“Maine is open for business,” says Governor Paul LePage. Of all of the ways that the governor hopes to create jobs, the project that he’s getting the most recognition for involves hiring a few painters.
LePage intends to remove a mural in the Department of Labor which depicts the successes of unions and the labor movement. Names of union leaders will disappear from the office buildings named after them. LePage feels it sends the wrong message to business.
Apparently Maine is a much more attractive place to partake in capitalism if workers are unaware of their ability to fight for better conditions.
I’ll give LePage credit for one thing: removing the good that labor unions have done from the history books could to be the only way to turn public opinion against them.
In his dystopian classic “1984,” George Orwell created a world in which the news could be edited and the history books changed at will to reflect a more preferable truth. We’ve all seen facts twisted by politicians in campaign speeches and at rallies, but it’s rare for them to put it into law.
The scariest part is that LaPage’s isn’t the only Orwellian scheme perpetrated by the right over the last few years. Ronald Reagan has been transformed into a conservative ideologue eager to obstruct many of the plans he initiated or agreed to in a compromise. Texas put a stronger emphasis on the founding fathers’ Christianity when they rewrote their history textbooks.
And if all that’s not enough for you, then tune in to the Glenn Beck show. His daily game of mentally-unstable-connect-the-dots is proof that if there’s a line drawn between two names on a chalkboard, people will believe they are connected.
I’d even go so far as to say that Fox News is to America as the Ministry of Truth is to Orwell’s Oceania. Even on ‘fair and balanced’ hard news programs, right-wing candidates and strategists will come on and tell you what’s true for them. There’s never a shortage of prominent Republicans on Fox.
It all comes down to a few simple truths—unions aren’t the reason our economy is suffering, Christianity isn’t for everyone and Reagan was more practical than the Tea Party. Don’t let Roger Ailes’s minitruth tell you otherwise.
