JAMES LILEKS: “This is the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s website…‘How can we bring equality to history?'”

The sentiments behind the thought were so self-evidently correct that no one stopped to think how bizarre that sounds. At the most facile reading, it suggests that history should be rearranged to reflect not what happened, but what should have happened if modern values were transposed on the past. Every generation interprets the past through their own values, of course, but there is still general agreement that certain dates, people, events, inventions, and artistic creations were seminal (sorry) and influential, and while you can argue about their effect, you can’t deny that they happened. You can, however, diminish their importance in favor of other dates, people, events, inventions, and artistic creations. In some cases this is wish-fulfillment. In most cases this is a graduate thesis. It may be a contrary argument whose appeal rests in its fashionable vestments, but if it has the Proper Modern Values, it becomes a new gospel simply because it rebels against those things the spirit of the times require we rebel against.

It’s like playing a shell game and insisting that the pea was really under the middle shell because that’s what you chose. But it was under this one. I know but it should have been under that one.

As the old joke told by Russian dissidents went, “In the Soviet Union, the future is always certain; it is the past that is always changing.” Read the whole thing.