Pictured: The Texas State Board of Education
Apparently, Texas buys a lot of textbooks. So many, in fact, that the Texas State Board of Education might usher in a trend that makes social studies textbooks literally (and by that we mean figuratively) give Ronald Reagan’s corpse a handjob while simultaneously rim-jobbing a mannequin representing the free market system, presumably dressed in a sexy skirt with sexy cowboy boots.
Above: The Free Market
Yes, conservative and Republican members of the State Board of Education in Texas are super pissed that public school textbooks tell students that the New Deal worked out okay, that the Civil Rights Movement wasn’t retarded, that the Great Society did some good shit, and American imperialism was sort of a dick head-ish thing to do. Furthermore, conservative board members want more chapters about how bad ass of a president Ronald Reagan was and how Judeo-Christian values totally inspired Bettsy Ross to stitch Old Glory together, or possibly Jesus himself, depending on which Jesus we’re talking about (they’re talking about American Jesus, the one who doesn’t want to give your cancerous ass health care, not the pinko Jesus that totally pissed off Rome, otherwise known to Texan conservatives as America 1.0).
Should the conservatives of the Texas State Board of Education get their way, it’s entirely possible that the children of similarly conservative areas will learn from a much more patriotic sort of textbook. They’ll learn how American imperialism wasn’t really imperialism in the traditional sense – ya know, because America is the land of Judeo-Christian values and shit – and those kids won’t know about American imperialism anyway, because in the new, more patriotic, textbooks, the word imperialism will be replaced with ‘expansionism’, presumably because the latter term doesn’t lead one to think of wholesale American exploitation of Latin America.
Latin American Chicks: (Insert erection reference using the word "expansion")
Furthermore, these new textbooks will teach wholesome middle American children that the Civil Rights Movement, according to a proposed amendment to the social studies curriculum, created “unrealistic expectations” for those uppity negroes (who’ve doubtlessly grown ever more uppity since the uppitiest negro of them all turned America into a Soviet satellite state). As you can see, this amendment, along with others, such as the one where all references to Ralph Nader are purged and replaced with true American patriots like Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, will instill a true sense of Americanism in a generation that will come of age right around the time the Tea Party rises up to murder their socialist homosexual despots, no doubt appointed by Barack Obama who, by that time in the future, will have abolished democracy, sort of like the USSR but with more guns, more black people, and, hopefully, far less Ukrainians.
This isn’t revisionist history. Absolutely not. It’s just a more Americanized history, which means that it will implement what most middle Americans already believe: America has rarely made any mistakes in its brief existence, minorities are stupid, Texas never really belonged to Mexico, books like The Jungle and A People’s History are lies that besmirch the purity of the free market system, and FDR was an eight-legged monstrosity hell bent on feeding blue-eyed American babies to Joe Stalin.
So thank you, Republican members of the Texas State Board of Education. Without your exuberance for a more patriotic history, my children would have grown up believing that Confederates were assholes, the Civil Rights Movement was a good thing, and South America fucked itself up without any help whatsoever from Jesus-lovin’ America.
All History is Myth
I have a friend who worked for Houghton Mifflin a text book company that sold books to Texas. In order to sell the books, especially historical books, the books had to represent what the school boards perception of history was. School books are written regionally, interpreting history and presenting history as a consumer item.
But this is what history is. It’s a compilation of lie, built upon lie, built upon lie. History is interpretation. There is no truth in it.
That’s a large part of how and why the intellectual and really emotional foundation of all cultures are unstable and the result is that you have a human race that is simply put….not in touch with reality.
To believe that Jesus, Muhammed and Abraham were anything like the way they are described by the bible/Koran….and a good example is Christianity which has clearly been documented to have been written and re-written to suit the times…is to be made vulnerable by this mass hysterical convolution of whatever is naturally true.
But this little episode in Texas is an event that has been going on since history was first written, before that there was Oral history and that became myth. Written history is myth too.