« Why do children’s stories about the Civil Rights era generate such visceral MAGA opposition, including passionate demands to ban books in schools and libraries? Because the savages in these stories are not hatchet-wielding Indians on the prairie or slaves bound on ships from Africa. They are Southern white Christian conservatives who blow up little girls in church, shoot Black heroes in the back and murder courageous young men under the cowardly cover of a Mississippi night.
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There was a time when mindless natives whooped and scalped their way through the stylized plains of 1950s Hollywood. Conservatives continue to view that era as a cultural lodestar. But the old sets have been struck. »
— Francis Wilkinson at Talking Points Memo, one of the most enduring political blogs.
Yeah, concepts like the "winning of the west" and the "paternalistic plantation owner" will die hard with rightwingers.
It's true that Hollywood and even the early years of TV programming had much to do with perpetrating these distortions of history. But as long ago as the late 1960s attempts were being made to take a more reality-based view of history.
This is actually from a comedy group called "The Firesign Theater" The blurb at YouTube gives the original release date as 1968. Although it's obviously satire, it must have given people back then a more unvarnished view of history than John Wayne films.
So the effort to demythologize the more blatant distortions in US history goes back more than half a century. The difference is that it's now trending mainstream and therefore is being strongly resisted by those with an interest in preserving such distortions.
