Rectification???

More incredible news from the world of academia from your undercover, albeit aged, reporter! In my history class yesterday we had a discussion about a book we were assigned to read. It was a 350-page treatise on the American government's attempt to educate, and so "civilize" (quotation marks are the author's) the conquered Native Americans in the late 1800s. We all agreed that the author was obviously biased against this effort (secretly I thought he used the issue as a platform to bash America) and we all enjoyed reading the book (I did like it apart from all the silliness). But here's the incredible news. The teacher and students took it for granted that it's okay -- no, RIGHT, to exaggerate, no, LIE, in order to clean up, or rectify, all the "garbage" (quotations marks mine) that has been touted as truth in the past. The teacher explained it to us by using a few metaphors. If a piece of steel is bent the wrong way, you have to bend it way past its correct shape to balance it out so it can someday return to its correct shape. And then there was the driving in snow metaphor. When you're sliding you have to sharply overcorrect so that the car comes to straighten itself out. Hmm. As far as I know, both these metaphors sound kooky. That's not how steel behaves. You have to pound it out right, not bend it equally wrong. And that's not how to get your car to go straight. In fact, you have to steer not in the opposite direction but in the direction you're sliding in order to straighten it out. But I suppose my professor thought he sounded clever. As I said, the whole exercise was to show that because White Anglo-Saxon Protestant males wrote so much biased history, today's enlightened intelligentsia has the duty to overcorrect it through any means they deem necessary, such as more (and even worse?) lies and exaggerations. He introduced this whole idea by referring to a "lesbian" woman (quote marks mine) who refuted WASP male history of the wild west by writing an extremely graphic lesbian version. (The work is not worth mentioning by name.) Of course it's all crazy and exaggerated, admitted my prof.. "but this is what is necessary in order to train us to think fairly." Scary.

I was also told that among the scholarly elite it is considered perfectly fine to write inflammatory books for the sole purpose of making a name for yourself, in fact it's the only way. In other words, for these people lying helps everybody; it's necessary for the greater good and beneficial for certain "important" individuals. At least among themselves, liberals admit it: they like lying. Depending on your point of view, two wrongs can make a right.

And that's not all. I was also taught that Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin ("Have you read it, Janice?" ) was THE EXACT SAME as history books. Apparently, it doesn't matter that Stowe's attempt to call attention to a social ill was FICTION, as in a work of art, while scholarly works are NONFICTION, which supposedly include credible citations to back up facts. It's incredible. These people cannot tell fact from fiction.

We had to write a paper on the book. I tried to do the assignment correctly while keeping a semblance of true principles intact, at least between the lines. Wonder what I'll get . . .