- Today’s students get steeped in American tales of genocide, slavery, oppression and segregation. American history is taught less as a progressively realized grand narrative and more as a series of power conflicts between oppressor and oppressed.
The academic left pushed this reinterpretation, but as usual the extreme right ended up claiming the spoils.
Sweet tapdancing christ has this mutherfucker not read Exodus? has he not read the Cliff's Notes for Exodus? THE BOOK OF EXODUS IS FULL OF PLAGUES, MUTHERFUCKER. It is the Kill Bill of biblical literature. It suggests that if God is on your side, genocide is A-OK. They were one of thirteen colonies, Dave. The Carolinas weren't at all about fleeing Cromwell. It's like watching the Church Lady on shrooms.The book of Exodus is full of social justice — care for the vulnerable, the equality of all souls.
It suggests that history is in the shape of an upward spiral.
The Exodus narrative has pretty much been dropped from our civic culture. Schools cast off the Puritans as a bunch of religious fundamentalists.
It should be possible to revive the Exodus template, to see Americans as a single people trekking through a landscape of broken institutions. What’s needed is an act of imagination, somebody who can tell us what our goal is, and offer an ideal vision of what the country and the world should be.
There are many lenses one can see Exodus through. -- I'm not sure that the mass killing of the Egyptians or the removing of the existing populations of Canaan (a process continuing to this day) completely shutters the story Gorski is choosing to highlight: The difficulty and challenge is looking through both lenses at the same time, hoping that we are moving towards a story that can have liberation without genocide. Given the history of humans so far, it's a hard story to write.The Exodus story has six acts: first, a life of slavery and oppression, then the revolt against tyranny, then the difficult flight through the howling wilderness, then the infighting and misbehavior amid the stresses of that ordeal, then the handing down of a new covenant, a new law, and then finally the arrival into a new promised land and the project of building a new Jerusalem.
There are many lenses one can see most of the bible through, no doubt. But to somehow imagine that - wait, where's that quote? I mean, (1) "for particularly narrow interpretations of 'Americans'" (2) it's the same story that makes plague blankets and death marches okay. "I'm oppressed, it's payback time." Having read up extensively on the Puritans, what they believed and what they were fleeing, I for one long for a country that never attempts to emulate them in any way, shape or form and I'm a middle-class, middle-aged white male.For most of the past 400 years, Americans did have an overarching story. It was the Exodus story.
Another fine entry into the log. Whatever, Dave. I think he's right about one thing, at least; we're going to have a power vacuum, if we don't already. The country is searching for a leader. A regrettably large number of people require that leader to be white.