Extra! Extra! In The New York Times yesterday: (i) not all New York City cab drivers are honest, and (ii) Texas will be Texas.
In the first “amazing” news item: New York City cab drivers have cheated millions of riders in the last two years. This has been accomplished by illegally charging an alternative (doubled) meter rate applicable to Westchester and Nassau County within New York City limits.
Some drivers have excused these overcharges on the grounds that the buttons activating the meter rates are small and that it is easy for pre-occupied fingers to accidentally activate the wrong rate. (The excuse, which doesn’t take into account the higher bucks received, smells like those sometimes sent to car insurance companies: “a pedestrian hit me and went under my car.” “The guy was all over the road. I had to swerve a number of times before I hit him.”)
If New York cab drivers being New York cab drivers is disheartening, Texas being Texas is even more so. As reported by James McKinley Jr.: “the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.”
Example: the new rules will replace the term “capitalism” as a description of, you know, capitalism, with the term “free enterprise system,” (to avoid the negative connotations of phrases like “capitalist pig”.)
Example: Thomas Jefferson (not liked because he coined the term “separation between church and state”) will be cut from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the 17th and 18th centuries. (I guess the Declaration of Independence doesn’t count.) (Is it worth noting that there are no historians on the Texas School Board?)
The proposed changes in Texas make me almost as upset with the left as the right; I can’t help but feel that, in the last decades, the left has also actively pushed for a politicization of history texts, and now is being hoist by their own petard. (I’m sorry to those readers who disagree with me.)
Yes, the old 50’s and 60’s texts were incredibly jingoistic and one-sided; many of the changes of the last decades created a much more historically accurate, as well as broader, picture of the past. (Some terrific history texts resulted, such as Joy Hakim’s wonderful The Story of US.)
However, attempts to right old sins, and to emphasize the accomplishments of groups and genders who had historically been overlooked (as well as oppressed), also sometimes went overboard. My children went to a grade school, for example, where every child knew of Rosa Parks, but extremely few had knowledge of FDR (except, perhaps, for his disability) , World War II (other than perhaps Japanese internment camps), or even, though it was a secular school, Thomas Jefferson (except perhaps for his relationship with Sally Hemmings.) (An attempt to be inclusive, in other words, sometimes seemed exclusive, and to almost perversely avoid a broader historical context.)
Of course, an even bigger problem (to amplify on a quote by the great education president and Texan, George W. Bush): “Is our children learning” anything at all?
In The Truth, a Discworld satirical fantasy by Terry Pratchett, the tyrannical Lord Vetinari warns a budding newspaper publisher that what people crave is not “news” but “olds”. “They like to be told what they already know,” Vetinari explains—not man bites dog, but dog bites man.
I’m not sure I completely agree with Vetinari here; while both these stories are certainly “olds”, they only offer a kind of painful satisfaction, the kind available from from scratching a bite, picking a sore.
For more on this subject, and one of my best paintings ever (of George Washington), check out my post on George Washington, Sarah Palin and Christian With a Capital C.
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