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PARTISAN REVIEW
they found that when some independent thinker checked through the
textbooks, he found the most egregious, abominable errors on major
things in American history, from the Korean War to the atomic bomb at
Hiroshima. They had
to
keep correcting the texts. They changed the
textbooks again and they had hundreds of new errors. Who writes, who
edits these texts? There are no standards in the writing of these text–
books. What shocks me is that they interviewed the editorial director of
one of the major publishers, he said that it didn't matter if all the im–
portant factual events are incorrectly presented. Now if this is the answer
of the publisher, if the teacher has to keep pointing errors out to the
students, what can one expect? The message students are getting is: why
should we learn these things, if they don't matter? The teacher has just
said, "What you're reading in the textbook isn't right." This produces
tremendous mass cynicism.
The other question I wanted to address is the one raised by Edith,
the teaching of fictional history at the expense of historical facts. I went
to the town hall debate
onJFK
two nights ago, and the whole problem
of mass culture came up. Thousands of people are learning about major
historical events, whether it's John F. Kennedy's presidency or anything
else, not from reading but from the mass media, from television docud–
ramas and the movies. This raises a serious problem. Regardless of the
merits of Oliver Stone's movie, the message that came from millions of
people, including Nora Ephron, who's an educated person, a talented
screenwriter, essentially is that proof and the facts of history don't mat–
ter, that what's important is our mythic understanding of the past; and
that this is created not by scholars and professors but by artists and i as
meaningful as, if not more meaningful than, anything any trained scholar
is doing. One of the critics said, "If you believe Oliver Stone's movie,
then you believe that JFK was assassinated by a conspiracy, whose leaders
included Lyndon Johnson, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, the FBI,
and the mob. Clearly, if there
was
such a conspiracy, something would
have leaked out. In this country it couldn't be kept secret for so many
years. Somebody would have said this is too implausible, beyond consid–
eration and reality."
Nora Ephron ended up saying that she could admit that some im–
pressionable young minds might get this feeling from watching Oliver
Stone's movie, but so what? Twenty or thirty years from now they'd
grow up and realize that that was the truth, and they may as well get
the impression now from the film. All of this, of course, met with
resounding applause from the audience. This is the mass culture. A film
like
JFK
-
and there will be many more, you already have
Mississippi
Burning
-
treats the past and the experience our country has gone
