History: You Can't Make It Up As You Go Along

"He who controls the past controls the future." So wrote George Orwell, the English novelist whose 1984 and Animal Farm stand as two of the twentieth century's great warnings about the power and danger of intentional untruth in the hands of propagandists.

Orwell's quote well encapsulates the issue at stake this month when the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) votes on what to recommend in its curriculum guidelines. "A near majority" of the 15-member elected SBOE is, according to Newsweek, "locked in a hyperconservative embrace, aligned as a bloc to promote a social-issues-centric view of the world." The Board's decisions have a determinative influence on what is written into textbooks supplied to the second largest education system in the country, and a major influence on smaller states who then often have to choose from among the publisher's selections approved by SBOE.

In short, the conservative bloc on SBOE is bent on rewriting history to conform to their preconceived political and ideological views. In pursuit of this goal they are engaging in unfounded revisionism of the historical facts. They feel that if they can put words into the mouths of the Founding Fathers, for example, they can legitimize their current political and societal views. This goes hand in hand with other conservative efforts to overturn settled historical fact in the service of partisan ideology. As Steven Thomma recently reported for the McClatchy papers:

The right is rewriting history. The most ballyhooed effort is underway in Texas, where conservatives have pushed the state school board to rewrite the guidelines, downplaying Thomas Jefferson in one high school course, playing up such conservatives as Phyllis Schlafly and the Heritage Foundation and challenging the idea that the Founding Fathers wanted to
separate church and state.

The Jamestown settlers? Socialists. Founding Father Alexander Hamilton? Ill-informed professors made up all that bunk about him advocating a strong central government. Theodore Roosevelt? Another socialist. Franklin D. Roosevelt? Not only did he not end the Great Depression, he created it.

As if these entirely fallacious assertions were not enough, among other changes recommended by the conservative bloc are chopping Thurgood Marshall and Cesar Chavez from the history book and replacing them with the inventor of the yo-yo, and giving a favorable gloss to the reputation of Joseph McCarthy. There are not only the expected plans to give "creationism" equal footing with evolution, but also, as member Don McLeroy puts it, to inculcate the view that America is "not only unique but superior...divinely ordained to lead the world to betterment."

When conjoined to the erroneous historical pronouncements of well-known spokespeople like Fox personality Glenn Beck, one-time Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann, it is apparent a widespread effort is underway to control current political debate by inventing a set of non-existent historical precedents, to expunge inconvenient facts from the record. If this makes headway, the very bedrock upon which opinion is formed in a democratic republic will have been subverted. Here the reality-based folks in media, academics and society at large must be uncompromising in drawing the line. As was perhaps best expressed in a quote attributed to the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts."