WRESTLING WITH MYTHS & MEMORIES

"Students, take out your history book to page 112...." Remember the teacher who said that?

Everyone in every generation lives their lives with both myths and memories. The first are the past-as-we-have-learned-it. The second are the past-as-we-wish-to-remember-it. Both are highly selective activities, for both require we sort through what the human race pretentiously likes to call "the facts."

To be factual about it, facts [outside the rigorous testing of say a chemistry lab] are often one's perception of the events. Consider examples like the deaths of Lincoln, Hitler, FDR and Kennedy. Each an historical event...each witnessed by dozens even hundreds...yet each with countless details still argued by those professional keepers-of-facts we call historians.

Given this all too human habit, colorful historical mythologies have grown over the centuries. Consider the mythology of how Alexander's conquest of Persia stirred an East-West bitterness that bubbles up in the Islamic terrorism of today....the mythology that the Germans defeat of Rome in the 1st C planted the fields of Teutonic supremacy harvested as recently as the Nazis...the over-patriotic mythology of Washington's despair at Valley Forge...the more-accepted mythology that the Allies won at Normandy rather than the Germans losing.

These "mythologies" are not lies, simply history's version of what was true. Once such narratives reach our state-approved textbooks -- well, succeeding generations of students have little else but to embrace them. Which is not necessarily a terrible thing; it simply is what it is in every culture in every age.

But then there are our memories.

These don't make it into textbooks, mostly just into the conversations around the family table. And the older we grow, the more our memories grow. In number and especially in comfort. I mean, what better invitation can a grandfather receive than an eager-eyed question like: "So tell us, what was it like back then...?"

Now there are those in our midst who will dismiss an old man's remembrances of things past. You know, like atomic scientists, statisticians, lawyers and reporters. You see, they claim to be among the professional keepers-of-the-facts. And that's OK. But it's probably a lot more OK when it comes to challenging national mythologies ...rather than disputing personal memories. Only a Grinch would do that.