The Lions Of Texas?

All history, being subject to the foibles, subjectivity, and even lack of substantive knowledge of the given historian, is a flawed description of reality. This is where competent peer review should come into the picture. Even the exact sciences are a flawed description of reality (albeit — we hope — closer than the humanities: Newton's physics was also a flawed picture, but it was closer to ascertainable reality than the Ptolemaic conception). That stipulated, a drop of water is not an ocean. The errors and subtle biases that creep into historical narrative are not the same thing as the systematic, top-down rewriting of school textbooks by politicians in pursuit of a blatant ideological agenda: the brainwashing of school children.

It is not hard to divine the intent of the Texas Board of Education, particularly as it shows that the neo-Confederate hard Right is finally dropping its mask. Heretofore, the Right had always wrapped itself in the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, the American tradition, Family Values, and all the other bugaboos of the professional patriot to try to demonstrate that they, and they alone, were the true inheritors of the mystical essence of America. Other groups simply weren't national (or nationalist) enough.

But that pretense was always a deception — perhaps unconscious on the part of the hard Right rank and file, though not its leaders. Right wing pressure groups have perpetually claimed that it was only twentieth century secular humanist liberals who "took God out of the Constitution." Likewise, they have circulated the preposterous myth that a majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were ordained ministers (in reality, a handful were). Politicized Mormons (think Glenn Beck) publicly worship the Constitution as a divinely inspired document. But, privately, the more intelligent members of the theocratic Right knew all along that these political narratives were a fig leaf. A few years ago, one of them told me privately that Jefferson and Paine were pagans foisting French Enlightenment doctrine on America.

The Right has become perceptibly more rabid in the last couple of years. They had put all their chips on Bush, hoping for the New Jerusalem, and that didn't work out. Then the anti-Christ Obama somehow got elected. That may have sent them over the edge. In those states where they are entrenched in power the Right has given us ample evidence of their agenda. In Virginia the legislature passed a bill to nullify the mandates of the federal government's prospective health care bill. Regardless of whether one thinks the health care bill good or bad, didn't Andrew Jackson settle the matter of nullification almost 180 years ago? And worse, they were attempting to nullify something which at the time of passage was not even law.

In Texas, the politicians have gone so far as to write Thomas Jefferson out of history because they have finally summoned the public courage of their private conviction that Jefferson was not a good Christian, according to their very dim lights. In doing so, they reveal a Weltanschauung broader than just a downgrading of Jefferson: they are opposed the entire conception of the United States as a commonwealth deriving its charter from the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Enlightenment sources of those instruments. Just as significant, the school board decreed the expunging of the word "democratic" from the description of the U.S. form of government, inserting in lieu thereof the term "constitutional republic." A constitutional republic can be a democracy, and vice versa (and they usually are), but the intent of the Board of Education is plain: a suggestion that democracy per se is suspect, despite the fact that that the United States evolved from a constitutional republic of limited franchise to a more democratic constitutional republic in a manner perfectly consistent with the Constitution. All extensions of the franchise were either duly enacted state laws that withstood Supreme Court review, or proper ratifications of the Constitution itself. But something about that process clearly irritates the Board of Education.

It is no coincidence that Texas' governor, Rick Perry, recently suggested secession from the Union as an answer to the evil deeds of the apostate Obama. For the neo-Confederate hard Right has never really reconciled itself to the outcome of the Civil War and the different conception of liberty and equality that ensued from that war. It is a generalization, but those regions of the country which vaunt themselves as the Real Americans Who Always Support the Troops frequently have a sentimental hankering for the Lost Cause. The Lost Cause, which they refuse to call the Civil War, was an act of treason on behalf of chattel slavery that caused the greatest effusion of blood in the Western Hemisphere in recorded history. American Patriots, indeed.

Richard Greener is a civilized man, and he makes the mistake of assuming that this unpleasant matter of rewriting text books is just a foible of one of the more backward regions of the republic, and in the long view no worse than Thucydides having acted as a sort of publicity agent for Athens. He is wrong.

First, the text books adopted by Texas are likely to get adopted by other states. Because of the inimical hatred of the big text book publishers to any actual literary or historical merit in a book they generally go with sheer volume and the lowest common denominator: that means Texas. Given the timorousness and stupidity of boards in other states they are prone to adopt whatever mental swill Texas inflicts upon its young.

Second, there are times when systematic distortion of truth is worse than some concrete civil injustice. The latter may, one can hope, be dragged before a jury, the bar of public opinion, or an investigative piece by the press. But falsification, if it is propagated and institutionalized, has a deeply corrosive and corrupting effect on our very perception of reality.

Third, the majority on the Texas Board of Education are not civilized people like Mr. Greener. They are barbarians. They will not be stopped by Mr. Greener's ambivalent relativization of the issue. These barbarians will not cease until their neo-Confederate dogma is shoved back down their throats.


* Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst.