Eric Foner Speaks to TBoE's Changes to the Curriculum's Textbooks

In The Nation, here.

This is his concluding paragraph:

"Clearly, the Texas Board of Education seeks to inculcate children with a history that celebrates the achievements of our past while ignoring its shortcomings, and that largely ignores those who have struggled to make this a fairer, more equal society. I have lectured on a number of occasions to Texas precollege teachers and have found them as competent, dedicated and open-minded as the best teachers anywhere. But if they are required to adhere to the revised curriculum, the students of our second most populous state will emerge ill prepared for life in Texas, America and the world in the twenty-first century."

Eric Foner has studied and written extensively the lies of how the era popularly known as "Reconstruction" has been taught, and how the lies have been transmitted down the decades in our schools' history classes -- which includes much calumny and distortion of President Grant's personal life and career. These long campaigns of mendaciousness have only begun to be corrected in these later years -- in the eyes of the crazy rightwing and rethugs. So imagine what they changed in the textbooks in these areas.


Also Peter Watts, the award winning Canadian profession / Science Fiction writer, was convicted of assaulting a border security guard earlier this year, when trying to cross back into his own country of Canada, from the U.S., where he'd been helping a friend move house.

All we can hope for now is that the judge is as fair as PW judged the judge to be, and gives the lightest sentence possible, and then suspends it.

Peter Watts, SF Author and Marine-Mammal Biologist, Beaten & Arrested By Border Security

Dr. Watts is Canadian.  He was returning home when the U.S. Border Guards stopped him.

Read about it here.

The sf/f network is working around the clock to help him, with legal issues and raising money, since neither the U.S. nor Canadian media seemed to find this anything of note.  The campaign's started very well, with Cory Doctorow telling the enormous readership of Boing Boing what happened.  The value added is that due to the close-knit culture that is the world of Science Fiction and Fantasy, so many people know Dr. Watts personally.

Just lately, today, the AP service has noticed the action, which one learns via google.

It would be nice to know whether or not the Border Security guards are really federal employees, or yet another group hired via a private corporation getting no-bid contracts that farm out federal and military duties to private citizens.  Almost all federal jobs are now, it seems, as Gail Collins writes about today in her NY Times column, "Going Naked in Kabul":

The guards at the American Embassy in Afghanistan worked for a private contractor called ArmorGroup. A few months ago, a nonprofit watchdog organization reported that some of the guards were being pressured to have sex in a “Lord of the Flies environment.” Whistle-blowers turned over pictures of men in various states of undress, fondling and urinating on one another.


In general, guards from countries like Australia, New Zealand and the United States were the ones involved in the bad behavior. Fortunately, the bulk of the workers were Gurkhas from Nepal who took their jobs very seriously. Unfortunately, the Gurkhas could not understand English.

So the American Embassy in one of the most dangerous spots on the planet was being protected by a combination of people who couldn’t communicate with Americans and thuggish party animals.

The biggest surprise was that the United States did not have its own soldiers guarding its Embassy in a war zone. We have been getting surprised like that a lot lately. Many of the worst stories involve Blackwater Worldwide, a private security contractor that changed its name to Xe Services after a series of mishaps in Iraq, one of which involved spraying bullets around a square in Baghdad and killing 17 civilians.