Lying about history, to our children

Lying about history, to our children
by David Benjamin

“… Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manoeuvers of Soviet policy, but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence…”
— “X”, Foreign Affairs, July 1947

MADISON, Wis. — One of the best ways to cramp a night out at a nice restaurant is to eavesdrop — even if you don’t want to listen at all! — on the people at the next table. This happened last month when Hotlips and I met our French tutor, Maribel, at a busy little wine bar on rue de Richelieu. Before Maribel arrived (fashionably late, in Paris style), Hotlips and I got to know, far too well, the American family squeezed around a table twelve inches away.

Dad (let’s call him “Dad”) was pontificating to his inquisitive sons, who were perhaps 11 and 12 years old (let’s call them Frank and Joe). Mom was passive, silent, agreeable (although, perhaps, seething secretly with unfulfilled aspirations and unspoken resentments). The kids were asking about history. Almost every word Dad uttered was so distant — factually and politically — from the actual events of the recent past that I found myself squirming in my chair.

In response to Frank and Joe’s questions, Dad contrived to explain the Cold War, fashioning a tale that was equal parts misdirection, abysmal ignorance and Twilight Zone. According to Dad, the Cold War started sometime in the 1970’s. This being the decade of Dad’s birth made it, apparently, the Beginning of Time.

Dad’s Cold War was fought largely between Ronald Reagan and “the Russians.” Reagan won. Conspicuously absent from Dad’s Cold War were three decades and a few bit players, among them Harry Truman, George “X” Kennan, John Foster Dulles, Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, Nikita Khrushchev, Dick Nixon, Gromyko, Tito, Ike, JFK, LBJ, Mao, Ho, Kissinger, Kim… well, what’s the difference? They were all just the Gipper’s pin-setters.

(Dad, what’s a pin-setter?)

Dad’s abbreviated Cold War also elided a few superfluous details, like Sputnik, the “kitchen debate,” the House Un-American Activities Committee and the blacklist, the CIA’s overthrow of governments in Iran, Guatemala and Chile, the Soviet Union’s crushing of populist uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the Berlin Wall, the Korean War, the Vietnam catastrophe, dead students at Kent State and Jackson State, the killing fields of Cambodia… (sigh)

OK, maybe Dad was just trying to keep things simple. If Frank and Joe had asked me about the Cold War, I would have chugged my wine, taken a deep breath and said, “Well, kids, have you got a few weeks to spare?”

Reading his tone, I knew that Dad, the poor shmuck, was just trying to impress the boys. Fathers are supposed to know everything. So he up and spilled, more or less randomly, the scattered Cold War factoids he could dredge from his sporadic contact with the news and from a high-school U.S. history curriculum that dwells morbidly on John Smith and Pocahontas but rarely reaches the 20th century before summer vacation rolls around.

I tried to calm my pique by saying to myself, “There but for fortune go I. What father doesn’t show off for his kids?”

This spasm of empathy, however, failed. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t drag myself down to the level of a guy who obviously hadn’t cracked a history book since 11th grade. I’ve been studying history since before I could read. My grandfather got me started. Archie, who had never made it to ninth grade, he remembered — and talked infectiously — about the times he’d seen. He rattled off the names of the great (FDR), the notorious (John Dillinger) and the mysterious (Garbo). Best of all, Archie had the wisdom not to claim any franchise on the truth. His history was composed of impressions, what he felt, what he thought, what people had to go through in those bygone days. A generation later, when my kids asked me about my Cold War memories, I was better prepared than Dad was for Frank and Joe. But my better history lessons were like the stories Archie told.

For me and my peers, the central impression of growing up in the Cold War, after all, had little to do with the Machiavellian dance of the Dulles brothers, or the brazen silence of the Hollywood Eight, or even JFK’s inspirational plea to “ask not what your country can do for you.” The main thing was the certainty, mutely shared by every child who ever had to practice the “duck and cover” drill, that we were all going to die in a nuclear firestorm before we were old enough to vote.

Whether I noticed or not — I’m sure I didn’t — it was that emotional thread, a broadly shared sense of doom among an entire generation of children, that triggered my hunger for history. I apparently shared this fixation with my kids feverishly enough that my youngest, J.D., ended up with a Master’s in history. Which means, of course, that I can’t fool the kid now even if I want to.

So it wasn’t just for my sake — Archie was involved, as well as J.D., along with Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, Palmer & Colton, Simon Winchester and all my other favorite historians — that I wanted to reach over and strangle this blowhard who was lying to his kids about history. To his kids! About history!

Hotlips took my hand, agreed with me, quieted my indignation and said, “Pour the wine.” I poured. Maribel finally arrived. We ordered, we toasted all around, we caught up and reminisced.

By and by, before I’d finished a remarkable veal steak with my favorite potatoes, I turned to scowl and they were gone — the solipsist Dad, his insipid wife and their soon-to-be-idiot sons, wandering oblivious into a future bereft of a comprehensible past.