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Rewriting History 4/5/2010 9:53:37 AM
Texas conservatives putting pressure on the State Board of Education to change text books.
Dick Armey, who used to be a fairly reputable congressman, Michelle Bachmann, and Glen Beck seem to be trying to do what Communism and George Orwell's 1984 couldn't do, rewrite history.
Armey would like us to believe that the Jamestown settlers almost died off their first year because they were socialists. If they were socialists, so were the Puritans, because they almost died off, too. They were so desperate for food that they ate the Indians seed corn. Armey gets it wrong twice actually. The Jamestown settlers weren't socialists; they were looking for gold (people Armey and others of his ilk would approve of), and as a result, weren't prepared to farm, fish etc. Meanwhile 74 years after the Puritans showed up at Plymouth Rock they were hanging women for witchcraft.
Michelle Bachmann would like you to believe that FDR is responsible for The Depression when it was going strong before FDR became president. There was that Black Friday thing on Wall Street in 1929 (which should remind you a lot of what just happened on Wall Street), and banks closing right and left. Customer bank accounts weren't guaranteed by the government, which is why people were making runs on the banks and why stockbrokers were jumping out of windows, and there was no social security or unemployment compensation. Bachmann probably got the idea that Roosevelt prolonged the Depression (which he did) because in 1937 he stopped priming the pump and tried to balance the budget. When the US got involved in WWII he was forced to do pretty much what Obama just did, pour money into the economy. This worked because the money stayed in America, people had jobs, and they spent it on what little they could buy.
Instead of criticizing others, Bachmann should work with her business (and Lobbyist) friends to convince business not to lay off their customers during times of recession. Marvin Windows here in Minnesota cut hours for their workers but they kept their people working. They took a loss; they didn't pay out any dividends to stock holders. Let me rant about Bachman for a moment before I forget. She was a lawyer for the IRS before being elected to the Minnesota state legislature. She got her law degree out of a cracker jacks box (Oral Roberts, same thing). But one would think that a big mouth tax dodger like her would never go to work for the IRS.
Then there's Beck. Beck would have us believe that Teddy Roosevelt is responsible for the "Nanny" state because he encouraged rich businessmen to spend their money on the poor. That's just disingenous (unless he got the idea from that Mormon John Bircher he's always quoting). What Beck really means is that Roosevelt was a trust buster. He tried to stop what conglomerates have done today, become too big to fail. Obama had to bail out AIG (an international insurance company) because the whole world would have come down around our ears if they'd been allowed to fail. They paid out 13 billion in insurance claims to Goldman Sachs alone and billions more all over the world. Why anybody would listen to Beck in the first place is beyond me. What ever happened to "credibility"? Let's put aside the fact that he's a "former" drug addict and alcoholic and look at his qualifications to talk about politics at all. Before he became prominent on CNN, he was a shock jock. He never took a political science class in his life, and he dropped out of the only college class he ever took, a religion class.
I hope you see my point. What this rewriting of history is is anti-intellectualism, anti-science, and if you put your faith in this stupidity and actually elect these people, we're headed for another Dark Age. Science will create the next boom, with plenty of jobs for all, and I've got a feeling it will be in the renewable energy industry. What are conservatives doing to help that come about? They're screaming "drill baby, drill" and questioning global warming.
And another thing: you don't just rewrite history. There's such a thing as historigraphy; i.e., "critical examination of sources." In other words, historians try to find primary sources, people who were living at the time being investigated. They look at journals, diaries, letters, they do interviews if anybody is left alive from that time. Then they look at secondary sources as close to the time being investigated as possible. You don't just decide that Roosevelt started the Depression. Take TJ Stiles recent biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt, THE FIRST TYCOON. Stiles provides 96 pages of footnotes, with twelve pages of primary source bibliography. He won the National Book Award for that little effort. Meanwhile, Sarah Palin published a little tome (which she didn't write) with no footnotes and no bibliography. She's an opportunist plain and simple and so are Armey (who wants to be the head teabagger), Beck, and Bachmann.
