History ought to be left to the historians, professional and amateur. History ought to be allowed to have arguments, to be blurry around the edges sometimes, to be in dispute where we genuinely don't know for sure -- and supported by as much first-hand testimony as can be gathered and preserved, so that we can know just what it is we do know.
History should not be rewritten by politicians, especially ones who have the power to change public monuments. Many of the people who make history aren't simple saints, or even very nice. Harriet Tubman was haunted by migraines and worse; Thomas Paine was so cross-grained and argumentative he just about ran out of friends, ending up in a French jail during their Revolution and getting back to the U.S. thanks to people who didn't want him dead, but could also barely stand to have him around. Deist Ethan Allen brought a magistrate to the point of tears, arguing about the nature of the Supreme Being invoked during his own wedding. And nobody ever pretended the brick-throwing queens of the Stonewall Riots were particularly nice.
Most of 'em are getting edited out or flattened down by the Trump Administration. You may or may not think the site of the Stonewall Inn should be a National Monument, but there's one there now, and if you read the plaques, you'd think the riot was one hundred percent well-scrubbed lady plumbers and nice boy accountants, miffed at the cops; Tubman got back on her own website after vociferous complaint, but it was a near thing. Museums covering African-American history are getting defunded. Founders and Framers are treated as if they were flawless plaster statues, not real people.
The Trump Administration claims to be doing all this to "end wokeness" and overthrow what they see as an "anti-American" bias in historical coverage. They're swinging at shadows; there's long been an effort to show the unvarnished truth, pushback against the "Lost Cause" retconning that simmered a long time and got up to steam under the odious Woodrow Wilson, but the correction has been that we get the good along with the bad. And if you don't know what mistakes we have made in the past, how can you recognize when we start to make new versions of old errors all over again? There once was a nation devoted to rewriting their own history, re-rewriting and re-re-rewriting, as many times as it took to create "the right kind of people." They ended up making the wrong kind of people instead, and it hasn't worked out well, for them or their neighbors. We should not follow them down that path.
The problem is that grifters & ideologues don't want people to know the lessons of the past, as it gets in their way.
ReplyDeleteSounds like Christianity. The first indisputable original writings we have are NOT Matthew, Mark, Luke & John (bless the bed that I lazy on) but Paul's letters to the far-flung early Churches. The Gospels got written some (I'm hazy on this, crucify me) 75 years later, but was obviously oral history earlier. Imagine if the history of the American Revolution had been first written down in 1850! And the complete Gospels we have are from maybe 100 years after that. As for the absolute inerrant words, the earliest manuscripts we have don't match each other very well...a phrase here or there, maybe one sentence.
ReplyDeleteThen there's the flawless garment of the One True Faith...there were actually at least a hundred early versions of Christianity...until the Roman Empire purged them for a nice state controlled obedient one and did so with fire and sword. But don't try to tell the Holy Rollers any of this, you get lynched. OTOH....you know how some churches have an ordinal qualifier, like Second Baptist Church? That's often when some bunch of the congregation felt hot about how worship should or shouldn't be, and so moved down the street and formed another congregation. And then there's the schism that led to the Southern Baptist faith....down South, the Baptists there felt that salveholding was jes' fine with Jesus. It wasn't until 1995 that the Powers That Be finally officially repudiated that. We're a lovely, logical species, for sure....