Product Description

“It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble,nineteenth-century humorist Josh Billings remarked. “It’s the things we know that just ain’t so.”


In this bold and brilliantly argued book, acclaimed author and talk-radio host Michael Medved zeroes in on ten of the biggest fallacies that millions of Americans believe about our country—in spite of incontrovertible facts to the contrary. In The 10 Big Lies About America, Medved pinpoints the most pernicious pieces of America-bashing disinformation that pollute current debates about the economy, race, religion in politics, the Iraq war, and other contentious issues.

The myths that Medved deftly debunks include:

Myth: The United States is uniquely guilty for the crime of slavery and based its wealth on stolen African labor.

Fact: The colonies that became the United States accounted for, at most, 3 percent of the abominable international slave trade; the persistence of slavery in America slowed economic progress; and the U.S. deserves unique credit for ending slavery.

Myth: The alarming rise of big business hurts the United States and oppresses its people.

Fact: Corporations played an indispensable role in building America, and corporate growth has brought progress that benefits all with cheaper goods and better jobs.

Myth: The Founders intended a secular, not Christian, nation.

Fact: Even after ratifying the Constitution, fully half the state governments endorsed specific Chris­tian denominations. And just a day after approving the First Amendment, forbidding the establishment of religion, Congress called for a national “day of public thanksgiving and prayer” to acknowledge “the many signal favors of Almighty God.”

Myth: A war on the middle class means less comfort and opportunity for the average American.

Fact: Familiar campaign rhetoric about the victimized middle class ignores the overwhelming statistical evidence that the standard of living keeps rising for every segment of the population, as well as the real-life experience of tens of millions of middle-class Americans.

Each of the ten lies—widely believed among elites and taught as truth in universities and public schools—is a grotesque, propagandistic distortion of the historical record. For everyone who is tired of hearing America denigrated by people who don’t know what they’re talking about, The 10 Big Lies About America supplies the ammunition necessary to fire back the next time somebody tries to recycle these baseless beliefs. Medved’s witty, well-documented rebuttal is a refreshing reminder that as Americans we should feel blessed, not burdened, by our heritage.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19355 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11-18
• Released on: 2008-11-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780307394064
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
MICHAEL MEDVED is the host of one of the most popular talk-radio programs in the country, reaching more than four million loyal listeners. He is the bestselling author of ten other books, including Right Turns, Hollywood vs. America, and What Really Happened to the Class of ’65? A member of USA Today’s board of contributors, he also writes a weekly column for Townhall.com. For more than a decade he served as cohost of Sneak Previews, PBS’s weekly movie-review show. Medved graduated from Yale with departmental honors in American history and attended Yale Law School as well. He lives with his family in the Seattle area.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
A Tainted Legacy

NO CAUSE FOR CELEBRATION

Why do so many Americans find it so difficult to celebrate their nation’s achievements and blessings?

How did cherished occasions of joy and gratitude become the focus of anguish and controversy?

I confronted these uncomfortable questions in my own backyard when Seattle’s notorious “Thanksgiving Letter” became a brief, embarrassing media sensation.

On November 8, 2007, the stern missive went out to all teachers and staff of the city’s public schools insisting that they should “struggle with these complex issues” surrounding the yearly celebration and avoid, at all costs, “teaching about Thanksgiving in traditional ways.” The bureaucrats who signed the letter worried that without their timely intervention, thoughtless educators might arrange precisely the sort of outmoded, one-dimensional observance of Turkey Day that emphasized inappropriate elements such as pride and reverence.

“With so many holidays approaching we want to again remind you that Thanksgiving can be a particularly difficult time for many of our Native students,” warned the officials (led by a school district honcho who identified herself with the intimidating title of “director of equity, race, and learning support”). To achieve a more appropriate perspective, they directed all staff in the Seattle public schools to consult a list of “Eleven Thanksgiving Myths” prepared by the radical “Native” Web site Oyate.org. The letter urged the educators to “take a look?.?.?.?and begin your own deconstruction,” specifically citing Myth #11:

Myth: Thanksgiving is a happy time.

Fact: For many Indian people, “Thanksgiving” is a time of mourning, of remembering how a gift of generosity was rewarded by theft of land and seed corn, extermination of many from disease and gun, and near total destruction of many more from forced assimilation. As currently celebrated in this country, “Thanksgiving” is a bitter reminder of 500 years of betrayal returned for friendship.

As soon as I read this alarming letter, I began to wonder how earnest teachers might take its suggestions to heart and begin to commemorate this festival of destruction and betrayal with, say, their kindergarten charges. My own appallingly innocent 1950s childhood offered shamelessly sentimental Thanksgiving pageants, complete with tacky Pilgrim and Indian costumes and, on one occasion, a live turkey. On my nationally syndicated radio show I speculated on the way such sweet but silly extravaganzas might be updated to accommodate the hip sensibility of contemporary Seattle. Perhaps the nervous kiddies could now parade onto the stage, appropriately costumed as little Pilgrims and Pilgrimettes, and then, after enumerating the countless crimes of their forebears, they could lash themselves (or each other) with miniature leather whips and wail together in regretful agony. The proud parents would no doubt rise and applaud in tearful, self-righteous appreciation.

Much to the humiliation of those of us who choose to raise our children in the Great Northwest, the story of Seattle’s idiotic effort to turn Thanksgiving into a “day of mourning” became a subject for national debate. After I discussed the issue on the air, the Fox News Channel contacted me to provide a local perspective, and they also sent camera crews to interview local Indian tribes. The Tulalips, who occupy a prosperous, well-organized reservation about a half hour north of downtown (complete with high-end shopping center, resort hotel, and, inevitably, casino), emphatically affirmed their pride in the annual November holiday. Tribal spokesman Daryl Williams explained that “most Native Americans celebrate Thanksgiving in the same way that many other Americans do—as a way to be thankful for abundance and a chance to spend time with families.” The Tulalips love to stage festive communal Thanksgiving feasts at which, in a bow to regional traditions, they serve alder-smoked salmon rather than turkey. Williams told the press: “The spirit of Thanksgiving, of people working together to help each other, is the spirit I think that needs to grow in this country, because this country has gotten very divisive.”

He’s right, of course. The divisiveness, shame, and self-hatred have spread far beyond the damp and moody precincts of Seattle. In fact, the year before our “Emerald City” launched its controversial assault on Thanksgiving, the Associated Press featured an account of an innovative educator at an elementary school in San Francisco, yet another city known for brain-dead trendiness:

Teacher Bill Morgan walks into his third-grade class wearing a black Pilgrim hat made of construction paper and begins snatching up pencils, backpacks and glue sticks from his pupils. He tells them the items now belong to him because he “discovered” them. The reaction is exactly what Morgan expects. The kids get angry and want their things back.

Morgan is among elementary school teachers who have ditched the traditional Thanksgiving lesson.?.?.?. He has replaced it with a more realistic look at the complex relationship between Indians and white settlers.

Stealing backpacks and glue sticks provides a “realistic look” at a “complex relationship”?

Across the country, too many Americans have developed a complex, even tortured relationship with their own past. And like all deeply dysfunctional bonds, this frayed connection rests on a series of destructive lies—sweeping distortions that poison our sense of who we are and what our country means.

Consider, for example, the oddly apologetic May 2007 commemoration of the four hundredth anniversary of the first permanent British settlement in the New World. With both the queen of England and the president of the United States journeying to Virginia to mark the occasion, federal officials took grim pains to tamp down any sense of merriment in the festivities. The National Park Service invested taxpayer money in new exhibits at its “Historic Jamestowne” visitor center, and these displays explicitly shunned the congratulatory messages of prior tributes. “Past Jamestown anniversaries were referred to as ‘celebrations,’?” warned a prominently posted introduction to the Park Service exhibition. “Because many facets of Jamestown’s history are not cause for celebration, like human bondage and the displacement of Virginia Indians, the Jamestown 400th Anniversary is referred to as the Jamestown 2007 Commemoration.”

Another display in the same facility struck Edward Rothstein of the New York Times with its remarkably unbalanced approach: “The Indians, we read, were ‘in harmony with the land that sustained them’ and formed ‘an advanced, complex society of families and tribes.’ English society—the society that gave us the King James Bible and Shakespeare along with the stirrings of democratic argument—is described as offering ‘limited opportunity’ in which a ‘small elite’ were landowners; in London, we are told, ‘life was difficult,’ with social dislocation, low wages, unemployment, etc.”

While official observances scrupulously avoided any overtly festive messages, small crowds of protestors denounced even the subdued themes of the “commemoration.” Demonstrators from groups such as Black Lawyers for Justice and the New Black Panther Party announced their intention to “crash this illegitimate party and pursue the overdue case for Reparations and Justice for the victims of slavery, mass murder and genocide.” The protest leader, Malik Zulu Shabazz, cited “crimes committed at Jamestown which resulted in America being originated on the corrupt foundation of racism, population removal, mass murder, slavery and a litany of crimes against divine law and humanity.”

Mr. Shabazz not only rejects the long-cherished view that American society arose in fulfillment of some powerful, providential purpose but proudly advances the opposite perspective: that the nation’s origins involved a “litany of crimes against divine law and humanity.”

“It’s not just Jamestown,” he told the Associated Press. “It’s what started in Jamestown.”

And what started in Jamestown? Our distinctive civilization. Malik Shabazz and other America haters view the nation itself as a vicious, criminal enterprise that requires radical transformation if not outright termination. In June 2006, Jake Irwin, a student at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and an outspoken supporter of Venezuelan demagogue Hugo Chávez, told the Wall Street Journal: “My political belief is that the U.S. is a horrendous empire that needs to end.”

POISONING THE PRESENT

Though few of our fellow citizens share this overt hostility to our national project, the big lies about America still circulate so widely that they feed an insecure and angry public mood. Grotesque distortions about the nation’s origins and institutions poison our present and threaten our future. But any attempt to challenge the prevalent slanders will draw scorn as a sign of simple-minded jingoism, while those who teach or preach the worst about America earn fulsome praise for their “sophistication” or “courage.” As a result, our universities and public schools eagerly endorse the cynical assumptions about the country, and alarmist mass media recycle hysterical accounts of imminent doom and corruption.

We worry over anti-Americanism abroad but parrot its primary charges here at home. While objective indications identify residents of the United States as among the most fortunate people in human history, much of the public refuses to acknowledge our blessings be...

Customer Reviews

Balance to What My Children Hear in School
My high-schoolers' history textbooks casually spout several of the lies that this book debunks in easily-understood, well-researched chapters. I was looking for something that would present the "other side" of what they hear, and this is authoritative and so engrossing that my son (age 16) read the entire book without stopping (even eating while he read!) as soon as we got it.

I'd heard Michael Medved on the radio and was always struck by his knowledge of history and ability to communicate, which this book confirms.

Reading The 10 Big Lies restored my positive feelings about the history of our nation, and also added to my pride and gratitude for living here. It was especially helpful to read well-supported GOOD news as a counterbalance to the negativity all over TV and the newspapers.

An uplifting book filled with useful and sometimes surprising facts--that I enjoyed reading.

Thank you, America
As European (Spaniard), I have enjoyed the most peaceful period in our 2000 + years of History... thanks to those vilified Americans. You helped us getting rid of fascism and communism (well, maybe you helped Franco to stay in power more than desired, but when he died, your Government was a good mediator in our transition period to democracy). And thanks to your protection, we didn't have to spend that much in weapons to scare off the soviets, thus establishing our so much well-liked welfare society(sorry, not as good as many American lefties think it is). You have been a bargain to Europe. Thank you. I will buy this book as a vaccine against the lies I have to endure in Spain regarding USA and its noble people.

Effective, mostly accurate, a bit over-the-top.
Recently, I was sitting in a pub in Oxford with a friend from India. He seems to find me, an American who did not share in the general "euphoria" in the UK over Obama's election, a rather exotic creature. But he made an interesting suggestion: why not look at the election of Obama, even if you don't welcome it, as a chance to reinvent what it means to be an American Christian, in a way that will connect more deeply with the world at large?

His challenge was still in the back of my mind when I read this book.

The years of American hegemony are now ending, and China and India will soon take positions on the world stage in some proportion to their vast populations. Witnessing how broadly many of the "lies" Medved describes are believed outside the US, I'd love to give Chinese and Indian friends a book like this and say: "See what America has been, at its best, for the world. As your power grows, try to emulate what you can of our successes, or do us one better."

Most of Medved's arguments are solid. He cites leading experts as well as opponents to make his case, and I think generally gets his facts right. (Notice that critics so far generally depend on vague complaints, unable it seems to point to specific errors.) Among other things, he argues that: America has seldom been as nasty to the Indians as is often claimed. The Founding Fathers were less secularist than supposed. (I wish he'd given both sides here, though -- as Steven Waldmon does in Founding Faith.) Big Business does help the country. America has seldom been truly imperialist, and has done the world a lot of good. And morality rises and falls; "a dizzying roller coaster of steep ups and downs, zigzags, climbs and reverses, and even loop-the-loops."

Medved carefully limits his claims, then backs them up with copious relevant facts. Many of his facts and anecdotes are quite interesting -- McKinley's prayer for the Phillipines, the story of how "America the Beautiful" was written, the size of houses in the 1950s compared to our "supersized" homes of today.

In the end, though, Medved is a bit too triumphalist to wish his book into the hands of Indian or Chinese friends. Sometimes he simply protests too much. Granted there was no official American policy of genocide. Granted that most Indians deaths came from disease, that others married out rather than being murdered, even that Indian cultures were "savage" in some sense. Still, the fact is, we wound up with the land (just as China ended up with Tibet, and India with Nagaland), and they wound up with treaties for half of almost extinct salmon runs. Is self-justification really the right tone to take? Having heard the same tone, and some of the same arguments, from Chinese about Tibet, I feel a bit uncomfortable with them. I would also have liked to have seen a more positive statement from Medved on the role native peoples were to play in America, culturally as well as in terms of territory.

To some extent, Medved's "American exceptionalism" cuts us off from others -- from our European roots, from human tradition as a whole. (Sociologist Rodney Stark gives a much more nuanced reading of what went into American success -- most of which is not unique to America.)

I believe America has done a great deal of good in the world. But pride comes before a fall, for countries as well as individuals. One thing that typifies nations at their greatest periods of growth -- Japan in the late 19th Century, China during the Tang and today, America at the revolution -- is a combination of confidence, and openness to outside ideas.

The challenge for conservatives, and for Christians, is to find a way of affirming our ideals, to seek reform on the model of Burke, Jefferson, Reagan, or St Paul, yet to do so in a way that helps us develop a fuller appreciate of the God-given beauties and truths in other traditions as well. Medved does seem to appreciate good in other cultures to some extent, but is unable to articulate his patriotism, and how it relates to the riches humanity shares in common, in what I found to be a fully satisfying manner. This is a generally excellent book, full of useful information, and an important answer to unfair attacks on the American heritage; but infused with a less than fully satisfying philosophy of patriotism. Maybe Medved should read G. K. Chesterton.

author, The Truth Behind the New Atheism