludicrous goal of "balancing" the politics of history. They even saw fit to include language restoring Joe McCarthy's reputation. Have we regressed so deeply into our zealously partisan, scorched earth mindsets that we can no longer concur on the wickedness of Joe McCarthy? These deliberate omissions and additions, these crafty verbal tweaks and twists, these heedless ideological substitutions are the steady drip, drip, drip of slash-and-burn politics seeping their way into what used to be our untouchable history, a collective American story that at the very least aspired to objectivity.
We are not the Soviet Union--Americans don't change the facts of the past to vindicate or vilify those who shaped our nation for better or worse. We don't erase memories, even the ones that today we may disapprove of. The Texas State Board of Education is quite plainly distorting history in order to rally school children over to the side of conservatism rather than letting them explore the whole truth of our past. Of course, no textbook is perfectly objective or politically neutral, but we owe future generations our best effort to keep what we call history free from the unsettling influence of partisan spin. It is the line we must not cross if we hope to remain a free society, the line between an America that prizes truth and a far more sinister version--one that manufactures a convenient history for its children, and in doing so forgets the lessons of the past. Where's that line now? Look behind you.