flat-earth society

.

"Anonymous" posted this story below and I thought it deserved its own space since it is probably as good an example as any of the kind of flat-earth-society thinking that is gaining a foothold in the halls of power and is contributing directly to the warfare that is likely to break out in our country.

I guess it's just the story of the Maine governor who ordered an eleven-panel labor-history mural removed from the Labor Department Headquarters for placement in some more 'appropriate' venue. The governor and his minions said they wanted to portray a labor department that treated employers and employees even-handedly. “Workers and employers need to work together to create opportunity for Maine’s 50,000 unemployed,” a spokeswoman explained.

Right -- and if we give the money to business, they will create jobs for those who need them, a lie of popular long standing that is contradicted again and again by businesses that in fact have amassed enormous wealth and 'trickled down' little or nothing. Year after year, business will create jobs. Year after year, the money will trickle down. Year after year, it doesn't happen.

(Gov. Paul) LePage, a Republican who took office earlier this year, last week ordered the removal of the mural from the department’s lobby, citing complaints from several members of the public, including one who said the images were reminiscent of “communist North Korea, where they use these murals to brainwash the masses.”

Brainwash the masses. Yes indeed. Money will trickle down. Employers and employees have a long and storied history of equal treatment. The police called out in the past to put down strikes and bloody the heads of all those 'equal' employees were simply keeping public order. It had nothing to do with unequally supporting the industrialists whose treatment inspired the strikes.

The flat-earth society. The Joseph Goebbels society. Tell a lie long enough and often enough and pretty soon someone begins to believe it. Even if the facts do no support a flat earth, still the earth is flat. Don't any of these lapel-pin patriots read the history of the country they claim to love? Where do they suppose encouragements like "Talking Union" came from? Was it simply a propaganda tool to brainwash the masses? Isn't it possible that such things grew out of actual-factual hardship and actual-factual sweat shops and actual-factual greedy manipulation? How can anyone "love my country" without knowing a little history?

None of this is going to change because of my rant. But the war that a self-serving rewrite of history invites is pretty damned frightening and light-years away from patriotic. Shame hides her head in shame.
.