Right Wing Revisionism Gone Wild:

History is a strange and wonderful thing. See, there's a couple of kinds of history. One history is an honest history, one that says, "Look and see, warts and all, this is what happened." That kind of history can embrace dichotomy. It can say that Thomas Jefferson was a slavemaster who fucked one of his slaves on a regular basis and he was a great advocate of freedom and liberty. Look at that statement - isn't that fucking fascinating? Isn't it incredibly human? Doesn't that kind of contradiction seem so real? Aren't the implications amazing? Doesn't it say something breathtaking about ourselves and our country?



Another kind of history is the stories we tell in order to suit our own purposes. It is a purposeful kind of historical amnesia or myth-making. It's the kind of history that, depending on your purposes, leaves out one side or the other of Thomas Jefferson's story. He's either slavefucker or freedom lover. It is reductionist. It is myopic. It ignores the historical records - the extant documents and narratives from the time period that would seem to offer a kind of reality. And in many cases, it is bullshit in that, more often than not, it serves nationalist purposes. It's why so many people got pissed off that we would dare bring out the slavefucker story.



A version of this kind of history is in action right now as the right wing of America attempts to revise the past. This approach says that, "No, what you think happened didn't happen. It happened this way." And it tells that version of events so often that it becomes the version, whether or not it's true. The Swift Boat Vets allegations are a good example. Every single record supports John Kerry's "version of events." Every single person who was there, on his boat, supports John Kerry's "version of events." But, with a complicitous media, up has become down and that shrapnel in Kerry's leg has become a pussy injury. The fact that we actually have in our consciousness to question Kerry's record is proof of the success of the revisionist approach. Even though not a single shred of actual, real proof has been given beyond the mad rantings of the Swift Boat Vets.



While so many people try to say that the two issues are equally balanced, the questions of George Bush's service record are not, in any qualitative way, similar. In fact, except for the words "military" and "Vietnam," they are two entirely different issues. With John Kerry, the attempt was to create a new narrative, one that would overtake the old, accepted, documented narrative. With Bush, the attempt is to try to find out what happened. To fill in a gap that has not been explained. Nothing has been offered that proves Bush fulfilled his duties to the Texas Air National Guard. Not one record. Not one shred of a document. This is not an effort to revise anything. It is an effort to tell the story. It is an effort to counter spoken lies. In fact, everything so far backs up this narrative: George Bush bailed on the Air National Guard when his duties became inconvenient to him. The cool thing about it is we on the left don't have to revise anything. The truth is such a fuckin' killer. We're actually trying to prevent the revision.



But historical revisionism is in frantic mode now with the Bush campaign. When Dick Cheney oozed onto his stool at a "meeting" in Des Moines and slurped out these words, "It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States," Cheney was counting on a short-term memory loss from the good brainless suckers supporting him in Iowa. You have to forget WMDs, Iraq/al-Qaeda connections, terror alerts gone wild, seven minutes in Florida, 1000 dead, a massive increase in terrorism around the world, and so, so much in order to even begin to buy what the shit Cheney's slinging. Revise, man, revise.



The answer to Cheney's threat is this: if you had any doubts in your mind, at any point, about the leadership of George Bush at any point in the last four years, if you thought he made decisions that favored the interests of the few over the interests of the many, if you thought he made the wrong moves regarding terrorists, then ask yourself this horrible, stomach-churning question: What do you think George Bush will do when he doesn't have to worry about being re-elected? What will he do when there is no way to hold him accountable?



History is a cruel mistress. You try to fuck her into lovin' you, and she'll turn around and bite your cock off. The truth, or some variation on it, always comes out. Now, what side of history do you wanna be on?