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

Whitewashing America's History

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

BY STEVE JANOSKI

Words are perhaps the most powerful of things. They can illuminate, devastate, and forever alter the realities of the world, exposing the fraudulent and eviscerating the powerful within the single sweep of an ivory page.

They can erupt in explosions that dwarf the fiercest bomb, and from the printing of the first Bible to Thomas Paine’s legendary "Common Sense" to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s "Uncle Tom’s Cabin," they have inspired new thoughts, generated new beliefs, and ignited revolutions.

In our shallow society, many remain unaware of the potent power they possess by putting pen to page, but for proof of its impact in the present day, one need look no further than, of all places, Montgomery, Alabama, where the literary world has been set ablaze over the controversial decision of editor Alan Gribben of NewSouth Books Inc.

Gribben has decided that NewSouth will attempt to strip Mark Twain’s classic "Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn" of its racist epithets in an upcoming edition due out in February; in it, the word "nigger" is to be replaced with "slave," and the word "injun" is to be replaced with "Indian."

Gribben’s reasoning? The book is left off of many school reading lists because of its use of the words, and isn’t as widely read as a consequence, he says.

"We may applaud Twain’s ability as a prominent American literary realist to record the speech of a particular region during a specific historical era," writes Gribben in the introduction to the book, "But abusive racial insults that bear distinct connotations of permanent inferiority nonetheless repulse modern-day readers."

Gribben goes on to say that for 40 years he has discussed Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in public forums such as college classes and libraries, and he has always refrained from using the slurs.

"I invariably substituted the word "slave" for Twain’s ubiquitous n-word whenever I read any passages aloud," he said. "Students and audience members seemed to prefer this expedient, and I could detect a visible sense of relief each time, as though a nagging problem with the text had been addressed."

Well yea Alan, by eliminating the blatant racism that’s built into this piece of nineteenth-century literature, you sure do eliminate a lot of those "nagging problems," don’t you?

Now, instead of the children who receive this book thinking about how horrific the thought process was of the average white American back in the 1840s, they can believe that slaves and masters alike walked hand-in-hand in harmony under the magnolia trees.

They might even wonder why Jim was trying to escape in the first place….if Gribben mixes in a little "Gone With the Wind," I do believe he could construct his very own mythical history of the Old South.

Hell, while he’s at it, why doesn’t he just go take out the parts mentioning slavery altogether?

We’ll call Jim a "runaway servant" instead, because the term "slave" will surely offend the Southerners who still call the Civil War the "War of Northern Aggression." They’d jump at the chance to throw some white paint over their blood-red history.

And, instead of making it along the Mississippi River, let’s have it take place along the St. Lawrence River, so we don’t generalize and make it seem like the South was the only place that owned slaves.

Oh wait, it was? Well, what’s that matter? We’re revising history, so let’s move the Mason-Dixon somewhere up around New York State to make them feel even better.

We should probably edit the letters of Abraham Lincoln too, being as he used now-derogatory racial terms frequently, and even once said that he didn’t believe the black man was equal to the white.

If people knew this, they might be repulsed! Cut it!

What Gribben conveniently forgets is that literature is supposed to make us confront difficult issues— even if it’s the hideously revolting racism that lies in America’s past, as evidenced by our active participation in the subjugation of a race of people.

When it comes down to it, the removal of these words and the butchering and desecration of this American masterpiece by one pompous editor from a book company based in the first capital of the Confederacy is a crime nearly unparalleled in literary history.

It is a historical whitewashing of epic proportions that is equivalent to tearing out the pages of every German history book that covers the years of 1933-1945.

George Orwell once wrote that, "Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present, controls the past."

I’ll be damned if I’ll ever let a member of the politically correct Gestapo control the past, and this publisher should be boycotted and driven out of business; its revisionist filth should be burned in glowing piles in the streets.

E-mail: janoski@northjersey.com