Medicating National Amnesia

 THE UNITED STATES OF AMNESIA is as determined as any country in human history to fabricate a falsw history of itself, and spoon feed it to its unsuspecting children. Phony fabricated history, written by patriotic people to make their country look better than it is, is called "hagiography", rather than "history". American society has displayed a high level of self deception from its very beginning. At Jamestown, for instance, the settlers knew full well that they were looking for slaves, gold, and silver, not religious freedom or to spread Christian civilization unto all the world, replacing savagery with goodness. American hagiography has largely served its main purpose, to reconcile the savagery and violence inherent with the creation and development of the United States with Christian values or at least decent, civilized values. It hasn't always been easy. Yet, to an amazing extent, American society has been successful brainwashing away its collective guilt, and replacing it with arrogance, and proud delusion. Thus we celebrated the courageous explorer and seeker of knowledge, Columbus, the spread of superior civilization by intrepid pioneers, the civilizing of native American savages and African savages. The glorious white European Christians, our heroes.Brave pilgrims and pioneers fighting the forces of darkness on behalf of religious freedom, the work ethnic, Christ, and the American way. America, the land of freedom and liberty. Finally, beginning tentatively in the seventies, a few brave intrepid liberals started trying to inject a modicum of truth into american history.The attempt was accepted, respected, and understood by enough educated people to become fairly widespread, which inevitably aroused the wrath of conservative, Christian, patriotic American hagiographs, who prefer pleasant fiction to harsh fact. Now, this bizarre incarnation of American 'conservatism" called "the Trump movement" is striving to eliminate honest history and to bring back hagiography into American classrooms. American historians must once again make American history good, noble, and glorious, or else. Make America Great Again, by lying about it. we must stop teaching children that slavery and racism were and are very bad things that white Christian people did to black people, and we must now adopt a more 'balanced" approach,  dispersing and making blame disappear. State legislatures in red states are close to legislating all history out of the history textbooks which make the Untied States look less than glorious. Our conservative colleagues feel a bit too "uncomfortable". American history teachers have always been subjected to punishment for telling the truth, about the "founding fathers" for instance, most of whom were distinctly non christian in their personal religious beliefs. They were "deists", which is closer to atheism than traditional Christianity. We seem destined to returning to the old hagiography in which the Civil War was fought for state's rights, rather than over slavery. Happy days are here again!