THE FATHER OF HISTORY is a man named Herodotus, a Greek writer who lived in the ancient times before the birth of Alexander the Great or even Richard Nixon. Herodotus has been called the first "historian" in that he made it his business to write down the story of mankind as best he could with the available information in the 4th Century B.C., which was way before Google or Wikipedia.
As a result Herodotus has been referred to, even by some of his contemporaries, as "the father of lies." His chief sin seems to have been a willingness to report popular lore alongside verifiable fact. For instance, during the reign of the Persian king Cambyses, the evil and murderous son of the first Persian conqueror, Cyrus, Herodotus wrote that a Babylonian journalist threw both his shoes one after another at the most powerful ruler in the world during a farewell press conference in Baghdad.
Centuries later scholars of antiquity doubt if such a preposterous event could have taken place in such a heavily guarded and hyper vigilant venue as a close quarters photo-op by a universally unpopular and commonly detested foreign monarch in occupied territory.
Clearly Herodotus was just making this stuff up. And so, undoubtedly, will our current technological state-of-the-art Geek historian -- You-Tube-Us --be rejected by future generations who will be expected to believe that the President of the United States was dodging hurled shoes like some kind of Whack-The-Mole video game.
Puh-LEESE! We all know how this kind of "live" video can be digitally enhanced, altered or completely fabricated. Will we expect intelligent life forms 2,500 years from now to believe that that was a a real event featuring the actual United States President, George W. Bush, grinning that infuriatingly guilty grin of his, ducking those Iraqi soles last week?
We live in extraordinary times, you and I. Herodotus would have a field day describing how in a little more than 10 years the greatest power in the world has gone from impeaching its president for lying about marital infidelity to allowing a president to go unprosecuted for lying about everything from reasons for going to war in Mesopotamia to reasons the economy went to hell in Middle America. And instead of standing up like men and hurling our shoes in the president's face out of conviction, American journalists have acted like boys lighting a flaming bag of dog poop outside the White House front entrance and then ringing the doorbell before running to hide behind the wall to wait and see if the president opens the door and dirties his shoes.
Leave a comment