The truth shall set you free

"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." – Mark Twain. Or Winston Churchill.

No doubt you’ve seen it when you open your email — it’s always forwarded by the same folks, and it usually starts with a blaring headline like, "You’re not going to BELIEVE this one!!!!"

You open it, thinking, "Oh, I better open it then, maybe it’s a YouTube video of something cool like a dog shooting a rifle while riding on a horse," but you’re sorely disappointed to find that it’s a bit… political… in nature. How can you tell? Why, the first line, of course.

"OBAMA’S MUSLIM CURTAINS SHOW THAT HE IS GUN-HATING ANTICHRIST BENT ON DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA!!!!!!"

It’s all in capitals, and there’s a lot of exclamation points, because these things are exciting!

The subjects can vary, but they’re mostly about things like Jane Fonda beating American prisoners in Hanoi during the Vietnam War, Denzel Washington paying the entire cost of constructing a veterans hospital, or Obama acknowledging on video that he’s not an American citizen. (Surprise!)

Unfortunately, exciting though these stories may be, they’re not true. In fact, most aren’t even based on a kernel of truth and are entirely made up to inflame the passions of the uninformed and hopelessly gullible.

The misinformation hasn’t stopped there. Social media sites have allowed this plague to reach epidemic proportions. Think about it: how many times have you come across a meme of a Founding Father’s portrait with some political slogan plastered across it that has a hundred likes and 20 shares from those who aren’t even sure if what they’re seeing is a real quote?

Allegedly both sides of the political spectrum do this, but in my experience one side is far more willing than the other to reconstruct history via internet, and they are rarely called on it. It’s as if with the advent of the search engine, all source material has been burned, and all we have left is brainyquote.com. I’m not sure people understand how truly dangerous this sort of thing is, in that Orwellian "who controls the past, controls the future" kind of way. 

Think for a second what the power to attach your chosen phrase to anyone in history actually does — is there any more valuable tool in persuasive speaking?

Concise, witty quotes that prove a point while giving little room for retort are priceless when it comes to swaying opinions. In advertising they become catchphrases, in presidential debates, "zingers," and one need look no further than our own history to find examples of how small, quotable treatises like "Common Sense" and "The American Crisis" influenced the political discourse of the time and, by consequence, the history of the world.

That history, like a shadow dancing on the wall, is hard enough to grasp as it is because it’s cast by a candle that can be filtered and manipulated to serve this purpose or that. But if it can be blatantly rewritten like the ending of poorly done sitcom — and if we actually encourage its rewriting — how can we ever know who we are?

Think of it like this: everything we are as individuals is based on where we’re from and how we came up. It’s what our parents were like, what neighborhood we lived in, who our friends were, and what we’ve been through that shapes our personalities and, by proxy, our future. 

The nation itself is no different. The storms we’ve come through shine the light on where we are headed as a people, and to selectively change our back story is to rob the ship of its rudder.

So next time some asinine e-mail with a headline caterwauling about something that seems too ridiculous (or too good) to be true comes your way, take a second to do a little research before you hit "forward" or "share."

Go to snopes.com, or factcheck.org, type in what you just read, and see if it’s as real as the writer wants you to think it is. Consider it your civic duty, and a personal favor to all of history.

More often than not, you will be surprised what you learn.

And when in doubt, remember Abraham Lincoln’s words of wisdom: "90 percent of what you read on the Internet is BS."

Email: janoski@northjersey.com

Serious about secession? How dare you

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2012

BY  STEVE JANOSKI

Most red-blooded Americans will be the first to tell you that democracy is the best form of all governments — until their favored party loses a presidential election. Then, all bets are off on what they will say and who they will curse.

I admit that during the darkest years of the Bush administration, I may or may not have been one of those people who doubted the efficacy of the democratic process, and I may or may not have had some choice words for the 50.7 percent of the population that voted to keep that man in the Oval Office.

But even then, I thought, what can I do? It is my country’s course, for better or worse, and I knew that inevitably, the pendulum would swing once again. Until that happened, I would see things through.

Eight years and one especially bruising election later, things have changed, and it seems that a certain segment of the population is no longer willing to follow the very fine American tradition of loudly griping while occasionally screaming, "I told you so" on and off for four years.

Thousands upon thousands of these disgruntled whiners have signed a number of petitions that have been pouring into the White House, with the aim of promoting the idea that their respective states should secede — secede — because of Obama’s reelection.

I’m sure at least some of the signatures are farces, included by caustic people like me who just want to a pain in the ass; I cannot say that I have not been tempted a number of times to sign the 100,000-person petition demanding that Texas secede.

And, I daresay an even larger portion come from broke, obese southerners who, despite being on disability or Medicare or Social Security, despise the federal government every bit as much as they rely on it. The signatures of these hypocritical louts should simply be laughed at.

But the most frightening, however, are the ones who think that secession is truly not only a plausible idea, but a good one. And believe it or not, they actually exist.

After such a prolonged and brutal election season, it doesn’t surprise me that people feel disenchanted. But the fact that these sniveling cowards wish to walk the child’s path of "I’m taking my ball and going home" is pathetic beyond comprehension and a disgusting insult to every man and woman who’s fought under the American flag in the past 236 years.

The petitions illuminate an incredible failure on the part of their signers to comprehend history; this dance has been done before, with terrible consequence. Make no mistake: hinting that this nation’s sons and daughters should be forced to go through the storm of civil war again is borderline treasonous — as is advocating secession in any way.

And, perhaps most importantly, it’s a sign of absolute, utter cowardice. Every single signee who is actually advocating separation from the United State of America is a coward, and we should all be ashamed that they ever considered themselves Americans in the first place.

They are weak, worthless mice who have soiled themselves in fear and decided that flight is a better option then standing and fighting it out in our legislators’ great halls the way our Founding Fathers intended. They are an abomination to the democratic ideal, and if I had my way, signing one single petition supporting secession would eternally strip them of their right to vote, hold public office, or lay their hands on an American flag.

While trust in government may be at historic lows (and that may be warranted after the past three decades), we are still the player on the world stage, and we've attained that position because over the past two-and-a-half centuries, we've held together even in times of great trouble.

That includes our first Civil War, the graves of which should serve as stark reminders of the fires that will inevitably test nations of the truly divided.

We would be wise to heed their lessons.

Email: janoski@northjersey.com

http://www.northjersey.com/news/182308911_Serious_about_secession__How_dare_you.html

South’s Civil War hounds refuse to heel

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

BY STEVE JANOSKI

She was a middle aged woman, blonde as I recall, who wore too much makeup as if trying to hide her true age. She stood behind a desk at the Visitor's Center at whichever battlefield I, a 10 year old kid, had found on a map while on a trip through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

"Who won this battle?" I asked her.

"Oh, we did," she said with a beautiful southern drawl.

Not, "The South won," and not "The Confederates won."


No, it was, "We won"— we the South, as opposed to "YOU," the North — that's what she said. I never forgot the innocence with which she said it, or the devious meaning that lies beneath those two words.

There's no denying that there's something special about the Civil War that draws the American public to it.

I've been reading voraciously about this war since I was little and I'm not the only one; the Civil War section is undoubtedly one of the largest in the bookstore, especially impressive considering that the war lasted only four years.

Whether it was the "brother against brother" dynamic or that it was one of the few wars fought underneath our feet as opposed to on some faraway European plain, we are continually enamored with the story of this great, noble catastrophe that freed the enslaved and solidified the strength of what would become the world's only superpower.

Last week was the 150th anniversary of the bombardment of Fort Sumter, and the Civil War fever has become white hot as the media turns its attention again toward that piece of the past.

Countless articles have been printed looking back at the war's legacy, and all of them have taken their own slant on what happened and why; what they say varies greatly depending on where the writer is from.

TIME magazine's April 18 issue had Abraham Lincoln's tear-streaked face emblazoned on its cover along with the caption, "Why we're still fighting the Civil War"— six days before it was published, Confederate re-enactors shot off shell-less mortar rounds towards Fort Sumter to commemorate the first shots.

It is an odd thing. In most countries, the people don't want to even remember the wars they fought — in America, we dress up like the soldiers and fight them again, but this time "for fun."

Not that the spectacles aren't fascinating, because they are, but the question of why so many feel that this old war is so intensely relevant remains.

On his show "Real Time," Bill Maher undoubtedly spoke for many a northerner when he said that nobody in California ever thinks about the Civil War. I think that's likewise for many people in New Jersey or New York or Massachusetts.

But go down to Virginia, boy…and it's "We won this battle."

The Sons of Confederate Veterans, a group for men who can trace a direct line back to a rebel vet, has 30,000 members. The Sons of Union Veterans? Just 6,000, even though twice the number of Northerners served.

Confederate colors still fly from trucks and flagpoles, and some southerners still argue that it wasn't slavery that started the war at all, but "state's rights" (the people who believe this are either willfully ignorant or outright stupid.)

The more backward of this bunch might even call it the War of Northern Aggression — even though the South fired the first shots; no other piece of American history has been revised and re-revised so extensively in a vain attempt to soften the blow of knowing that half the country fought to preserve slavery.



But many of these people forget that it matters little, because no matter what the "legacy," the Old South is as dead as the men who fought for it.

Texas has a burgeoning Hispanic population, while parts of Florida have become "Little Havanas" because of the Cuban refugees who have made their homes there.

Northern Virginia is becoming one large block of suburban condo associations, the battlefields of Tennessee are being paved over, and all the while the elderly are moving south to avoid snow and taxes.

The wheels of progress are grinding away our bloody past, as they always have, and those whose identity is defined by their white-knuckle grip on that past have already been left behind.

There are some silent reminders of our old division — the electoral map of 2000, for instance, was nearly identical to the secession map of 1861, and racial tensions still grow fierce on occasion — but never close to the previous tribulations.

Commemorating the Civil War is important, but it must always be remembered that it is unequivocally over.

The start of the war should not be "celebrated," because celebrating this war would be no different than celebrating the slaughter at Verdun or the firebombing of Dresden.

It must be remembered, marked, and looked upon solemnly as exactly what it is: a terrible tragedy that very nearly destroyed the world's greatest nation.

And in the end we must, as writer Allan Gurganus said, fold up those battle flags and put them behind glass — and they should never be unfurled again.

http://www.northjersey.com/community/history/more_history_news/120333749_South_s_Civil_War_hounds_refuse_to_heel_.html