Yes It Is, It’s True: Maybe Ford was right, ‘history is bunk’

During my somewhat less than stellar stint as a substitute teacher in eight school districts in Kent and Allegan counties between 2008 and 2012, I stumbled onto a book, “Lies My Teacher Told Me.” I was able to read it over the course of five days, whenever the students were preoccupied with a movie or a test.

The book was not really an eye opener, it merely confirmed what I had believed for a long time, but dismissed as my own bitterness about not landing a history or social studies teaching job after I graduated from college. My greatest excuse for toiling two years as a sub by day and security guard by night was that school districts so often hired football and basketball coaches who had minors in group social studies rather than the likes of me who was a genuine devotee of history, social sciences and journalism.

I was lucky that the late Irvin P. and Helen Jane Helmey decided in 1972 to hire me as a community journalist for the now defunct Wayland Globe.

But in my defense, I have learned since then that there was a grain of truth in my bitter protestations. And to this day, I still insist there is plenty wrong with how social studies is taught in schools. History, as a serious academic subject, just hasn’t gotten a lot of respect. And it shows.

I learned more about what this country did to Native Americans from two Firesign Theatre albums. For example, in “Don’t Crush that Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers,” the group did a comedic parody of a TV commercial, narrated like a travelogue backed with sickly syrupy string music:

“This is a line of Indians leaving Ranch Malario to make room for you! Here’s the beautiful Trail of Tears Golf Course.”

I was never taught just what the Trail of Tears was in high school history. Nor was I given any indication that Columbus, instead of a bold, heroic explorer, actually was the overseer of a campaign of genocide against innocent victims. And they lived here first, man!

“Temporarily Humboldt County” from “Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him” was a blitzkrieg of examples of how Europeans came to the New World to push around, steal land from and nearly exterminate people they wrongly called Indians. In my patriotic and incomplete history classes in junior high and high school, I was never taught that.

I came to understand that revered presidents Woodrow Wilson and Andrew Jackson were racists and Theodore Roosevelt really loved war too much, and Franklin Roosevelt rounded up innocent Japanese citizens to put them into internment camps, and we deliberately picked fights with Spain in 1898 and Mexico in 1846 just so we could expand our empire at their expense.

Fast forward to my return to the classrooms as a bottom feeder substitute for four years.

I made a habit in every social studies class I subbed in to ask all the kiddies a trivia question that wasn’t so trivial — How many Iraqis were among those 19 nuts who hit the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001? Not once was I given the correct answer: Zero.

I also had a habit of asking all the students to look at the tags on the backs of their T-shirts to find out where they were assembled. Many were “Made in China,” “Made in Thailand,” “Made in Mexico,” “Made in Bangladesh” or “Made in Honduras.” Only one in all those four years was wearing a shirt that declared, “Made in the USA.” I insisted everyone in the class rise to give that student a standing ovation.

One day, I started teaching a series of classes second hour through sixth hour, noticing a first hour government class had been watching a video that was paused, showing Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts speaking. At the beginning of each of the subsequent hours, I asked the students who had been paused in the video. Not one answered correctly.

I suppose it could be regarded as the classroom version of “Jaywalking,” in which late night host Jay Leno had one of his minions ask really easy questions of clueless citizens on the street.

But my all-time favorite story was on the day Barack Obama was elected in November 2008. When I asked students that Wednesday morning about it, a deeply religious student boisterously declared that “Obama is the Anti-Christ!” I argued with the student, attempting to use logic, but he insisted Obama is a Muslim and he was aptly described in the Book of Revelations.

Two female students reportedly upset over my argument with the student and they left the classroom abruptly. I was told they showed up at the high school office. I was never asked to sub in that class ever again.

The teacher of that class routinely sent students to City Council and Township Board meetings, incorrectly calling them “hearings.” A hearing is part of the meeting and has a specific purpose. Perhaps I’m nit picking.

I have come to believe in my aging process that I have been lied to all my life, as have you. We were lied to about Santa Claus, about the Easter Bunny, about the Tooth Fairy. We were lied to about sex, about marijuana. And we wonder why our children too often don’t take us seriously when we warn them about real dangers.

These days on Facebook I see an alarming number of posts making deliberately false assertions, but the worst part is that far too many fail to use critical thinking or what they should have learned in their history or government classes to call the rascals out for spreading cancerous lies.

In these perilous times, the best quote is from Sir Edmund Burke: “The best way for evil to triumph is for all good men (and women) to do nothing.” Perhaps more appropriate is Henry Ford’s “History is bunk.”

That can explain what happened in Germany 85 years ago, and don’t be foolish enough to believe it can’t happen here. It already is.