David A. Schwinghammer
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Blogs by David A. Schwinghammer
Rewriting History
4/5/2010 9:53:37 AM
Texas conservatives putting pressure on the State Board of Education to change text books.
Dick Armey, who used to be a fairly reputable congressman, Michelle Bachmann, and Glen Beck seem to be trying to do what Communism and George Orwell's 1984 couldn't do, rewrite history.
Armey would like us to believe that the Jamestown settlers almost died off their first year because they were socialists. If they were socialists, so were the Puritans, because they almost died off, too. They were so desperate for food that they ate the Indians seed corn. Armey gets it wrong twice actually. The Jamestown settlers weren't socialists; they were looking for gold (people Armey and others of his ilk would approve of), and as a result, weren't prepared to farm, fish etc. Meanwhile 74 years after the Puritans showed up at Plymouth Rock they were hanging women for witchcraft.
Michelle Bachmann would like you to believe that FDR is responsible for The Depression when it was going strong before FDR became president. There was that Black Friday thing on Wall Street in 1929 (which should remind you a lot of what just happened on Wall Street), and banks closing right and left. Customer bank accounts weren't guaranteed by the government, which is why people were making runs on the banks and why stockbrokers were jumping out of windows, and there was no social security or unemployment compensation. Bachmann probably got the idea that Roosevelt prolonged the Depression (which he did) because in 1937 he stopped priming the pump and tried to balance the budget. When the US got involved in WWII he was forced to do pretty much what Obama just did, pour money into the economy. This worked because the money stayed in America, people had jobs, and they spent it on what little they could buy.
Instead of criticizing others, Bachmann should work with her business (and Lobbyist) friends to convince business not to lay off their customers during times of recession. Marvin Windows here in Minnesota cut hours for their workers but they kept their people working. They took a loss; they didn't pay out any dividends to stock holders. Let me rant about Bachman for a moment before I forget. She was a lawyer for the IRS before being elected to the Minnesota state legislature. She got her law degree out of a cracker jacks box (Oral Roberts, same thing). But one would think that a big mouth tax dodger like her would never go to work for the IRS.
Then there's Beck. Beck would have us believe that Teddy Roosevelt is responsible for the "Nanny" state because he encouraged rich businessmen to spend their money on the poor. That's just disingenous (unless he got the idea from that Mormon John Bircher he's always quoting). What Beck really means is that Roosevelt was a trust buster. He tried to stop what conglomerates have done today, become too big to fail. Obama had to bail out AIG (an international insurance company) because the whole world would have come down around our ears if they'd been allowed to fail. They paid out 13 billion in insurance claims to Goldman Sachs alone and billions more all over the world. Why anybody would listen to Beck in the first place is beyond me. What ever happened to "credibility"? Let's put aside the fact that he's a "former" drug addict and alcoholic and look at his qualifications to talk about politics at all. Before he became prominent on CNN, he was a shock jock. He never took a political science class in his life, and he dropped out of the only college class he ever took, a religion class.
I hope you see my point. What this rewriting of history is is anti-intellectualism, anti-science, and if you put your faith in this stupidity and actually elect these people, we're headed for another Dark Age. Science will create the next boom, with plenty of jobs for all, and I've got a feeling it will be in the renewable energy industry. What are conservatives doing to help that come about? They're screaming "drill baby, drill" and questioning global warming.
And another thing: you don't just rewrite history. There's such a thing as historigraphy; i.e., "critical examination of sources." In other words, historians try to find primary sources, people who were living at the time being investigated. They look at journals, diaries, letters, they do interviews if anybody is left alive from that time. Then they look at secondary sources as close to the time being investigated as possible. You don't just decide that Roosevelt started the Depression. Take TJ Stiles recent biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt, THE FIRST TYCOON. Stiles provides 96 pages of footnotes, with twelve pages of primary source bibliography. He won the National Book Award for that little effort. Meanwhile, Sarah Palin published a little tome (which she didn't write) with no footnotes and no bibliography. She's an opportunist plain and simple and so are Armey (who wants to be the head teabagger), Beck, and Bachmann.
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More Blogs by David A. Schwinghammer
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• The Morning After Pill - Friday, April 12, 2013
• What Would Thomas Jefferson Say? - Saturday, April 06, 2013
• Boneheads - Tuesday, March 12, 2013
• Why Benedict XVI Resigned - Sunday, February 17, 2013
• Gabby Giffords Testifies - Wednesday, January 30, 2013
• Newspaper Caters to Gun Owners - Wednesday, January 23, 2013
• Piers Morgan Deserves a Medal - Monday, December 24, 2012
• The Red Devil and the Blue Devil? - Tuesday, October 30, 2012
• Is the new TV show, REVOLUTION, fantasy? - Wednesday, September 26, 2012
• Fanatical Moslems Aren't That Different From Our Fanatics - Wednesday, September 12, 2012
• We Need the United Nations - Wednesday, July 18, 2012
• Stop Catering to People's Basest Instincts - Monday, July 09, 2012
• Concerned Women for America political ad - Saturday, June 23, 2012
• Independent Voters Need to Pick a Side - Monday, June 11, 2012
• Romney's Solyndra Appearance - Friday, June 01, 2012
• Single Issue Voters - Sunday, May 20, 2012
• Bully or Sociopath? - Saturday, May 12, 2012
• Tan-orexic Woman Poor Role Model - Friday, May 04, 2012
• So Far Right They're Almost Left - Sunday, April 22, 2012
• Dog Eat Dog - Sunday, April 15, 2012
• The Tea Party is Back! - Sunday, March 25, 2012
• Gas Prices - Tuesday, March 13, 2012
• "Doofus" - Tuesday, March 06, 2012
• Bon Iver Front Man Makes Important Statement - Thursday, February 16, 2012
• Contraception Blowback - Friday, February 10, 2012
• 800 vetoes! - Saturday, February 04, 2012
• Issa Hounding Holder over GOP program - Thursday, February 02, 2012
• Rick Santelli's Rant - Wednesday, January 18, 2012
• Corporate Raider President? - Thursday, December 01, 2011
• Is This the Best They Can Do? - Thursday, November 17, 2011
• Tea Party a non-violent Movement? - Sunday, October 30, 2011
• Wall Street Protests - Wednesday, October 05, 2011
• Three new stooges - Thursday, August 25, 2011
• Hypocrite enters the race - Friday, August 19, 2011
• Business Leaders Need to Speak Out - Saturday, July 30, 2011
• Rupert Murdoch and GOP Credibility - Monday, July 25, 2011
• Playing on the railroad tracks - Sunday, July 17, 2011
• Scapegoating - Sunday, June 19, 2011
• The Biggest Swindle in US history - Friday, June 03, 2011
• We're Still Here! - Saturday, May 21, 2011
• Improve education by improving teacher morale - Wednesday, May 04, 2011
• Tea Partiers Don't Know What They're Talking About - Thursday, April 28, 2011
• General Electric paid no corporate taxes - Tuesday, April 05, 2011
• The Flat Earth Society is at it again! - Thursday, March 17, 2011
• Crap fest - Thursday, March 03, 2011
• Egyptian Revolution - Tuesday, February 08, 2011
• Tucson - Wednesday, January 12, 2011
• Would you want a right-winger for a neighbor? - Friday, January 07, 2011
• Noah's Ark Museum - Monday, December 06, 2010
• Frick and Frack Shoot Off Their Mouths - Friday, November 05, 2010
• Enthusiam Gap - Wednesday, October 27, 2010
• Super Computer - Tuesday, October 19, 2010
• US Chamber of Commerce, conservative front group. - Wednesday, October 13, 2010
• 13 Reasons to vote the straight democratic ticket - Wednesday, September 01, 2010
• Breitbart Makes Segretti look like a choirboy - Wednesday, July 28, 2010
• House on Fire? - Thursday, June 17, 2010
• The Blame Game - Friday, May 28, 2010
• National Prayer Day - Tuesday, May 18, 2010
• Conservative psyche (continued) - Friday, May 14, 2010
• Conservative psyche - Wednesday, May 12, 2010
• Are you smarter than a half-term governor? - Wednesday, April 14, 2010
• Rewriting History - Monday, April 05, 2010
• Fred Phelps - Friday, April 02, 2010
• Combing the Daily Newspaper - Wednesday, March 17, 2010
• Noir - Friday, November 06, 2009
• Interview with SOLDIER'S GAP author continued - Tuesday, November 03, 2009
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• SOLDIER'S GAP author answers questions. - Thursday, October 22, 2009
• Everything you always wanted to know about writing a novel - Tuesday, October 20, 2009
• Manuscript conventions - Thursday, September 10, 2009
• Revision - Monday, September 07, 2009
• Dialogue - Thursday, September 03, 2009
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• Point of view - Thursday, August 27, 2009
• Plot - Tuesday, August 25, 2009
• Arnie's dream - Friday, August 21, 2009
• Rituals - Thursday, August 20, 2009
• Dressing Arnie Vogel - Tuesday, August 18, 2009
• Character sketch continued - Friday, August 14, 2009
• Character sketch - Thursday, August 13, 2009
• Characterization - Wednesday, August 12, 2009
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• Warm-up activity - Freewriting - Monday, August 10, 2009
• Warm-up activity - brainstorming - Sunday, August 09, 2009
• Warm-up techniques (clustering) - Saturday, August 08, 2009
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