Evening Musing:
The American relationship with history is very peculiar.
American society insulates itself with a certain willful amnesia, an official disinterest in the critical study of the past.
People seem to prefer myth and legend over fact and evidence. The civil religion requires a certain uncritical ahistoricity. Skeptics are unpatriotic, revisionists are heretics.
And let’s be clear: that goes for American partisans of either flavor. Leftists and right-wingers alike seem conditioned by this peculiar relationship with history.