THE HISTORY OF EVERYTHING IN 600 WORDS

It is said the night has a thousand eyes. It can also be said, the day has a million images. Every pair of daytime eyes recounting what they believe they see. But, incredibly, everyone is seeing something slightly different. From Monday morning quarterbacks to morning-after lovers to next-day theatre reviewers to long-after historians.

Oh yes, historians too! Scholars studiously trained in assembling the facts, but always the facts as they see and sense them. Churchill said it wisely: "History is always written by the winners." He added even more wisely: "History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it." I always told my history classes: "History is the greatest story ever told, and retold, and retold."

Over 3000 years ago the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses the Great wrote the history of his dazzling defeat of Egypt's last remaining challenge: the Hittites. An Indo-European empire sprawling from present day Turkey to the Gaza. And for over 3000 years, this eclat of Ramses has remained intact. We've believed what he believed.

Then archaeologists came upon long-buried Hittite cuneiform records. Whoa, they were doing it even back then! Twisting the facts, re-writing the stories, changing history. Because, you see, the Hittite records of their war with Egypt was a whole different thing,

This conflict, about 1200 BC, was perhaps the world's first great war between nations, not simply tribes. But while Ramses has portrayed himself, in the Egyptian hieroglyphics in the Valley of the Kings, as a mighty victor, the Hittite record reports it mightily differently. In fact they write the Pharaoh barely survived the battle with his life.

Who then to believe...? As the great huckster P.T. Barnum liked to say: "Who you going to believe -- your own eyes or me!" As with economics, the so-called science of history is hardly comparable to the science of mathematics or chemistry or biology. With them, when you mix X with Y, you can be pretty sure what you will get. With the so-called facts of history, that simply is not so.

In today's miasma of conflicting national values and visions, hopes and hysteria, our free society is free to arrive at a million different conclusions about any single image. That's because each of us cherishes our own particular apercus by which we find what we hold to be the truth. When our Declaration of Independence states "we hold these truths to be self-evident," Jefferson's rhetoric rings so lyrically; but not even his fellow founding fathers could have defended the claim.

I have three children and several close relatives and friends who have all been raised in the very same country, century, and culture I have. But do you think there is anything from these last seven paragraphs likely to be "self-evident" to them? I can't...! And they can't....! And I'll hear about it from them right after e-mailing this to you. You who won't find much that is self-evident either...!