It has been said, in many different ways, that fiction imitates nature, and that truth is stranger than fiction. I’m not surprised when fiction seems to copy reality; after all, writers have to get their ideas from somewhere. But I am more than amazed when today’s fact turns out to have been predicted by yesterday’s fiction. I’m talking specifically about the current controversy brewing in Texas about what and how teachers should be allowed to teach about history. The very same conflict was the subject of the novel “Texas” published 38 years ago by James Michener.
We more or less expect conflict, controversy, tragedy, the unexpected and the bizarre in fiction. After all, why would anybody bother to write about something ordinary with no surprises either good or bad, unusual or innovative? Think about the old comic books and movies that depicted space travel and the exploration of our galaxy. Today, those things are beginning to happen and are reality — no longer futuristic fiction. And I remember that some of the boys in my junior high and high school classes drew pictures of fantastic rockets and space-age cars that looked impossible, yet today we are regularly sending rockets into space and driving automobiles that eerily resemble those imaginative drawings. Fiction can’t imitate the future because it hasn’t yet happened. But such things make one wonder if it can predict it.
If memory serves me, Michener’s Texas quandary dealt mostly with the image of the state and its people and was a conflict between historical facts and the notion that Texas and Texans were somehow better, smarter, more important, more moral and superior in every way to other Americans. A task force was created to determine which truths were to be ignored, denied, enhanced, twisted, embellished to extreme degrees to achieve that end.
Even in Iowa, where people are generally hard-working, fair-minded, realistic and kind-hearted, there now appear to be some who think it’s okay to tamper with the truth, to change history, and to require schools to teach what they consider “both points of view” when it comes to shameful and uncomfortable subjects such as slavery. I can think of no valid viewpoint to argue in favor of slavery. The industrial revolution proved there was a better solution; one that proved paying jobs were much better, not only for individuals but for the economy of the country in general and for the dignity of all humankind.
One doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that we can’t change the past. It happened. It’s there, with all its successes and failures, all its shimmering beauty and ugly warts. Ignoring it, trying to justify it, even lying about it can’t delete or alter reality. Do those people supporting such deceptions really think that the students who will be taught those remodeled “facts” won’t someday find out the truth? And when they do find out, those people, the supporters of those deceptions, will find themselves added to history. They’ll become part of the ugly parts of the very story they are hoping to suppress.
The so-called reformers can burn the history books and write their own version, they can obliterate historical landmarks and tear down monuments and statues, but they still have to stop somewhere, to draw a line. Would they tear down the Great Pyramids? Raze the Taj Mahal? Dismantle all the man-made wonders of the world? Would destroying those things change the fact that they were constructed with slave labor? Knowing what we know about human nature and our thirst for knowledge, it is highly unlikely that future generations would be misled for very long.
One of the consistent characteristics of Michener’s novels is his tendency to educate us about the past. He tries to explain how and why places, people, creatures and events in his stories came to be. This sometimes involves going back to the Big Bang or wherever it all began. This is human nature. We want to know. We want to know the truth even if it is ugly, disturbing, even frightening. And when one realizes how and what scientists are learning about the past, how diligently they search for the truth about everything that’s happened from the beginning of the Universe to the present, I doubt those fanatic “reformers” have a chance of hiding the truth.