Sanitized for Your Protection

There's an excellent piece at CommonDreams.org, written by an Austin Texas high school history teacher who tells how the Texas history curriculum has been purged of impure thoughts and inconvenient truths.

Texas has sanitized the high school curriculum, not for the protection of the students but to protect the ruling elite. The textbooks are sanitized to keep students from learning about any proto-socialist or communitarian views held by the Founding Fathers, to disguise the founders' occasional agnosticism and open-minded theism, to erase any useful understanding of how the union movement in the twentieth century led to the forty hour week, the weekend, the paid vacation, to the idea of giving employees raises and benefits like health insurance and pensions. Instead of learning about how Washington and Hamilton introduced the idea of a national debt to spur investment and economic growth, Texas school children will learn about Estée Lauder and a handful of other business tycoons. They'll learn how the House Un-American Activities Committee bravely saved America from the march of Communism––no mention of the witch-hunt, the censorship, the careers ended, the innocent lives destroyed or the broad fear they created. In Texas textbooks, Westward Expansion did not drive native Americans from their ancestral lands or kill millions with disease and privation, it saved their souls. History is all about how you look at it. Conservatives and Republicans have warned us about propaganda; this is it.

Last year the CSMonitor reported on the "whitening" effort in Texas education, to make slavery less significant in the history books, to whitewash it. Maybe this is how Michele Bachmann got her notions about how slavery was happier than the lives of African Americans today. In case you don't remember, this is how the Soviets taught history. I guess Texans and Republicans learned something from the Cold War.

IBG-YBG

I came across this term by accident, coined in 2007, in a book by Jonathan Knee, and blogged a couple of times since. Quoted here and enlarged on a bit here, it's still not in common usage. IBG-YBG: I'll Be Gone, You'll Be Gone. Another way of saying "Never Mind" or "What, Me Worry?" As acronyms go, it's very clever, pointing up a pernicious habit in the financial and ruling classes. This passage seems especially ironic, reading it now, after the collapse IBG-YBG thinking precipitated.

"The bankers who pressed . . . questionable telecom credits at Morgan in their quest for market share, fees, and internal status coined an acronym that could well be a rallying cry for what the entire investment banking industry had become more broadly. "IBG YBG" stood for "I'll Be Gone, You'll Be Gone." When a particularly troubling fact came up in due diligence on one of these companies, a whispered "IBG YBG" among the banking team members would ensure that a way would be found to do the business, even if investors, or Morgan Stanley itself, would pay the price down the road. Don't sweat it, was the implication, we'll all be long gone by then."

(Jonathan A. Knee, The Accidental Investment Banker (Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. xvi-xvii)

This knack for committing crimes that won't be discovered till years later reminds me of a recent president. James Wolcott wrote about him in Vanity Fair:

"On the last page of Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack (2004), Bush, asked how history would judge the war in Iraq, verbally shrugs: “History. We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” And on the first page of Robert Draper’s Dead Certain (2007), Bush cautions, “You can’t possibly figure out the history of the Bush presidency—until I’m dead,” then inserts a piece of cheese into his mouth. This exit clause isn’t something he invokes only to reporters. In Bill Sammon’s The Evangelical President (2007), an aide confirms to the susceptible author that Bush doesn’t brood about the petty setbacks that bedevil less serene souls: “His attitude is a very healthy one. He says, ‘Look, history will get it right and we’ll both be dead. Who cares?’ ” If only the estimated 1.5 million Iraqis displaced by the war and driven into Syrian exile could adopt such a healthy outlook, maybe they too would learn how not to sweat the small stuff."