On distortions of history

People ask me, “How do you get your ideas? Issue after issue, there’s ‘The Old Olivetti’ like clock-work.” The short answer is that I don’t get ideas, I just turn on the machine and start typing. Ollie does the rest. Other people say, “Don’t you have a computer? Do you really use an old electric typewriter? How do you correspond with your editor?” The answers are “no” “yes” and “by carrier pigeon, sometimes by phone.” Then they usually look at me oddly and question the carrier pigeon part. “Nu, so what‘s not to believe?” I ask. “Well, you gotta admit, they rejoinder, carrier pigeons in this day and age are a bit archaic, almost anachronistic, virtually Luddite.” So, “Yes,” I admit, but ask, “So what?” “So why not come live in the modern age?”

Live in the modern age? When I’m not being a shaper of opinion (usually my own) I‘m an historian. “The modern age” is like a stream. Go stand in the river, drop a feather at your feet, feel the water flow by you. By the time you‘ve gotten over your numbness, that feather is out of sight, beyond the bend or simply beyond sight. You have been left behind. Live with it; you’ll never catch up. What’s so great about the modern age? It's already someone’s past. It’s the past that is permanence, no matter how people pervert it. Things happened. Along come historians who try to tell what it was and understand it, impart meaning to it; along come exploiters who either twist it, deny it or make it up.

It’s twisted by Bush who makes Kerry (the war hero) the villain while he (the shirker) emerges conquering hero.

It’s denied by the likes of David Irving, David Duke, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Neturei Karta. Whos Neturei Karta?” You ask? It’s not a who, it’s a what, and don’t ask. It is a group of self-proclaimed “Guardians of the City” a small but vocal Chassidic band of Shabbas-protecting rock-throwing brothers who believe that the establishment of a Jewish national home without divine authorization is a shanda! Members don’t exactly deny that the holocaust happened, but they do deplore using it as an opportunity to create the State of Israel which they see as “a poison, threatening true Jews” and they pray “that the underlying cause of strife and bloodshed in the Middle east, namely the state knows as Israel, be totally and peacefully dissolved.” So much for a two-state solution. Oh, and the Holocaust was the divine will. “The Zionists,” their spokesperson told the Tehran anti-Holocaust conference, “with their secular pompous approach behave in complete opposition to this philosophy and dare to say ‘Never Again.’ They have the audacity to think that they can prevent the Almighty from repeating a Holocaust. This is heresy.” Nu, so call me a heretic. Can we arrange for a steel cage grudge match between these fellows and those other religious zealots who want to tear down the Dome of the Rock to build the Third Temple? I'd pay money to see that show of piety.

Then there are those who make up history. Parson Mason Weems comes to mind. Do you know of him? Johnny-on-the-spot, when George Washington died, he published “A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits of General George Washington” which is as close to fictionalized hagiography imposed on the American public until the more recent exploits of Karl Rove. “I cannot tell a lie, I cut down the cherry tree” Washington, or Weems? Weems. Washington praying on his knees in the woods at Valley Forge? Weems, not Washington. Washington asking all to leave his death bed, praying, lifting his feet onto the bed and gently expiring, his soul lifted up to heaven? Weems. In an op-ed piece in a recent New York Times I was reminded of the fact that Washington illegally claimed land west of the line the Brits said should be reserved to the Indians, fought a war to invalidate British land policies hemming in the settlers (amongst other things) and then protested when squatters squatted on his land now legally his. (Not Weems.)

So I use an old Olivetti and carrier pigeons. It’s more honest that way. Oh, wait, a bird just few into the coop bearing a message. It’s from fearless editor. Let me read it. “Josh: Stop telling people we correspond by pigeon; it’s a lie.”