Surreality TV [dri]

Boston University professor Howard Zinn’s book A People’s History of the United States, long a font of false knowledge to countless impressionable college freshmen, is coming to the small screen.

For those who may not be familiar with Professor Zinn’s book, it is a politically correct tour de farce through the evil, oppressive, and oh yes, racist history of the United States of America. Its pages contain the “true” history of America not the lies that the privileged power elite have forced upon the backs of the masses. Word is that Matt Damon has been slated to play the lead role (possibly a sadistic, white, racist, overlord or perhaps a murderous, lynch mob loving Republican).

The sad part of all this is that so many viewers will accept this collection of provable lies as the reasonable truth. In his 1980 commentary for The American Scholar, Harvard professor Oscar Handlin noted these gross distortions of truth contained in Zinn’s book:

“It simply is not true that “what Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortez did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots.” It simply is not true that the farmers of the Chesapeake colonies in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries avidly desired the importation of black slaves, or that the gap between rich and poor widened in the eighteenth-century colonies. Zinn gulps down as literally true the proven hoax of Polly Baker and the improbable Plough Jogger, and he repeats uncritically the old charge that President Lincoln altered his views to suit his audience. The Geneva assembly of 1954 did not agree on elections in a unified Vietnam; that was simply the hope expressed by the British chairman when the parties concerned could not agree. The United States did not back Batista in 1959; it had ended aid to Cuba and washed its hands of him well before then. “Tet” was not evidence of the unpopularity of the Saigon government, but a resounding rejection of the northern invaders.”

No doubt these and countless other fabrications will find their way into the upcoming television mini series. Truth be damned because in the post modern world, it doesn’t matter if something is actually true, what matters is that it should be true.

posted by xgenghisx at 08:03 PM

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