history rewrite,
America: A Patriotic Primer, anyway? He kept dragging his butt to classroom after classroom, probably finding the companionship there so much easier to understand, showing kids the new right-wing take on history:
Even got that nice Governor Perry busting his butt doing it, too.Published on Wednesday, July 3, 2002 in the Austin American-Statesman
Lynne Cheney's Primer: G is for Gloss Over
by Robert Jensen
This Fourth of July, many American parents will no doubt be reading Lynne Cheney's alphabet book, America: A Patriotic Primer, to their children.
If kids pay close attention they will learn a lot, but unfortunately it will be a lesson in obfuscation and distortion. Cheney --the wife of the vice president, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and a noted conservative intellectual -- offers a whitewashed version of U.S. history that is morally and intellectually offensive.
Note, for example, the letter T, for tolerance: "Free to think and believe and pursue happiness in our own way, we recognize the right of others to do the same." No argument with that sentiment; I'm all for tolerance.
But skip back a few pages, to the letter N, "for Native Americans, who came here first," on a page adorned with drawings of American Indian notables and names of tribes.
Even allowing for the fact that it is an illustrated children's book and not a detailed history, her N page leaves out some rather significant facts that could be easily summarized. Yes, the Native Americans came here first. Then the Europeans came. Then the Europeans killed almost all the Native Americans and took almost all the land.
I suppose one could claim that the Europeans were T-is-for-tolerant of the Native Americans, at least tolerant of those who accepted less-than-human status and did what they were told. American Indians were free to think and believe and pursue happiness in their own way, so long as they got out of the way of the white folks who wanted the land and resources.
And along the way, those white folks carried out the one of the most successful genocides in recorded human history. Depending on the size of the indigenous population in North America at the time of Columbus' arrival (12 million is a conservative estimate), 98 to 99 percent of that population was dead by the end of the 19th century.
More:
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0703-07.htmA few Amazon customer reviews of her "book:"
http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:k8egJ2N4HEMJ:www.amazon.com/review/product/0689851928%3FfilterBy%3DaddOneStar%26pageNumber%3D2+America:+A+Patriotic+Primer+Lynne+Cheney+rewrite+history&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=usFascists truly are the pits. True deviants. Liars. Scum.