Portside

This year, in Advanced Placement American History courses all across the nation, students will learn details about America that make it look bad. This is something that many people in academia or the rest of the world simply call “history”. The Republican National Committee calls the class a “radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes negative aspects of our nation’s history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects”. Which, once you translate that back out of hysterical conservative Victimology, is still just history.

History as text is easy; you can just rewrite it to fit any screwheaded agenda. History as an applied understanding presents a bit more of a problem. Look at Jefferson County, Colorado, where a newly conservative school board instituted a review to ensure that the AP US curriculum will “promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free-market system”. This is fine on the page, but students in Jefferson County have taken to picketing the school board. Because that’s how losing our values starts. You make every kid take an end-of-year test in a little book, and then look what happens. You know who else liked little books? That’s right.

How stupid ideology-by-selective-bibliography seems to you depends on who you are.

That it’s stupid on its face is indisputable. Part of the hue and cry from folks at places like the National Review – where America is the strongest nation on Earth yet always one public library book away from total collapse – stems from the AP US History lesson plans apparently failing to mention founding-father types enough. The College Board issued a letter defending the curriculum, explaining that the course offers a college-level curriculum meant to provide context of historical movements and forces by expanding on students’ existing knowledge. (You can read a sample here.) In short, kids aren’t prohibited from knowing about Thomas Jefferson; that they’re taking the course means they should know enough about him already to integrate that understanding within, say, an examination of how the sort of decentralized, constitutional Republican ideal of governance gets hypocritically thrown out the window the moment power is achieved and you can buy Louisiana, have your lackeys try to impeach an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, suspend habeas corpus and throw Americans in camps for violating your embargo.

But bowdlerizing less telegenic parts of the syllabus feels a lot more dumb if you already know history, because this move by the Jefferson County school board doesn’t even have the decency to be a novel form of dumb. It’s a 130-year-old tradition of dumb whose mechanisms somehow manage to get dumber with each passing decade.

At the start, in the absence of talk radio, revisionism demanded a literary effort. In the late 19th century, southern apologists sought not only to redeem the cultural institutions of the south but also make the face-saving case that 250,000 of their people weren’t killed to defend owning, torturing, raping, killing and selling humans. Hence romanticizing southern culture, playing up the fears of the industrialized north and dehumanizing machine-dependent labor, punitive tariffs and the resurrection of that Jeffersonian ideal via Calhoun of states’ rights, without the unfortunate codicil of “to own people”. It’s contemptible and self-serving, but at least it’s a holistic kind of historiography.

Next, when you think about culture war in the classroom, you think about the Scopes Trial, a kind of operatic American moment, which cemented the two antagonists in the debate over testable hypotheses and fairytales. It was essentially a rhetorical war between what we want to believe and the difficulty of reckoning with what we can observe, but at least it had the feel of something poetic and the rigor of a trial.

Now it’s just yelling. That bad, freedom good. This America, that libturd.

Consider this quote about an American history textbook by an African-American author:

[it] destroys pride in America’s past, develops a guilt complex, mocks American justice ... is hostile to religious concepts ... projects negative thought models, criticizes business and free enterprise, plays politics, foments class hatred, slants and distorts fact.

Except that quote’s from an article called “The California Textbook Fight” that ran in the November 1967 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, about a book published 48 years ago. I cheated by omitting the complaint that it “indoctrinates toward Communism” and “overemphasizes Negro participation in American history” because I thought those terms would be a dead giveaway, but you can see the same complaints about socialism and minorities today. In fact, the only way that quote differs from an open letter about the new AP American History Standards drafted by the Alec-affiliated “American Principles Project” is that it sounds more intelligent. Jefferson County school board member Julie Williams’s above encomia about “promoting citizenship” and the “benefits of the free-market system” is just the sunny-side version of this attack.

The bind facing the Jefferson County school board and the conservative movement in general is that history happened, and pretending it didn’t takes effort. It would take an army of William Jennings Bryans with power levels of Inherit the Windbag well over 9,000 to exclusively reinstate Jesus into every classroom. Meanwhile the glut of history books written by Glenn Beck and every other former morning drive-time host prove how much constant work is required to create impermeable alternate histories.

Which is why you see conservative school groups across the country entertaining measures to create a false balance by “teaching both sides” or the Texas Board of Education cutting out the dull parts and “punching up” the sizzling bits of American history like Joe Eszterhas phoning it in. Thomas Aquinas co-wrote the Declaration. The Enlightenment didn’t happen. That genocide over there was just a few bad apples. Jesus invented the 40-hour work week, and socialists invented black lung.

Which is odd, because it’s possible to love something in spite of its flaws. Any contented marriage of more than a few years proves as much. This is why we still go to our favorite bands’ concerts even though we know they’re going to play five tracks from that turkey of a new album. It’s not revolutionary to suggest that America has more appeal than a grouchy spouse and more staying power than the Rolling Stones, so it should get through this, even if you might love it a smidge less.

In fact, that you might love America a little less for understanding its warts might inspire you to change it, to have a very American (and very universal) urge to seek the betterment of those around you. Students in Jefferson County understand as much – protesting for “honesty and integrity in all of [their] classrooms – and the makers of the AP US History curriculum support their actions as a reflection of its contents. That’s only a scary thing if the story you’ve told yourself about who you are and the place you came from is so fragile that you can look at textbooks and only see something that should be written in pencil and cry out for an eraser.

Jeb Lund is the founder of Mr Destructo and a contributing editor to Sports on Earth. He wrote the 'America's Screaming Conscience' column for Gawker, and his writing has appeared at the Awl, the Classical, Deadspin, Esquire, GQ, the New Republic, SBNation and Vice. Follow him on Twitter: @Mobute