Cleaning Up the Past

Stephen King's Langoliers

Common wisdom once advised that the only way to progress was to learn from history, thereby avoiding the mistakes of our predecessors by correcting our course accordingly.

A wise man once said that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. Truer words were never spoken. Human history is rife with injustice and cruelty unimaginable to modern civilized societies, mainly because we learned that such behavior was deplorable, and we changed it.

Women's Suffrage and the Civil Rights Act would most likely never have happened if our offspring were deprived of the knowledge of what was wrought before them. Without the social barometer of the past, behaviors would have remained the same. History is the closest thing to time travel that man is capable of, the ability to peer into what came before to see how and why we got where we are today.

One of the great themes of science fiction is the idea of actually travelling through time. A common theme in these stories is the danger of altering the present reality by tinkering with the events that led to it. In 1995, Stephen King laid those fictional fears to rest with The Langoliers. 

In King's story, a small group of airline passengers accidentally gets caught in a time warp, and are transported roughly fifteen minutes into the past. They soon discover a disturbing truth; there is no distant past to travel to because the Langoliers - a ruthless and voracious collection of horrifying creatures - eat the past, cleansing every trace of it like an unfortunate cow wading into a piranha-filled river.

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Would Twain Recognize This Today?



My friend over at The Edisto Joe Outlook the other day pointed out the latest absurdity by the Left, in their attempts to edit Mark Twain. The purpose, it seems, is to eliminate the "offensive" terms in Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer that were common vernacular in Twain's era. In Wednesday's Mark Twain Revised And Politically Correct, Joe writes:

One of America's greatest authors, Samuel Clements, aka, Mark Twain, has now had two of his greatest works, "Huck Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" revised into a new combined edition, Mark Twain's The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer And Huckelberry Finn, courtesy of one Mr. Mark Gribben and New South Books of Alabama. The new version no longer will contain the dreaded N-word, nor will it contain the words "injun" or "half-breed." 



The piece goes on to explain that those terms have now been replaced with "slave", "Indian" and "half-blood", respectively. The reason? The author, Mr. Gribben, is the victim of the New World, a place where people suddenly seem to have a right not to be offended. So now, we will see a broadened effort to scrub the works of giants, to edit the work of better men because they were the product of their time.

It is a dangerous road to traverse. Once masterpieces are altered to suit the present, they will more resemble the product of modernity and alter our perception of the past. And what if some future revisionist finds the terms used by Gribben to be offensive? Eventually, Twain's works will be unrecognizable.

It is ludicrous for the Left to believe that because past events were deemed offensive by today's standards, they somehow have a right to deny or alter them. While it is comforting to know that we cannot physically travel back in time and alter the present, it is frightening to realize that there are still those who have found a way to get it done.

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The New Catch Phrase: Constitutional Fetish

Where's the Expiration Date?

Liberals - now to be referred to as "Progressives" because Liberals no longer liked the negative connotation of the word "liberal" - have been scared witless (I know, I know) by the sudden truculence of the people. As they marched onward with their radical plans to transform America into their Socialist Utopia, those formerly passive people were either unaware or indifferent, perhaps refusing to believe the reality of what was afoot.

No longer. With the rise of the former Speaker of the House to the election of Barack Hussein Obama, people finally saw and realized the full extent of what the Progressives were attempting to do. And they rose up, loudly.

The response from the left - both politicians and pundits - was a defiant one in which they attempted to ridicule and belittle the new opposition, and it almost worked. If not for the relentless work of the Tea Party and similar groups, combined with a brave new crop of political nubiles unafraid to embrace the new ferocity, the Left may have succeeded.

There were many different attacks from the new "Obama Movement" on us. There was the "gun-toting, Bible-clinging" intended insult, which seems a strange position for an allegedly devout Christian like Barack Obama. The very people at whom that barb was hurled, however, instead caught and embraced it proudly. Obama even denigrated middle Americans for having American flags on their pickup trucks. Again, the response from middle Americans was, "Damn right"!

Deeply held American values, generations old and passed down from parents, were suddenly the object of ridicule. The Left tried to pass such traditions off as old and archaic. We weren't buying.

During the lead up to the passage of Obama Care, when constituents demanded of their representatives to know the Constitutional authority of Congress to ram it down our throats, some said that they didn't care about that document. They said it was too imperative to get the bill - which they hadn't even read - passed. Big mistake. People embraced the Constitution even more tightly.

Not a problem for the Progressive cabal; now they wonder aloud what this new "fetish" for the Constitution means, and why we right-wingers care so much. According to Merriam-Webster's dictionary, a fetish is defined as -  b : an object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion.

That is critical, because it signifies that the Left views the document responsible for this great nation's rise to prominence as irrational, and to revere that document as obsessive. They would prefer to toss it aside like an old novel and move on (pardon the pun), and take this country in a new direction.

Sound familiar? It should. The Democrats slogan leading up to the 2006 elections that swept them into power was "A New Direction for America". And in 2008, the Obama campaign was all about "change". Since then, we have gotten both, and all it's done is to drive more and more people back to the Founding document. The left calls that "going backward". Glenn Beck has a better description.

Beck portrays it as simply going back far enough to see where we left the tracks, and restart on the one that gave us the best success. I agree, and it is something we are still capable of doing, so long as we don't let the bullies make us cry.

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No Longer a Need to Pretend

It began - at least for me - with Dan Rather's embarrassing fall from grace with his refusal to acknowledge that he used forged documents designed to indict George W. Bush's military record. Oh, I know, it's been argued that Walter Cronkite was the template back in the days of Vietnam and Kennedy versus Nixon, but those were times when I was more concerned with capturing bees in a jar or building snow forts.

They were certainly times long before the inception of Fox News, an outfit reviled by the competition due to jealousy, and by the political left because of damage inflicted. It was Anita Dunn, Obama's former Communications Director, who was the attack dog of the administration, claiming that Fox News was not a "legitimate news organization", a mantra that the president himself soon repeated.

No, we were led to believe, only "real" news sources like ABC or CBS were to be trusted. Never mind the chilling notion that an American government was suddenly in the business of attacking the news media, in whatever incarnation; the viciousness with which it did so was unprecedented. Fox has been the target simply because they tell the story the alleged real news media deliberately conceals, and because much of the broadcast day is decidedly right-leaning.

Fair enough. So let's agree that Fox is biased - a notion they have done little to dispute - but of that fact they are unapologetic. But what of the blatantly obvious bias of the Big Broadcast news networks? Sure, they vehemently deny any accusations of bias, and bristle at the very mention of it, but come on, do they really think we're that naive?

When ABC News in June of 2009 gave the president an hour-long platform to promote "health care", ABC defended the move from critics. Ken McKay, then Chief of Staff for the Republican National Committee, wrote in a letter to ABC News President David Westin, in which he said, "The president has stated time and time again that he wants a bipartisan debate. Therefore, the Republican Party should be included in this prime time event."  ABC News Senior Vice President Kerry Smith disagreed, countering with the claim that any viewer who watches will be sure to find the network's coverage is "informative, fair and civil."

Then there is the problem with unemployment. Remember how the media pounded Bush relentlessly over the unemployment percentage, which then hovered around 5%? They joined Democrats in portraying that figure as exaggerated because the people who were among the employed had lost higher-paying jobs with better benefits, and were now forced to "flip burgers" to get by. Suddenly, however, under the leadership of Barack Obama, flipping burgers was a splendid new "career".

In May of 2009, I saw on ABC's World News Tonight with Charles Gibson, what to that point was the most astounding example of State Run media I had ever seen. Discussing the April jobs figures about to be released, Gibson announced that 539,000 jobs were lost. He followed up with the great news that in February alone, 4.3 million jobs were created!

The next day, I wrote When Democrat Presidents Create Jobs, in which I described how suddenly the lower quality jobs the Liberal media once complained about were the saving grace of unemployment running rampant. An excerpt:

He gives an example stating that 4.3 million Americans got new jobs in February. Then the video starts and we see (are you reading this, MoveOn?) middle aged people as part of the 72 who just got hired at...a burger joint. They interviewed a young man who had "just lost his construction job" and who is the new "fry guy". 

The piece goes on to gush about Walmart expecting to hire tens of thousands of new workers, and also that the federal government has hired 62,000 new people. 

Now, ABC News has taken water-carrying to a new level. To start the New Year, on January first, ABC News Political Director Amy Walter issued a warning to Republicans about trying to repeal "ObamaCare". On ABC's Good Morning America, Walter had this to say:

"If Republicans decide they're going to spend the first six months of this year going over and debating the individual mandate or ObamaCare or whatever they want to call it, I think that's not going to sit very well with the electorate."

 It's not enough to just be incredulous that an alleged "news" outlet would issue warnings to either political party (their job is to report on events, is it not?). No, one would also expect that the people responsible for informing the electorate were themselves informed. So how does Ms. Walter not know of the overwhelming majority of the electorate opposed to ObamaCare?

There are some who will ask me to quit complaining. After all, Fox pundits issue the same kinds of warnings all the time right?

Yes, that is true. But if the uber-respected ABC News is now doing it, wouldn't that equate them with Fox, which has been reviled and ridiculed by the government and its minions? It then becomes a question of integrity and intent. Fox has the former, while the media that hides within a false cloak of respectability has the latter.

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