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May 23, 2010 
Texas schools board rewrites US history with lessons promoting God and guns
Chris McGreal, Houston | Sunday 16 May 2010…The board is to vote on a sweeping purge of alleged liberal bias in Texas school textbooks in favour of what [Cynthia] Dunbar says really matters:
a belief in America as a nation chosen by God as a beacon to the world, and free enterprise as the cornerstone of liberty and democracy.
“We are fighting for our children’s education and our nation’s future,” Dunbar said. “In Texas we have certain statutory obligations to promote patriotism and to promote the free enterprise system. There seems to have been a move away from a patriotic ideology. There seems to be a denial that this was a nation founded under God. We had to go back and make some corrections.”
And that, the laughable idea of “corrections,” gives you a snap shot of just how blindly politicized and caustic the school board-ers are. Over and over again, they planned to and succeeded in voting to “correct” History.
What was so wrong? Certain words kept appearing in their textbooks. Huh? That’s right — bad words kept popping up. So they had to be wiped out.
The words were inappropriate? No. The words were inaccurate? No. The words were poorly chosen, misused? No. The words stung. Nothing more than that. They were unpalatable to some people, those with smothering buttoned-down psychologies who exult in exporting hospital-corners Americanism. The people who now run the Texas Board of Education.
Well, who wouldn’t want America to be perfect? Who’d rather hear that the United States screws up, incarcerates the blameless, brutalizes the peaceable, slaughters the defenseless? Not these solid Republicans. Not these folks who can’t bear honesty, not anyone immature to the point of believing the past can be re-texted into vanity.
Not the Texas Christian textbook tyrants.
Scholars on the curriculum teams had argued that “capitalism” and “free market” are commonly used terms in economics courses and everyday discourse…
Terri Leo (R- Spring): “I do think words mean things. . . . I see no reason, frankly, to compromise with liberal professors from academia.”
The commie academics stunk up “capitalism” badly. So the Texans decided they’re no longer going to lay their students down at the feet of the eggheads, no longer going to allow the c-word to be seen in their books. The leftists don’t get to beat kids up with their elitist agenda.
After the discussion, the board voted to strike all instances of “capitalism” from the state’s curriculum.
“Capitalism” certainly isn’t inaccurate, but it’s rank to their sensibilities, so it’s out. “Democratic” too:
One amendment required students to learn about the “unintended consequences” of the Great Society, affirmative action, and Title IX programs, and another replaced references to “democratic societies” to references to “republican societies.”
The Board struck the word “democratic” from the description of the U.S. government, instead terming it a “constitutional republic.”
We certainly operate by democratic principles. But why mention that if it ingratiates the d-word into students’ minds? Just substitute it with “republican.” Obliterate the rival party: a correction.
And then there’s slavery. There’s no hiding behind the pretense of balance by trying to call it anything else . .
The education board has dropped references to the slave trade in favour of calling it the more innocuous “Atlantic triangular trade” . .
. . but they’re atomically pretentious. The mere attempt to re-brand slavery properly abominates the school board. It indicts the Texans as a suspect bunch harboring an unhealthy obsession with evil and, likely,
a latent disappointment with the abolition of it.
Buying, selling, working to death, killing human beings — these are at least tolerable to the Texas Conservatives. Otherwise, there would be no need to protect or rehabilitate any of it, right? There’s no way to view centuries of human trade as scandalized unless it were possible to scandalize it somehow. It’s the liberals, we’re left to assume, that are to blame for putting a stink on it, not the events themselves. And this word that’s a remnant of the conspiracy, it’s not fair or patriotic any more to let it go.
They simply have to put it right. This considerable slice of American history deserves to be free from the recriminations of History intellectuals and the self-righteous — the politics forced upon school books as “slavery.” The British are “Redcoats,” Sacco and Vanzetti are still “Anarchists” and the Holocaust remains “The Holocaust.” But you better leave the Atlantic Triangular Trade alone.
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