Who really owns the truth?

Do you remember the days when there were good guys and there were bad guys, and it was a good thing when “we” got the bad guy?

Yeah, I’m trying to remember those days, too. There was something about white and black hats, something about a celebration, something about the mood of a country lifting.

Like people tell me what happened when we learned that Hitler was dead. Or when Mussolini was swinging from a lamp post outside a gas station.

But the world doesn’t seem to be that cut-and-dried anymore. No black and white, but a whole Pantone book of shades in between.

Could you imagine, back in 1945, if a member of Congress or a representative of our national media stood up and said that the death of Hitler would only make our problems worse?

He’d be swinging on the same hook with Mussolini.

OK, maybe Al Zarqawi wasn’t the bad guy everybody had hoped we’d surprise with a bunker buster, but shouldn’t his demise count for something?

A strange thing happened in my house the day after Zarqawi bought it. (Not so strange, if you are familiar with the politics that goes on in my house) I was in the living room listening to the NPR pledge drive and Husband was in the family room watching Fox News on television.

It was as if we were living on two separate planets. On his planet, we killed a big bad guy and were rejoicing. Ecstatic Iraqis were waving guns in the air and the sun was shining for democracy. On mine, the guy on the radio running the drive begrudgingly allowed Bush’s statement to air, then came back and said that OK, we’d killed a top Al Qaida leader (among a few other innocent civilians) and while it might have been good presidential PR to take this guy out, in the long run it would only make things worse and cause more death and destruction in an illegal war that was unnecessary and bleeding our country’s vital resources dry. Nobody at the top is telling you the truth, and that’s why you need to give as much as you can to this radio station, which will always tell you the truth.

And I started thinking about truth. And how, as I’ve always theorized, no matter how many sides of the story you hear, the truth lies, bound and gagged, somewhere in the middle.

The world is not as cut-and-dried anymore. And maybe it never was. Maybe this misty look at the past has only resulted from the pressure of year upon year that condenses “truth” into a finely-hewn collection of factoids that are then compiled into history books and spoon-fed into children’s’ brains. Columbus took Isabella and Ferdinand’s money and sailed the ocean blue and discovered the New World. The Pilgrims fled religious persecution in England and found a haven in Plymouth Rock where they lived compatibly with the Native Americans. Meanwhile all the other colonists busied themselves killing this peace-loving indigenous people and stealing their land. FDR saved the country from the Great Depression. He would have stayed out of World War II of not for Japan bombing Pearl Harbor. Overall, women didn’t do much, except maybe sew a flag or free a few slaves or fight for their own right to vote. And African Americans? As a child, I only remember hearing about John Brown, Sojourner Truth and Rosa Parks.

And we’ve grown up accepting these nuggets as incontrovertible “truths.”

But as my mother often reminds me, history is told by the winners, and unless you are motivated enough to dig deeper, you don’t learn the other side of the story. You don’t learn that the Pilgrims wanted to foist their religious beliefs upon everyone they met, sometimes under great duress. That the Native American tribes regularly and enthusiastically made war upon each other, with the winners enslaving the most capable of their surviving enemies. Ditto that Africans took each other as slaves, and it was a group of mercenary and greedy Africans that sold their own people literally down the river and into those terrible boats that took them to the New World. Did we learn that in Washington’s will, he decreed that his slaves be freed? No. Did we learn that Lincoln agonized about the freeing of slaves, concerned that as a population, they wouldn’t know how to run their own lives and would descend into poverty and despair? Don’t remember that one, either. What was Napoleon’s side of the story? Attila the Hun’s? Hirohito? We certainly don’t learn about that in school.

My childhood spanned the length of the Viet Nam war. Just from being conscious during that time I learned two sides of that triangle, and from some of the hipper teachers, the third (meaning why the conflict was actually happening). I haven’t been in school for a very long time, and I don’t know what the textbooks did to it, so if anyone knows, I’d be curious.

I’m also curious what the press of history will do to this era. If Al Quaida will be portrayed as some sort of mosquito-like annoyance that we dealt with fairly handily after a shaky start. Or if it led to something larger. Like that assassination in Serbia led to World War I.

We might never know.

Depends which version of the truth survives.