Why not tell the truth...

RUSH LIMBAUGH,the famed radio talker, has a new book out, written for children, providing a purely conservative, (meaning "hagiographic", or, history written so as to make the subject look good) pro-american version of early american history. Rush, like just about all conservatives, has somehow gotten the idea that the teaching of american history to american schoolchildren has gone to hell in a handbasket, becausse, according to said conservatives, teaches too much revisionist, negative history, and no longer tells the truth, ther truth being, namely, that american history is the great story of a great nation, pure and simple. The westward expansion of the unites states is a litany of courage, of brave, virtuous wilderness taming pioneers. Increasingly frequently, american public school history teachers make mention that this brave pioneering westward american expansion was in fact genocide visited upon the natives. Traditional hagiographic history never brought that up; presumably the student was always perfectly free to figure it out for him or her self. For a long time after the end of world war two americans taught their children that the perfidious unprovoked sneak attack at pearl harbor resulted in the atomic bombs being dropped by the united states. Nowadays, here and there, there are a few intrepid teachers who have the nerve to suggest thea FDR may have encouraged the attack on pearl harbor, and a few teachers have even pointed out that the atomics bombs were dropped after the war was already over. The most natural thing in the world is for a historian to write hagiography about his own country. We all love our country. And that's exactly what's been going on in american historiography for two hundred years, and jsut when we have started to get away from it a little tiny bit, and started telling the well balanced truth about our past, a bit, here come the neo conservatives wanting to go back to our old hagiographic ways, because it comforts them. Geez. The real american history is not sufficiently negative to make us all look bad. It a mixture, a balance, of achievement, and mistakes, like all human behavior. We are strong enough to deal with the truth. Why not tell it?