Editor’s note: This column appears in The Park Record’s 2010 April Fool’s edition.
You can’t make this stuff up! The hits just keep on coming!
Following their recent reprioritization of historic personages and events within their newly revised textbooks, the Texas State Board of Education has now released Phase II in an attempt to skewer the stranglehold the “left” has long held over education in their state.
Phase I, of course, had them whacking Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, César Chávez, Edward Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln, while upgrading the profiles of Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly and the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Such left-wing lingo as “Title IX” and “affirmative action” also felt the editor’s wrath.
Thomas Jefferson, whoever he was, also got clobbered by a bit by collateral damage in these sweeping textbook revisions. His role as a founder of our country has been placed on a much lower shelf than previous. Something about his involvement in constructing the legal theory of separation of church and state.
All is not lost, however. In Jefferson’s stead, Texans get Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin, among others. Who needs the guy who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom in their history books when medieval philosophers and Puritan theologians are available? What’s wrong — wasn’t anybody answering the door at the Flat-Earth Society?
Then there was the placing of heavy emphasis upon the conservative right’s gospel that the founding fathers were guided strictly by faith-based Christian dogma, a concept long debunked in the academic community. And, of course, Latinos and most other non-white minorities have all but disappeared from this “correction” to the record.
The subtext to all this, however, resonates far beyond the Red River and the Rio Grande. With Texas being one of the nation’s largest purchasers of textbooks, it wields influence far beyond its borders or demographics.
With most states allowing local school boards to select their own texts, Texas, with its statewide mandate, is obviously a prime mover and shaker. Publishers, as one would rightly expect, would rather print consensus editions and the upshot of all this could be rising costs and fewer options involving content. But such is life in the ever-evolving post-fact society we live in.
But nothing could have adequately prepared those lurking around this issue for the dropping of the other shoe, the arrival of “Phase II.” For starters, all Hispanic surnames have been replaced on the rolls of Alamo defenders with names like Bush and Cheney and Rove. It even turns out that Enron’s backroom deregulation deal with Dubya had God’s blessing.
It’s also evident in the new history that the indictment of Rep. Tom Delay (R-Texas) for fundraising fraud was politically motivated as he had so righteously insisted all along. According to a source close to the investigation, those who framed the good congressman also had ties to the assorted fabrications involved in that supreme concoction against the “right” known as the “holocaust.”
One of my favorite rewrites of Texas glories past, however, has to be those concerning the events surrounding Billy Sol Estes and his bilking of the USDA out of $21 million for growing and storing nonexistent crops of cotton back in the early 1960s.
After federal agricultural agent Henry Marshall was selected to investigate the faulty transfers of cotton allotments and recommended tighter controls as a means of reducing further scams, he would be found dead next to his truck with his rifle beside him.
In what seemed a bit off-kilter, even by Texas standards, it was decreed that he had committed suicide by shooting himself five time with his own rifle. Of course, there were no photos or blood samples or fingerprints taken from the scene to dispute the findings.
The new Texas-Board-of-Education-approved revisionist history textbook equates these quite perplexing facts as being similar in scope to the “water-and-wine” and “raising-of-the-dead” episodes from the Bible. It is quite simply a mystery, and we must have faith that God’s hand was involved. Just as they see Willie Nelson and the Austin scene as, quite obviously, the devil’s work.
In the aftermath of the Texas textbook affair, rumors have been circulating locally that the Park City Board of Education, possibly as a means of achieving some kind of geographic balance, is pondering the introduction of Howard Zinn’s iconic “A People’s History of the United States” into their curriculum for next school year.
It’s like I said. You can’t make this stuff up. Well, maybe some of it.
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and a free-lance writer with a background in commercial and community radio, among other pursuits. He has been a columnist and feature writer for various Park City publications going back to 1973.