You can leave the room now, all of you who think history is just a bunch of boring dates and junk. The Blob is temporarily removing its Sportsball Guy hat and donning its History Nerd hat.
It's going to lament again, for approximately the 4,932nd time, that certain swatches of America are either appallingly ignorant of its history, or would rather it weren't so inconvenient. Kids today, right?
Wrong.
Because the certain swatch of America I'm talking about are Our Only Available Impeached President, and his flunky Attorney General, William Barr.
It was Barr the other day who told some folks at Hillsdale College that the lockdowns ordered by governors around the country to combat a vicious pandemic were "the greatest intrusion on civil liberties" since slavery. And it was OOAIP who said teaching kids about slavery -- and, you know, all that racial stuff -- was "child abuse," and that he, Donald J. "Paul Revere" Trump, was going to sign an executive order to get America back to teaching history the white, er, right, way.
As a history nerd of the first order all of this makes my teeth ache.
First, the President's attorney-general-on-retainer, who conveniently forgot about some things when he said what he did about common-sense efforts to fight a pathogen that's now killed 200,000 Americans.
Greatest intrusion on civil liberties since slavery?
Um, Billy boy, allow me to remind you of some stuff:
1. The internment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II.
2. The imprisonment of anyone who uttered a dissenting word about America's involvement in the First World War, with sentences that sometimes exceeded 10 years.
3. The suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War.
4. Jim Crow.
5. The Alien and Sedition Acts.
But, yeah, telling people they have to shelter in place for awhile to avoid spreading a killer virus is MUCH worse than all that.
Lord. Give me strength.
Give me strength, too, to listen to OOAIP talk about American history without yanking my hair out in double handfuls. My History Nerd hat doesn't always fit me perfectly, but when Paul Revere Trump dons his he looks like '70s baseball star Oscar Gamble with his batting helmet perched precariously atop one of history's more glorious Afros.
Paul Revere knows less than nothing about a whole lot of things, but his dim vision of our history is so wanting as to be comical at times. Not so comical is the Sovietization of American history OOAIP seems to be suggesting, with the greatness of America extolled while glossing over its flaws -- as if America's greatness were so fragile it could not stand up to honest scrutiny.
This is not history but propaganda, and it feeds the yearning for an unrecoverable and largely imaginary past that animates OOAIP and much of his base. You can find it in history textbooks from the first half of the 20th century, which taught schoolchildren that slavery wasn't such a bad deal for the enslaved, and that slaveholders actually treated many of their slaves like members of the family.
Those sorts of gross distortions apparently are what OOAIP and his constituency yearn for. It's a literal whitewashing of history that either ignores or out-and-out falsifies half of America's story -- but which the most openly white supremacist politician since George Wallace clearly finds comforting.
It's why he calls teaching schoolkids about race and its clear role in shaping America "toxic propaganda" that teaches "hateful lies about this country." As is often the case with this president, what he condemns is exactly what he himself is proposing.
The unvarnished truth is, you cannot honestly teach American history without examining the role of race in the nation's narrative. African slaves, after all, literally built America -- including the house in which OOAIP currently resides. The contradictions between our founding principles and the institution of slavery and its racist assumptions go all the way back to the founders, who struggled with those contradictions themselves until kicking the can down the road.
The contradictions remain, of course. Witness, for example, the hoo-ha over removing monuments of icons of the dead Confederacy, which was founded on the principle of white supremacy and which fought a bloody civil war to defend it.
The post-war rewriting of that narrative to ennoble a cause that couldn't be ennobled leads directly to the present, of course. The monument flap is its enduring legacy; a whole segment of America honestly believes removing from the public square tributes to those who took up arms against the United States is somehow an erasure of "our" history.
It is not, of course. It is merely a course correction back to the history neo-Confederates have attempted themselves to erase.
As is teaching the role of race in America's story.
Yes, it's a messy tale, but history is inherently messy. Most endeavors that involve human beings are.
Quick story: When I was in high school, one of my favorite teachers was Thomas Lamb, who taught history in a way that made it come alive -- and that showed us it was never subject to assumption. On one occasion, he did this by splitting the class into two "legal teams" and conducting a trial of the British soldiers who were involved in the Boston Massacre.
What this taught us (me, anyway) is there were two sides to that story. The traditional version is that British soldiers killed five innocent patriots in cold blood. The more nuanced version is the innocents were not so innocent; they taunted the soldiers and attacked them with rocks, chunks of ice and oyster shells until the soldiers finally opened fire. So there was blame to be laid on both sides.
I didn't come away from that exercise hating America, as OOAIP would no doubt contend. I came away with a clearer picture of an historical event.
And shouldn't that be the goal here?
