Who Will Survive the Great Texas Textbook Rewrite?

from VF.com
Henry Rollins Straight Talk Espresso

From a letter to Thomas Jefferson written by John Adams, January 23, 1825:

Books that cannot bear examination certainly ought not to be established as divine inspiration by penal laws…. The substance and essence of Christianity as I understand it is eternal and unchangeable and will bear examination forever but it has been mixed with extraneous ingredients, which I think will not bear examination and they ought to be separated.

Perhaps the powers that be in Texas consider Thomas Jefferson an extraneous ingredient and will seek to extract our third president and other major figures in American history from their school’s textbooks. It seems that there will be a bit of revision in Texas, and I fear it will be big—as things often are in the Lone Star State.

What will be the fate of Charles Darwin and Martin Luther King after the great cleansing, I wonder? I fear for the New Deal reforms and any other bits of history that may somehow be seen as inconvenient truths to the architects of the Great Texan Rewrite. I cringe when I think that the Civil Rights movement may magically vanish from the state’s history or be seen as an uppity peasant uprising. What will become of the Emancipation Proclamation? The outcome of the Civil War?

I understand a desire for nostalgia. I still listen to records I bought as a teenager. But a return to the dim-bulb cruelty and religious fascism of the past is a little too far in the way-back machine for me. What do you bring back next, the Bubonic Plague? The Texas Witch Trials!

Poorly educated people are not an asset unless you desire citizens who cannot think critically. Now why would any state want that? If I wanted my state to secede, I would need the voters to see that it is in their best interest to detach from a nation full of infidels and unpatriotic enemies. If it were me, I would start in the schools and the books that students read.

A man born in the great state of Connecticut once said, “See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.” I am sure he will get quite the sheen in the new history books of Texas.