Have we consigned history to the dust heap of history?
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Sept. 26, 2024 – The birth of America represents release from the bondage of clerics, princes, and kings that had littered civilization with the corpses of obedient peasants, soldiers of fortune, and idle bystanders.
In the sweep of history, it was the day after Gutenberg broke the monopoly on knowledge that the stink of deceit carried freedom’s pilgrims to a new home oceans away.
Literal truthies race to remind us that two centuries elapsed between the miracle of moveable type and the Mayflower’s crash landing. Well alright, but without poetic license, we’ll never get anywhere – no new story will be told, but only old bells re-rung, Nero’s fiddle re-strung, and the Crusades re-enacted, but with nukes this time.
History must not be consigned to the dust heap of history. If we allow that, then how long will it take us to cut honesty into half-truths, which always add up to whole lies?
How’s this for a festival of fibs – the head of the party of Lincoln swears tyranny is good, the nation’s secrets are his, and that good people i-d themselves with swastikas and the flag of slavery’s lost cause, the stars and bars?
It’s true, people, I saw it on a social media platform. Now there’s a clever oxymoron – social media! Why have we allowed social to be redefined by the tinhorn titans of BigTek?. In my ancient, distant youth, there was such a thing as an ice cream social. It was a casual gathering of people who knew each other from school, or church, or the neighborhood.
But a tsunami of mass communications busted social loose from voluntary gatherings of people and made it refer to solitary silos of fears and resentments, of bullies and liars and frauds, oh my.
For the idiot savant of apartheid, x marks the spot where birds once fluttered. To the idiot spawn of Fred the Nazi from Yonkers, truth is an all-caps cry not to die behind bars.
Social media platforms are the new gallows – where do you hang out?