Fiction
"I learned that Washington never told a lie
I learned that soldiers seldom die
I learned that everybody's free
And that's what the teacher said to me"
I learned that soldiers seldom die
I learned that everybody's free
And that's what the teacher said to me"
—Tom Paxton, "What Did You Learn in School Today?"
"Television is not the truth. Television's a god-damned amusement park."
—Howard Beale, Network
Cap.Ben Sisko: You want to know? You really want to know what my problem is? I'll tell you. Las Vegas, 1962 — that's my problem. In 1962, black people weren't very welcome there. Oh, sure, they could be performers or janitors, but customers? Never! ...The Civil Rights Movement was still in its infancy. It wasn't an easy time for our people, and I'm not going to pretend that it was!
Kasidy Yates: Baby, I know that Vic's isn't a totally accurate representation of the way things were, but it isn't meant to be. It shows us the way things could have been. The way they should've been.
Sisko: We cannot ignore the truth about the past.
Kasidy Yates: Baby, I know that Vic's isn't a totally accurate representation of the way things were, but it isn't meant to be. It shows us the way things could have been. The way they should've been.
Sisko: We cannot ignore the truth about the past.
—Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, "Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang"
Real Life
"No, the spread wasn’t filled with a rich plantation owner’s wife in a hoop skirt and wide-brimmed hat sipping sweet tea as her slave fanned her. The spread featured pictures of a Blake Lively look-alike in crap clothes you could buy from Talbots. The pictures are pretty harmless by themselves (except for those overpriced ass clothes), but Gawker called them out for romanticizing the Antebellum South and calling it a time of 'beauty and grace' while leaving out all that slavery stuff. Basically, in Blake’s mind that era was just like Gone with the Wind. And with that, Paula Deen totally wants to get naked, lube Blake’s mind up with butter and make sweet, sweet love to it."
—DListed
on "Allure of Antebellum"
on "Allure of Antebellum""To everyone bitching about how it's not accurate to Greek mythology, I kindly request that you stick a ball-gag in your mouth and go sit in the corner. Of course it's going to differ from the source material, it's a kids' movie. We can't show Zeus boning everything with a hole in it as our hero's noble beginnings."
"'God, isn't is terrible how popular culture rewrites and romanticizes history to appeal to the lowest common denominator?'
Yes, I agree, now let's find some pirates and romanticize their bollocks off."
Yes, I agree, now let's find some pirates and romanticize their bollocks off."
"Nostalgia demands we treat the past as apolitical so that we can simply love it. It aspires to be apolitical art, which is impossible to start, and then to be apolitical art about history, which is doubly impossible. And while nostalgia is inescapable for geek culture, there are options: ways to be self-aware and smart about it. Queer as Folk is fundamentally a piece of nostalgia about the Manchester gay club scene, but it’s not blind to the implications. Nor was The Grand, Russell T Davies’s stab at period drama. But Mark Gatiss’s work fails to be self-aware about the implications of nostalgia. It just blindly apes things Mark Gatiss liked in the past."
"I have heard complaints in the past that The Unquiet Dead offers a stylised picture postcard view of the Victorian era that completely misinterprets the period. I hate to break it to you but Doctor Who always offers a stylised version of history from the overly theatrical tone of The Aztecs, The Crusade & The Massacre to the jolly adventure romps like The Smugglers & The Highlanders right through to the colourful cliché ridden delights such as The Time Warrior, The Talons of Weng-Chiang and Black Orchid. None of these stories is a particularly accurate portrayal of any of the periods that they are set in because you are making the choice re-interpret the era to suit the story that you are trying to fit in it. Any of the stories I have listed above could be massively moulded to suit a different tone and would suggest an entirely different take on the period. I just don’t think you can discuss and criticise the integrity of how a writer paints a picture of the period when they are going to do something as anachronistic as dumping a time machine and time travellers within in it. The Unquiet Dead offers a whiter than white, huddle into your jacket and cuddle up to loved ones view of the Victorian era but that is fine for the mock Dickensian romp that it is trying to tell...And besides, it looks gorgeous."
"It is true that in recent times fairy-stories have usually been written or 'adapted' for children. But so may music be, or verse, or novels, or history, or scientific manuals. It is a dangerous process, even when it is necessary. It is indeed only saved from disaster by the fact that the arts and sciences are not as a whole relegated to the nursery; the nursery and schoolroom are merely given such tastes and glimpses of the adult thing as seem fit for them in adult opinion (often much mistaken). Any one of these things would, if left altogether in the nursery, become gravely impaired. So would a beautiful table, a good picture, or a useful machine (such as a microscope), be defaced or broken, if it were left long unregarded in a schoolroom. Fairy-stories banished in this way, cut off from a full adult art, would in the end be ruined; indeed in so far as they have been so banished, they have been ruined. The value of fairy-stories is thus not, in my opinion, to be found by considering children in particular. Collections of fairy-stories are, in fact, by nature attics and lumber-rooms, only by temporary and local custom play-rooms. Their contents are disordered, and often battered, a jumble of different dates, purposes, and tastes; but among them may occasionally be found a thing of permanent virtue: an old work of art, not too much damaged, that only stupidity would ever have stuffed away."
"There are many people who do not appreciate these fairy-tales, call them childish and insipid. [...] Fairy-tales are dished up to suit modern requirements, the crudeness, the harshness, the sudden, unexpected tenderness, abandoned almost as soon as uttered, the harmless 'indecencies' are all carefully removed; but it is no longer the wayward, funny soul of humanity that is speaking, but something quite different, something which smells of influences more familiar to us, more within the range of our every day horizon. After reading such a doctored tale we are no nearer to understanding the old meaning of the legend, but remain comfortably nestled and cosily settled in our little modern frame of daily routine, — 'and, dear me, there's the dinner bell!'."
—Bernard Gilliat-Smith, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society (1912)
(1912)