My Dad gave my Nephew the new Rush Limbaugh book, “Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims”, for his birthday this past weekend. My nephew was not impressed with the gift but that didn’t stop my Dad from giving him a hard sell on the book. It sounded to me like it was a very carefully scripted speech that he heard on the radio.
“You need to read this book as soon as you can. I bet you could read it in a weekend if you really put your mind to it. This book will teach you many important things like what Liberty and Freedom mean and it’s just a fun way to learn about our founding fathers. And then, after you finish the book you should go to your teacher and ask if you can do a book report and present this to your class so they can learn those things too.”
After I got home I looked up the book and saw a transcript of when Rush was selling it on his show. He claims it’s “non partisan” and yet a line he quotes from the book is “One if by land, Two if by Tea”. Ugh. Rush claims that this book is designed to teach history to kids that aren’t learning history correctly in school. I have no doubt this book is presenting a heavily biased version of history but I’m wondering to what extent he’s revising the stories he’s telling. He claims he’s trying to highlight “exceptional” Americans and that it is a direct challenge to Obama’s message that “exceptional” Americans are few and far between (this is Rush’s interpretation, not mine).
So have any of you read it yet? Is it at least entertaining or is it the Republican version of a chick tract? Neither my brother nor I are Republicans anymore so I know my brother isn’t going to push that my nephew read the book but I’m curious what the actual message is.
Haven’t seen it (and won’t) but I’ve heard Rush plugging it nonstop and the whole concept sort of amuses me. From my memory of grade school and what I saw from my son’s time there, 85% of US History at that level is jingoistic mythology anyway. I swear, my kid managed to pick up on “George Washington cut down a cherry tree and said ‘I can not tell a lie’” from school.
So despite grade school history being “Pilgrims came here because no one would let them worship God back home but in America they totally could” and “The Founding Fathers were mad because the British taxed them too much and didn’t let them have representatives so they threw tea into the harbor and fought off the British because… freedom”, you still have people out there convinced that there’s some liberal indoctrination that can only be stopped with conservative-slanted children’s books teaching “real” history.
I was an adult before I knew that the Pilgrims came here to escape religious oppression. We were just told that “they couldn’t do what they wanted.” We’d reply, “Well, we can’t do what we want, either, but we’re not going to get in a rickety old boat and sail across the ocean.”
Note that for all that Rush Limbaugh and others claim to be fighting a “war on Christmas” those same Pilgrims absolutely would not observe Christmas. They even worked on that day. Their theory, as I understand it, was that Christmas isn’t really mentioned in the Bible, so they didn’t recognize it.
That’s the advantage of historical fiction - an author can make his characters think and say whatever he wants them to. He can accentuate a persons positive traits and characteristics while completely hiding the less politically correct values. I fear Rush is using historical mouthpieces to regurgitate his own message. The end result will be that Rush validates his viewpoint by proving that he’s exactly in line with the Founding Fathers - neglecting the fact that the version of the Founding Fathers he agrees with are more or less his own creation.
As you guys have mentioned I fear he’s going to say people wanted a “Republican” way of life and came to this land to fight for it. In so doing I’d expect him to gloss over the details about just what those freedoms are that people were looking for and that when we curtail personal freedoms today it makes him look like a hypocrite. You can’t edify a group of people who stood against the status quot of one country to find freedom in another while at the same time lambasting those in this country who seek personal freedoms that are opposed to the Republican status quot.
Amazon has a “Look Inside!” for the book. As far as I can see, it’s typical elementary school history. I guess Rush is just selling that librulz are teaching our kids horrible history without providing any evidence that it’s so.
My previous post undoubtedly reflects my own bias towards Limbaugh and makes assumptions about what the book says. I rushed to judge without any actual facts. I do hope the books are just an attempt to get kids excited about history by introducing them to historical figures - I’m just wary given the source.
