"Righting" History
Most of you have probably heard by now that Republicans on the State Board of Education in Texas are rewriting history for the state's children because, they say, history has a liberal bias. No longer will students study the Bill of Rights and learn why the framers did not want the state to meddle in the religious lives of its citizens. Now they will learn that the framers didn't want separation of church and state at all. The students of Texas will also learn that Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin had an important influence on political revolutions from 1750 to the present, but Thomas Jefferson won't be mentioned in that context. Texans will also be required to learn about the importance of Phyllis Shlafly and the Heritage Foundation.
Steven Thomma notes that the school board in Texas isn't the only one "righting" American history. Former House of Representatives majority leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, said recently that the people who settled Jamestown in 1607 were socialists and that their ideology doomed them. Historians must have been smoking illegal agricultural products, then, because they've been telling us that Jamestown was a capitalist venture financed by the Virginia Company of London. "It was never socialistic. In fact, in 1619, Jamestown planters imported the first African slaves to the 13 colonies that later formed the United States."
Armey also advised people to read the Federalist Papers if they want to find out what's driving the tea party movement. "The small-government conservative movement, which includes people who call themselves the tea party patriots and so forth, is about the principles of liberty as embodied in the Constitution, the understanding of which is fleshed out if you read things like the Federalist Papers," Armey said.
The Federalist Papers were written largely by Alexander Hamilton, an advocate of a strong central government.
An admirer of British political systems, Hamilton was a nationalist who emphasized strong central government and successfully argued that the implied powers of the Constitution could be used to fund the national debt, assume state debts, and create the government-owned Bank of the United States. These programs were funded primarily by a tariff on imports and a highly controversial whiskey tax.*
Armey called those who disagreed with his view of Hamilton "ill informed."
Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., is one of several prominent conservatives claiming that Franklin D. Roosevelt caused the Great Depression. "FDR took office in the midst of a recession," Bachmann told the Conservative Political Action Conference. "He decided to choose massive government spending and the creation of monstrous bureaucracies. Do we detect a Democrat pattern here in all of this? He took what was a manageable recession and turned it into a 10-year depression."
Thomma writes: "The facts show that the country was in something far worse than a "manageable recession" in March 1933 when Roosevelt took office. Stocks had lost 90 percent of their value since the crash of 1929. Thousands of banks had failed. Unemployment reached an all-time high of 24.9 percent just before Roosevelt was inaugurated."
Even Joe McCarthy is being rehabilitated by the right. Phyllis Schlafly, whom Texas schoolchildren now must study, asserts: "Almost everything about McCarthy in current history books is a lie and will have to be revised."
Ann Coulter agrees: "Everything you think you know about McCarthy is a hegemonic lie. Liberals denounced McCarthy because they were afraid of getting caught, so they fought back like animals to hide their own collaboration with a regime as evil as the Nazis."….
4 comments:
Good stuff here
Is this Texas thing a done deal, or is there some sort of oversight on this odd little group?
Another reason why these under the radar positions should never be left to the electorate.
I believe that it is a done deal. That's a problem because textbook publishers seem to make their decisions based on practices and policies in big markets such as California and TExas.
One of the things that makes our country unique is "local control" of education, as opposed (typically) to central control from a committee of blue ribbon eggheads. Hence, though, say, the Brits are capable of stunning goofiness, they are not saddled with the phenomenon of local school boards judging that "evolution" or the "big bang" should not be taught at the public schools. "Local control" is typically a war cry of knuckle-draggers such as our own in the SOCCCD.
Holding my aching head, slumped over in dismay...
ES
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