I must confess that I am still something of a newshound. I guess it’s because I grew up in the age of Watergate and wanted to be just like Woodward and Bernstein. So I majored in journalism.
The only problem was that I found that there was no glamour to be found in a typical newsroom. When I served my internship at the Renton Record Chronicle, I thought I would change the world. Instead, I spent the morning rewriting press releases. That’s what all the reporters did in the morning. You sifted through a big stack of news releases, looking not for the ones that were newsworthy, but for the ones that required the least rewriting. Those are the ones that became “news” the next day. Boy, did that burst a bubble. None of the reporters ever went out on assignment. They just made phone calls. I had to beg to do go out in the field.
So, long story short, I learned that journalists were full of crap. They hide behind their “objectivity” when they aren’t really objective at all. They all have something to sell, whether it’s based on their own agenda or that of the publisher. At least in public relations, you don’t have to pretend you’re objective, plus it pays a lot better.
But I still watch and follow the news daily. And I’ve noticed trends recently that really kind of bother me. As we all know, FOX News is unapologetically to the right, MSNBC is to the left and everyone else falls somewhere roughly in the middle, leaning a bit to the left or right of center. And they are all selling their point of view.
Which leads me to Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann and the Tea Party. Now, stick with me for a moment. I don’t care about the particulars of their agenda… I’m pretty much politically agnostic. But I do see a trend that frightens me – and that is the rewriting of history in the guise of newly discovered fact.
Case in point. Glenn Beck’s revision of history. He says FDR created the Great Depression. That Teddy Roosevelt was a socialist, Joe McCarthy, yes that Joe McCarthy, was a hero who was set up by the liberals and Jamestown was socialist commune. Fantastic stuff indeed, but there is at least one school district in Texas ready to adapt this version of history.
Then there’s the total idiot, Rep. Michele Bachmann. She was recently quoted as saying that slavery was solved by the founding fathers, not by the Civil War. In her revisionist mind, the founding fathers were infallible and couldn’t possibly have had slaves, even though you can see Thomas Jefferson’s slave quarters at Mount Vernon to this day.
And I quote this directly from her speech in Iowa this past week: “…men like John Quincy Adams” — the son of a founder — “who would not rest until slavery was extinguished in the country.”
Maybe in her mind those slave quarters at Monticello were vacation villas and the Amistad was nothing more than a cruise ship catering to the African American crowd.
And then it suddenly dawns on me what they’re really selling. They want us to believe the Civil War was about state’s rights and that our founding fathers thought they created a perfect Union that never needed to be updated. It didn’t need to have an amendment giving women the right to vote or the 13th Amendment finally ending slavery… the country was perfect from the very start and all we really needed all along was the right to free speech and the right to bear arms.
I don’t quibble with these two rights, mind you. I celebrate them in fact. What I quibble with is the glossing over of our history to pretend that our nation has never had its ugly moments. That anyone in this country could be anything they wanted to be since 1776. That there was no slavery. No Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 or the fact that we took all the property from Japanese Americans in WWII and put these Americans in concentration camps. There were obviously no lynchings in the South, or separate water fountains for “coloreds” only.
Give me a frickin’ break!
This repackaging of history is downright dangerous. It’s the same mentality that questions whether the Holocaust ever happened. These folks are selling something and it’s hatred and it’s divisiveness wrapped up in a pretty package or red, white and blue where we just need to go back to the basics in America and everything will be sunshine and lollypops.
I know enough from my own education in journalism that someone is always selling something. That’s how pundits make a living, I get it. Journalists aren’t really objective. They have bosses and they have to please the bosses. Fine.
But it really concerns me when the people who are elected to office have a viewpoint to sell that divides us through mistruths, false accusations and boldface lies. An elected official by their very mandate has to represent all the people, not just those in their respective party. But yet, certain segments of our system are skewing reality to suit their own self interests. It reminds me of the McCarthy era: Tell a lie long enough and loud enough and it will eventually become the truth. And when all else fails, start pointing fingers.
And in the process, these master manipulators are engaging in one of the most diabolical methods of controlling minds — rewriting history to their own liking, sanitizing and demonizing at will to create a country they want us to have (or the people that line their pockets), not a country “by the people, for the people.”
Watch the snake oil salesmen out there. They aren’t selling you a cure. They’re selling you a disease.
Somewhere in Florida trying to remember where I put my musket,
— Robb