Revisionist History Challenged
Today, it is Electrifying Venom as Kate, a mere woman, challenges the statement that "no women deserved to make it" onto the Top 20 figures in American History and that we women should "accept [slanted versions of] history for what it is rather than trying to force it to fit into your agenda." Sorry boys... We're edumakated nowadays and ye cain't put one over on us near as easy as ya could a'fore. heh.Ok, I read his rationale, and I buy it—which is not to say somebody else’s top 20 list wouldn’t perfectly legitimately have Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony on it—I volunteer Alexander Hamilton’s place on the list for that purpose. (And let’s not forget people like—the name escapes me at the moment: the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who helped mobilize the abolitionist movement. It will come to me the second I post this . . .)
But the criticism (quasiquote) Harriet Tubman freed a race and Mark Twain wrote some amusing stories (quasiquote) is if anything more slanted and less intellectually respectable than the thinking in the original remark.
It might be an amusing exercise to see how much agreement there is on peoples’ lists. I’m inclined to put both John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan very near the top (and no I’m not a political conservative; I’m an anarchist) because Kennedy set the Apollo program in motion (not because they are easy, but because they are hard) and Reagan because he had the balls do step outside the MAD framework and end the Cold War, 30 years after it should have been ended.
I can imagine that Sandra Day O’Connor and Geraldine Ferraro might make some peoples’ top 20 list, and they wouldn’t make mine, even though I think the things they represent were major achievements for the US, decades and centuries overdue; neither of them have actually done anything in their own right that would put them up there.
Just musings.
Posted by on 07/22/03 at 01:19 PM
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