When scholars and politicians engage in revisionist history, rewriting certain sequences to suit their causes and their needs, it sparks
anger and sometimes destroys their credibility. But what about when ordinary people - say, around family dinner tables - rewrite their own history, not the swashbuckling wars of empires but backyard battles and kitchen victories - and in so doing rewrite yours and mine? Hearing them narrate these twisted tales in which they almost inevitably portray themselves as heroes and victims, never as deadbeats or enablers or endangerers, we squirm. Should we speak up, shouldering our weapons as soldiers of truth, declaring I was there and THIS is how it was? Is it worthwhile to deny them the soft comfort of their denial?
Say you're all sitting around and one of the elders gets into Homeric mode and begins, "I'll never forget the time Cheryl punched me in the nose."
"Really?" asks someone (who either knows the actual story and is going along for the ride, or doesn't). "She just slugged you? Right out of the blue?"
"Out of the blue," vows the elder. "That harpy assaulted me."
And you know, and half the people in the room know too, that one day in 1974, when the speaker was young and newly divorced, in a fit of rage she seized a bread knife from a kitchen drawer, bundled her eight-year-old son into the passenger seat of her car, and drove at breakneck speed, knife clutched in one hand, to the house where her ex-husband lived with his new wife, Cheryl, the one he'd left her for. And when Cheryl came out of the house and leaned into the car through the passenger window, the driver began jabbing at Cheryl with the knife, slashing wildly. The eight-year-old boy sat frozen with fear on the passenger seat between his mother and his stepmother, the blade whirring inches from his face and legs.
Dodging the knife, Cheryl thrust her arm into the car and clouted her assailant, then rushed back into her house and locked the door. Miraculously, no blood was drawn. The knife lay on the car's vinyl floor-mat at the boy's feet.
And you hear the altered version of this story, and so many others from so many mouths, decades later, thinking: Will this ever end, these lies about the past that elders tell, that everyone tells, to make themselves look better and feel better regardless of truth, and regardless of how their actions affected others? Are they never to apologize, never to repent?
Sometimes you have to accept that they won't. They have either actually forgotten or they haven't but they will tell the revised version forever. They will not apologize. And what, you ask yourself, would be gained if they did?
