Conservatives Practicing Soviet-Style Revisionism

When the USSR was still up and kicking, teachers were required to edit history books. They'd cut out or paste over pages, replacing them with content sent them by the Communist Party. Figures who had fallen out of favor with the party were airbrushed out of photos and any mention of them was pasted over with a new history -- as far as anyone was concerned, those people never existed. As a result, Soviet students grew up in a world without any real past or, at least, a past nearly as unknowable as the future. If Comrade X was a big figure in Soviet history one year, the next he might no longer exist.

The reason for this was what the right would call "politically correctness" run amuck. The party's ideology dictated that the party was flawless. Removing people from history wasn't seen as an act of censorship, but as retroactively correcting mistakes. By revising history, the party believed they were able to control it. And the populace became used to ever-changing truths and, for the most part, accepted the party's shifting versions of reality.

This Soviet style airbrushing of history is happening now in the US. Specifically, Texas. And the first figure to fall out of favor with the party and be airbrushed out of history is one of the founding fathers. Liveblogging a Texas Board of Education meeting the Texas Freedom Network reported that Thomas Jefferson has become the Texas version of Leon Trotsky.

9:30 – Board member Cynthia Dunbar wants to change a standard having students study the impact of Enlightenment ideas on political revolutions from 1750 to the present. She wants to drop the reference to Enlightenment ideas (replacing with “the writings of”) and to Thomas Jefferson. She adds Thomas Aquinas and others. Jefferson’s ideas, she argues, were based on other political philosophers listed in the standards. We don’t buy her argument at all. Board member Bob Craig of Lubbock points out that the curriculum writers clearly wanted to students to study Enlightenment ideas and Jefferson. Could Dunbar’s problem be that Jefferson was a Deist? The board approves the amendment, taking Thomas Jefferson OUT of the world history standards.

9:40 – We’re just picking ourselves up off the floor. The board’s far-right faction has spent months now proclaiming the importance of emphasizing America’s exceptionalism in social studies classrooms. But today they voted to remove one of the greatest of America’s Founders, Thomas Jefferson, from a standard about the influence of great political philosophers on political revolutions from 1750 to today.

[...]

9:51 – Dunbar’s amendment striking Jefferson passed with the votes of the board’s far-right members and board member Geraldine “Tincy” Miller of Dallas.

Jefferson is no longer in favor by the party. Having written about a "wall of separation between church and state," the third President of the United States and author of the Declaration of Independence is no longer "politically correct" among the wingnut crowd who insist that the founders wanted to set up a theocracy. So he's out, replaced with such non-founders as John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, and Sir William Blackstone. Also out, references to democracy.

This revisionist history isn't limited to Texas. It's being practiced in the talking points of the Republican Party. "During a Christmas Eve appearance on Fox News, I pointed out that most mainstream economists believe the government must boost the economy with deficit spending," wrote columnist David Sirota in January of last year. "That's when conservative pundit Monica Crowley said we should instead limit such spending because President Franklin Roosevelt's 'massive government intervention actually prolonged the Great Depression.' Fox News anchor Gregg Jarrett eagerly concurred, saying 'historians pretty much agree on that.'"

Sirota did what few people would -- he checked. Not only do historians "pretty much agree" on the exact opposite of what Crowley and Jarret were saying, but so do the vast majority of economists. But history didn't serve their argument well, so they broke out the airbrush and history was "corrected." This became a common Republican talking point during the debate over the stimulus package -- that Obama's spending would fail, just as FDR's supposedly had.

McClatchy's Steven Thomma has a great piece on the right's attempts to edit history to their liking and I suggest you read it. In he looks for historical revisionism among the Republican elite and finds plenty. Among them; Sen. Joe McCarthy was a hero, the Jamestown colony failed because of its socialism (in reality, it was a company town founded by the stock-issuing Virginia Company of London and didn't actually fail), that Alexander Hamilton wasn't in favor of a strong central government, and that Theodore Roosevelt hated the rich.

Of course, this is all provably BS, which goes a long way toward explaining the actions of the Texas Board of Education. Texas is the nation's largest purchaser of textbooks, meaning that Texas standards influence other state's textbooks as well. Like Soviet students, the students of Texas and many other states will learn the history that the party approved, not the history that actually happened.

You may know too much for the party's good, but the airbrush can make sure your children don't.

-Wisco


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Choosing Ignorance

One of my favorite openings for one of my posts was written in July, 2007. That post, titled "Monument to BS Works Out Pretty Much the Way You'd Expect," was a post about the opening of the Creation Museum.

Just outside of Cincinnati -- in Petersburg, Kentucky -- stands a 60,000 square foot, $27 million monument to gullibility, fanaticism, and the ability to believe the stupidest damned things despite all evidence to the contrary. Answers in Genesis's Creation Museum features exhibits showing humans co-existing with dinosaurs, offers 'proof' that there was once a global flood, and warns us not to judge Cain for marrying his sister.

Yeah, it's that nuts.

Why revisit a museum that has an exhibit of a triceratops wearing a saddle and tells people that dinosaurs were packed into a 450X75X45 ark? Because today is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin. The good news is that more people believe in evolution than this stuff, the bad news is that neither belief holds a majority. According to Gallup, fully 25% of Americans believe that creationism offers a better explanation of all the species that populate the planet than evolution. Put more simply, a quarter of Americans believe that it's all explained by magic, as opposed to a complex scientific system that actually works in the real world -- evolutionary biology is an applied science. It's like disbelieving in math, despite the fact that people use it constantly to come to working answers. If it works, if it generates results, it's obviously true.





But math doesn't contradict some holy book. But let's pretend for a moment that it does. Supporters of creationism -- including its more scientific sounding version, "intelligent design" or ID -- argue that both evolution and creationism should be taught in schools and the kids should decide for themselves which makes more sense. But both aren't equally true. Assume for a moment that the number 7 were taboo in a popular religion. Would you support teaching kids that the answer to a math problem could be 7 or -- if you don't believe in 7 -- rounded up to 8 or down to 6 and be equally correct? Would you accept your kid being taught that 3+4=6 or 7 or 8 -- depending on which felt truer to them? Or would that be stupid beyond words? Would you fly on a plane that was designed with this taboo-influenced math?

Yet this is exactly what people want to do with science classes. Teach them evolution, teach them ID, and let the kids decide. In the court decision Kitzmiller v. Dover in 2005, teaching creationism or creationism dressed up in its ID clothing was ruled unconstitutional. It was, after all, teaching religion in schools. "[W]e conclude that the religious nature of ID would be readily apparent to an objective observer, adult or child," Judge John E. Jones III found and ID was out of the schools in Dover, Pennsylvania. Schools would have to teach that 7 exists.

Since then, creationists have tried to pass anti-evolution laws which they can then take to another court and get a decision more pleasing to Republican Jesus. Since the beginning of this year, laws have been introduced in Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama, New Mexico, and Iowa. Nearly every one of these post-Dover laws cites "academic freedom."

That's right, if you can't teach complete BS to kids who don't know any better, then you're being oppressed. For example, the Mississippi bill, AKA the "Academic Freedom Act," contains in its language this sentence:

This bill will level the playing field because it allows a teacher to bring forward the biblical creation story of humankind.

Here's the thing, this isn't some sort of competition. No matter how many people you manage to convince that creationism is true, creationism remains untrue. Reality isn't a democracy, where facts you don't like can be replaced with new "facts" supported only by public opinion. There will never be a level playing field between the two concepts, because evolution will forever have the unfair advantage of not being a load of crap. There was a time when pretty much everyone agreed the Sun orbited the Earth and, at that time, all that meant was that pretty much everyone was wrong. And, proving that there's nothing so backward and stupid that people won't believe it, there are some who still don't believe in a sun-centered solar system -- because it contradicts the Bible.

There is a choice to be made here, but it's not between two equally valid theories. It's in choosing just how ignorant you're willing to be. When it comes to schools and education, we shouldn't be expecting children to make that choice -- it is, after all, schools and education. 7 is not equal to 6 or 8 and ID is not just as valid as evolution. There is no compromise, there is no middle ground; one is true, one is false.

When it comes to gullibility, fanaticism, and the ability to believe the stupidest damned things despite all evidence to the contrary, creationists have cornered the market. Let them keep their Flintstone museum, with dinosaurs and humans living side by side, but let them keep it out of schools. We shouldn't be in the business of teaching ignorance.

-Wisco

Fighting for Freedom from Reality

In a ruling certain not to rock the legal and educational worlds, a federal court in Los Angeles ruled yesterday that you can't force universities to pretend that BS is true. In terms of common sense, the ruling -- Association of Christian Schools International et al. v. Roman Stearns et al -- wasn't much of a stumper. But there are people who think you get to choose what's true for you -- as if the universe were a series of multiple choice questions with no wrong answers -- and those people aren't pleased.

The perpetually panic-stricken WorldNetDaily kicks things off by completely misrepresenting just about every fact in the case:

Arguments were heard today in a federal district court case to determine whether a state university system can dictate that private Christian schools in the state teach their college prep courses from exclusively secular, Bible- and God-free textbooks.

As WND reported earlier, the University of California system adopted a policy last year that basic science, history, and literature textbooks by major Christian book publishers wouldn't qualify for core admissions requirements because of the inclusion of Christian perspectives.

Robert Tyler, who is representing Calvary Chapel Christian School and five students in the case against the University of California, told WND that the university's discriminatory policy creates an ultimatum for Christian schools. "If you want courses to be approved in private education, so your students are qualified to attend (UC) institutions, you must teach from a secular point of view," he said.

This is typical of the strategy of whiny victimhood that the religious right has been reduced to these days. The truth is that the textbooks in question managed to accomplish the seemingly oxymoronic task of teaching ignorance.



"And what did they teach in these science classes at Calvary Chapel Christian School in Murrieta, one of the schools that sued?" asks Karin Klein for the LA Times. "Well, one textbook in the class, published by Bob Jones University Press, informs youngsters that the earth is about 10,000 years old. The other textbook, "Biology: God's Living Creation," includes a lesson on how dinosaurs walked the earth with people, and might have faced extinction via flood. You know, THE flood."

I'm not sure what the reasoning of the plaintiffs was here. You get turned down for admission to a college because the high school your parents sent you to made you ignorant. If you win the case, you go on to college, where you flunk out of everything because your high school turned you into an ignoramus. At that point, post-secondary education becomes nothing more than a waste of money.

Of course, the strategy of the religious right was to sue their point of view into being true. Step one; get accepted to the University of California. Step two; sue every time you failed to get a passing grade. Step three; all the creationist horsecrap you believe magically becomes true... or something.

Basically, the Association of Christian Schools International argued that UC was violating the First Amendment. And that argument is pretty insane. To go back to the WND piece, attorney for the nutjobs Robert Tyler said, "We believe that UC's discrimination is clearly unconstitutional and violates the First Amendment, because UC is attempting to secularize Christian schools."

Yeah, you've got that backwards. You guys are trying to Christianize secular schools. What you're trying to do is create a separate legal truth all your own, where everyone has to pretend that all the crap you believe is real. Having failed to get your laughable BS past the scientific community, who in turn stand in the way of teaching it in public schools, you try to sue your way into education, as if some judge can just declare creationism true and force the universe to rearrange itself to conform to your new "science."

"The UC is intent upon defending some 'right' to discriminate unlawfully," Tyler said, as if calling a lie a lie amounted to some sort of inexcusable injustice. Colleges exist to educate, not to promote some religious mumbo jumbo that some weird cultists wish was true.

It's not just creationism that is the problem here, either. The textbooks also include history books that assume that God controls everything and explains things in terms of divine intervention.

San Francisco Chronicle:

For example, in Friday's ruling, [U.S. District Judge James Otero of Los Angeles] upheld the university's rejection of a history course called Christianity's Influence on America. According to a UC professor on the course review committee, the primary text, published by Bob Jones University, "instructs that the Bible is the unerring source for analysis of historical events" and evaluates historical figures based on their religious motivations.

Again, using this "information" as the basis for college history courses would be a guaranteed fail. And, again, that failure to pass would've been followed by another lawsuit. The people who freak out the most over "activist judges" are praying for judicial activism to somehow make all the crap they believe magically true. God, apparently, loves even the hypocrite.

With this decision, we're supposed to believe that the legal system has sadly abandoned us to the unrelenting oppression of reality. A universe who's laws cannot be appealed will be allowed to stand unchallenged and no waving of a holy book will be allowed to change it. Religious freedom suffers when reality can't be forced by law to conform to our beliefs. Truth, that unchallenged tyrant, will not be overthrown by the forces of biblical ignorance -- a result which, somehow, is supposed to make us less free.

The truth is that you can believe whatever the hell you want to believe. What you don't get to do is force everyone to pretend that whatever the hell it is that you believe is true. That doesn't make you less free, it just makes everyone equally free. Truth may be an undemocratic tyrant, but it's the only one that can never be dethroned.

-Wisco

John McCain's Hundred Year Jobs Program

As the wars slog on and on and on, the consequences at home grow. The war in Iraq is now expected to cost Americans $3 trillion dollars, once all the borrowing and spending has finally been accounted for. That figure, by the way, represents cockeyed optimism -- the debts continue to rise.

Coalition losses total 4052 military deaths. Of course, that's today. Accurate casualty figures have a very short shelf life and the number only increases. On the Iraqi side, as many as 90,778 have died.

Those costs are permanent, the money wasted will never be regained and the fallen will never rise again. Other costs are likewise permanent, but go unmeasured or when they are documented, go largely ignored by a media fascinated by a presidential campaign at home and war fatigue among the public.

News & Observer (N. Carolina), "Combat vets face hurdles as students":

Spc. Natasha McKinnon survived losing part of her left leg to an improvised bomb in Iraq. Now that she's back, she's trying to find her balance in college life. Sometimes she can't recall a professor's name. She loses track of test dates. Occasionally, she forgets she has pulled off her prosthetic leg to rest her stump during a long lecture, only to tilt off balance when she tries to stand.

As tens of thousands of veterans of the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq try to collect on their promised college benefits, McKinnon and others are finding that their combat experience complicates the transition from soldier to student.

Some have trouble collecting the government money that is supposed to pay for college, or they discover that the benefits aren't nearly enough to cover tuition and other bills. While their classmates complain about homework and hangovers, many vets struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder, the effects of traumatic brain injury, lost limbs and a range of chronic medical problems.

"Not only am I a full-time student," McKinnon told the paper, "I'm a full-time patient. It takes a toll, mentally and physically. Sometimes I'm there in class, but only in body. Not in mind."

There are moves out there to make the lives of student vets like McKinnon's a little easier. Enter the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act of 2007. This has widely been reported as an "expansion" of the WWII-era Montgomery G.I. Bill, but it's really just an update. According to the Inside Higher Ed, "The bill would enable eligible veterans to receive payments covering tuition -- up to the cost of in-state tuition at the most expensive public college in a veteran’s home state -- room and board, fees, educational costs and a $1,000 monthly stipend." We aren't talking about sending vets to Harvard or Yale here; this would allow them to enroll in state universities.

Of course, the Pentagon and John McCain oppose the bill -- which otherwise has bipartisan support. "Officials in charge of Pentagon personnel worry that a more generous and expansive GI Bill would create an incentive for troops to get out of the military and go to college," ABC News reported. Do they really need an incentive? You'd think a pointless and needless war would be incentive enough.

For his part, McCain has offered an alternative bill. Not surprisingly, it's a freakin' joke. "The McCain-sponsored bill aims to increase the $1,100 per month active-duty service members now get for educational expenses to $1,500." reports The Hill. "The sum would increase to $2,000 per month for a member who served on active duty 12 years or more."

Let me repeat that -- under McCain's bill, you'd have to serve for twelve years in order to qualify for just $2,000 a month. And, for people enlisting today, that's not $2,000 today dollars, that's $2,000 2020 dollars. Figure in projected inflation and that's $1,516.51. You know what? You might as well take that $1,500 and get out as soon as possible, while you're actually college-aged. There's your "incentive for troops to get out of the military and go to college." McCain apparently shares Bush's math skills, which have us shoveling $3 trillion down a rat hole while cutting taxes for the wealthy.

Of course, that's not the only program Baghdad John has in mind for military personnel. A new Democratic National Committee ad reminds us of McCain's jobs program:



On the plus side, McCain's "hundred years in Iraq" means jobs for life -- if you can call that a plus. It also means shoveling trillions more down that aforementioned rat hole.

John McCain has been running as America's leading veteran. But veterans would be right to ask him, "What have you done for me lately?" Under President McCain, they'd get endless war, joke benefits, and -- assuming they ever get out -- they'll come home to a ruined economy.

If that's leadership, John McCain can keep it.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; war; Iraq; Afghanistan; Republican; elections; 2008; G.I. Bill; Jim Webb; The bad news is John McCain's education benefits for veterans, the worse news is his century-long jobs program