Last night my son asked me to read him 'Twas the Night Before Christmas' in all its picture-book glory. About halfway through his eyes lit up: "Santa's smoking a pipe?" There is was, the next three pages in all its glory...'ol Saint Nick puffing away. It doesn't matter if it's tobacco, marijuana, peyote...Santa Claus smokes. And through the entire story, this was the only thing that Jacob made comment about, except for another picture of the reindeer flying away that he really liked.
Of course it's an old book, an old story. But this got me to thinking about how we have somehow expunged dear old Santa's nasty lung-destroying habit of smoking in the years since this book was published. Yes, Santa still has issues with his weight (i.e., he's fat), and the fact that he wears a red suit and loves the little children is something that causes us today to pause. But smoking? No way...we surely don't want to expose our children to that. And so we've re-written history to smooth over some of the rough edges about the old man.
Revisionist history happens all over the place. Albert Spalding spent much of his life perpetuating the myth that baseball (which had nothing to do with cricket, rounders, or any other fay 'English' game, he championed) was invented by a future Civil War general in the village of Cooperstown, NY to the point that this is now where the game's hall of fame is located. James Loewen has written several powerful books about history has been distorted time and again in the name of ideological purity: we teach our children history that is designed to make them good patriots rather than informed citizens, and former confederates put up Civil War monuments all over the south (and some of the north, too) to glorify the Cause.
Sometimes it happens in not-so-ancient history. That Barack Obama admitted that some of the foreign policy of his predecessors was wrong and needed to be repudiated was turned into the historical fiction of an 'apology tour' by his critics who were more interested in setting a future agenda than they were recognizing the mistakes of the past. History is not just written by the winners, but also the whiners.
And so this leads us to today, December 21, 2012. Supposedly this was the day that the world was going to end, according to the Mayan calendar. Or at least this is what we've been told again and again and again. Still have about thirteen hours left here in the central standard time zone, but I'm not holding my breath.
Why is it that so many people are freaking out about this (about 10% of people worldwide, so I've heard)? Because they are historically naive, and they can't tell the difference between truth and agenda. Whether it's media seeking to sell newspapers (or, more likely, attract eyeballs on the internet) by irresponsible reporting, or the diminishing John Cusack seeking to sell a movie by a convoluted idea, some people will believe just about anything, no matter how foolish, no matter how stupid. They believe this because they don't dig into the thorny issues of history. They'd rather believe a linear history with a good moral principle than try to juggle the ambiguity that most history presents. And so they believe that the world will end today, that baseball was invented by Doubleday, or that the Civil War was about everything else besides slavery.
It's not just that those who don't learn the lessons from history are doomed to repeat it...it's that people too lazy to go and look past the hijacking of history will continue to believe myths in the future.
