Lots of things get lost, misplaced or just plain misinterpreted, on account of time being loose. In addition, the old adage “the victors write the history books” allows those in power to use loose time to deliberately hide, change, or redact the history of actual events to suit them.
Of course, the changes are never seamless, and things sometimes leak through, or get rediscovered. There’s a whole secret history of the world out there, for those who are willing to look.
I don’t just mean the obvious things, like the fact that many of our heroes were actually monsters, and many of our villains weren’t quite so bad as we made them out to be. Andrew Jackson, for example, had so much Native American blood on his hands that he forgot what it smelled like. Zachary Taylor stole half of Mexico in the world’s biggest armed robbery, and we were so outraged that we made him president.
On the other hand, Robert E Lee was simply a man of his times, forced to make an impossible decision, and he’s been dragged around the history books by the heels because of it. King George III is made out to be a ruthless tyrant, and the simple fact is that he was mad. In a sane society, he’d have been treated for severe mental illness...But he was in Britain, so they made him king.
And then there’s the people that whose place in history is all...fuzzy. Franklin Roosevelt turned the depression around, built our national infrastructure, and insisted on unconditional surrender as the only terms that would be acceptable for dealing with the nightmarish regimes of Nazi Germany and Tojo’s Japan...But he also shoveled Americans of Japanese descent into concentration camps, and refused to accept the refugees on the St Louis, dooming the Jews on board. So was he a hero or a monster? Well, it turns out that you can be both.
It’s not just historical figures. Events and places with weird and interesting histories lie all around us, if we could only be bothered to look. I know Tucson is stuffed full of ancient horror and seriously bizarre locations and events, and nobody can tell me that a place as old as Boston - to say nothing of London - isn’t a warehouse full of strange happenings and lost secrets.
How cool is that? How many fun, nightmarish things are 3 yards below your feet or 10 feet in front of your face? Have you got the guts to find out? Is it - to you - worth it to shut off the TV long enough to go looking for oddball shit that has fallen through the cracks in history?
It’s a strange world, people. Let’s find out just HOW strange, shall we?
Okay for now,
Dok
