Flutterby™! : Reimagining Superman 2006-06-01 15:15:48.639679+00

Reimagining Superman

2006-06-01 15:15:48.639679+00 by Dan Lyke 2 comments

This one's for Bryant: Over at Digital Warfighter, there's a Reimagining Superman entry that's kind of fun.

I was loaned The Assasination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome, I'm mid-way through chapter 4. It's one of those histories written with an acknowledged bias and slant (as anything with "...A People's..." in it would be), but one of the annoying things is that the book is full of passages bemoaning the mainstream historian's interpretations of events:

Modern writers like H.H. Scullard say that Gaius "unwisely formed a body guard of friends" that "provoked' the optimates into killing him.

And, of course, I want to grab the author by the shirt collars and in a loud voice inform him that history is always written by the winners in such a way as to recast the tale into a myth which supports the historian's culture, get over it and get on with it.

I bring this up because I think it's kind of cool to see people re-cast myths in ways that have evolved none-too-subtly over a human lifespan.

#Comment Re: made: 2006-06-01 16:32:39.697613+00 by: ziffle [edit history]

You make a very important point - currently our public libraries are discarding all the old books and turning themselves into a 'current periodicals' place.

A library should be a repository of all the old works so we can see what they were saying and compare what each era thought or did, and from different perspectives.

Instead the libraries only allow politically correct, stuff like multiculturalism and tolerance, which by the way means intolerance unless it concurrs with current thinking - and notice that current thinking means 'the winners' of the control over the libraries as you pointed out.

The libraries should be bulldozed ans we should start over with new librarians. The current ones are infected with political correctness.

An excellent source is Will and Auriel Durants The Story of Civilization and his smaller works regarding opinions and viewpoints. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Durant

I don't think you need to change the librarians, just the boards of the libraries. I think most of the librarians would love to have the budget and facilities to maintain an archival library, but the boards want to serve patrons, and most patrons are looking for a cheaper alternative to bookstores.