One reason that taking a narrow, peculiarly selective, view of history is objectionable is that there are people who assume the degree to which attention is given to a think is a valid indicator–in fact, possibly the only indicator–of its veracity or worth.
There are people–I’ve actually known plenty of them–who assume that recording artists, actors, etc., must be of high merit merely because their works sell well or they are lavished a good deal of attention in the popular press. I used to work with an otherwise rational-seeming man who despised the CBS AM radio affiliate in St. Louis; every morning at work he would rant about what a bunch of vapid idiots their on-air staff were, and talk about how inane they had sounded that morning as he drove into work.
He didn’t car pool. I finally asked him once why he listened to the station if he disliked it so much, and he said it was because it was the Number 1 station in the region. That is, he thought he was “supposed to” because it was popular.
Some years ago the late, lamented Spy magazine took a poll to find out how many people cared about such well-known celebrities as Madonna. The poll results suggested that most people considered her, and news about her, to be a bore. Yet she kep turning up on magazine covers, and continues to do so. I would suggest that this is partly because a good proportion of the people who regularly read publications such as People or The National Enquirer do so becuase they think they are supposed to, and they think they are supposed to believe people such as Madonna are interesting and important.
Similarly, I have been told by an acquaintance that USA Today is an “important” paper in the same sense as, say, The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, merely because it has such a large circulation. I still remember a conversation some friends of mine and I had with a classmate back in high school in which we tried to convince him that just because The Bay City Rollers were said to be the biggest band in Great Britain at the time didn’t mean that we had to listen to them if we had a choice. It was kind of like one of those interventions the friends of an alcaholic stage.
While argumably this kind of silly behavior doesn’t matter much when all that is at issue is pop culture, there ought to be better ways of forming opinions about history and one’s place in it than which persons and events get the most space in an at times highly distorted high school American History text. Or, for that matter, which stories get the most air time.
Tonight, while searching the Net on another subject, I stumbled on a long-winded rant by a commentator suggesting that the Amistad story amounted to a hoax. His reason? That he had never heard of it before the Steven Spielberg movie. He finally concluded that it had really happened, but that it was not interesting or important. His reason? That it had not gotten much mention in history textbooks until recent times.
The possiblity that this amounted to the correcting of a mistake, or that the omission of stories such as the Amistad from curricula was a product of long-standing ignorance and prejudice, did not seem worth considering to him. Amusingly enough, he concluded with a rant about “political correctness”. Time and again it has been my observation that “political correctness” merely means a deviation from longstanding dogmatism, the suggestion being that the prejudices of the past, by definition, must be the right ones.
This past Saturday it fell to me to wait in a store for several hours while CNN Headline News played on a monitor. A story about how bean bag chairs had been found in an apartment owned by Saddam Hussein was reported far more often, and at far greater length, than the news that the American Red Cross had entered a tentative agreement with the federal government to pay fines for having intentionally violated health standards, and to have forged records besides, in its blood collection program for seventeen years. Be assured there are people who are going to believe that the Saddam story is more important, and have it make a greater impression on them, because it received more air time.
When Ferdinand Marcos was removed from power in The Philippines a woman called a phone-in show on KMOX-AM, the CBS station I mentioned before. Marcos ouster was getting the kind of headline news coverage given Saddam’s bean bag chairs. She was livid that the mass media was now suggesting that Marcos had been a corrupt tyrant. She said that could not be true. If it was, she would have heard about it before.
Any person in the U.S. with access to television, a radio, or newspapers had, of course, been capable of finding out about Marcos on their own for years. I suspect what she meant was that if it was true, it would have been given the same attention that the press has since given, for instance, to Madonna.
One wonders if the fact that Marcos was a crook, and was shored up for years by the U.S., will get much play in American History books in the future.
[sup]I always thought May Day was about virgins dancing around a phallic symbol.[/sup][/ul]