American history goes rogue
This is a response to “Rewriting American history” [News, April 4].
Revisionist history was a charge levied against the Soviets. We maintained that our history contained the credible elements of a social science. Now Texas greets Joe McCarthy as a hero, Franklin D. Roosevelt as a Great Depression instigator and President Barack Obama as an Islamic socialist?
If ideologues want to reconstruct events and people, let them write books such as Palin’s “Going Rogue” and sell them at Costco.
But in schools, children risk brainwashing. Ideology triumphs over providing them with objective constructs for understanding events.
Sure, the left and right pen nastily tendentious stuff. Pundits for each side rebut. Who rebuts in school when Teddy Roosevelt is portrayed as a socialist? What test grade do you get for thinking of him, instead, as the quintessential Rough Rider?
Pretty scary, and growing. That is what the right seems bent upon: Recreating events to suit the special interests funding supposedly neutral think tanks that disguise the ideology, calling it “history.”
— Peter Loeb, Sequim