Simon & Schuster
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In his new book, “What this comedian said will shock you” (coming May 21 from Simon & Schuster), Bill Maher, the opinionated host of HBO’s “Real Time,” hilariously denounces what he thinks is wrong with America’s culture wars to his political stagnation.
In the excerpt below, Maher takes aim at those who brazenly invoke today’s standards to rewrite history in ways that, even in “Star Trek,” would go too far.
Don’t miss Robert Costa’s interview with Bill Maher on “CBS Sunday Morning” on May 12!
“What This Comedian Said Will Shock You” by Bill Maher
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The past and the furious
You can get creative with a novel, TV show, or movie, but history books? This is not meant to be fan fiction. How we teach history to our children has become a big controversy these days, with liberals accusing conservatives of trying to whitewash the past — and that’s sometimes true.
But the Awakened want to abuse to control the present, and in 2022, a scholar named James Sweet caught hell for exposing them for doing just that. He criticized a phenomenon known as “presentism”, which involves judging everyone in the past by the standards of the present; it is the belief that people who lived a hundred, five hundred, or a thousand years ago should actually have known better.
Which is so stupid – it’s like beating yourself up today for not knowing what you know now when you were ten. It’s stupid to spend all this time raising Sea-Monkeys, playing with slot cars and ogling old people PlayboyIt’s in the woods behind my house.
Who hasn’t experienced moments in your past that make you cringe? Who hasn’t said “I can’t believe I said that, I can’t believe I thought that, I can’t believe I did that…” You ate the earth, you wanted to be a Ghostbuster, you shoplifted gum, you tried to be a white breakdancer. You wanted to marry Scott Baio.
I’ve done some incredibly stupid things that I of course regret. I used to smoke. I was passionate about numerology. And astrology. And Christianity. I read Hemingway.
Yes, because we hadn’t yet become the people we were going to become – and humanity as a whole is just the collective version of that.
Did Columbus commit atrocities? Of course. But back then, people were generally atrocious. Everyone who could afford it had a slave, including people of color living in other parts of the world.
The way people talk about slavery these days, you’d think it was a uniquely American thing that we invented in 1619. But throughout history, slavery has been the rule, not the exception: the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the British, the first Americans, up to R. Kelly.
The Holy Bible is practically an owner’s manual for slave owners. The word “slave” comes from “Slav”, because many Slavs were enslaved and are as white as the Hallmark Channel. Who do you think gathered the slaves from the interior of Africa to sell to slave traders? Africans, who also owned their own slaves. Humans are not good people. We are a species prone to making other members of our species our female dogs. And the capacity for cruelty is a human thing, not a white thing, even if that doesn’t fit the current narrative.
But in today’s world, when the truth conflicts with the narrative, it is the truth that must apologize. Being woke is like a moral, magical time machine, where you judge everyone by what you imagine you would have done in 1066, and you always win. Professor Sweet is right about presentism: it’s just a way of patting yourself on the back for being better than George Washington because you have a gay friend, and you don’t. But if he were alive today, he would be, and if you were alive then, you wouldn’t be.
Portland Public Schools teach children that the idea that gender is primarily binary was brought here by white colonizers. The curriculum guide says: “When the United States was colonized by white settlers, their views on gender were imposed on the people already living here. »
Not even Star Trek I would try this story, where they discover a planet and give them separate toilets. It’s as if they’ve finally discovered a unified theory of enlightenment, integrating all their ideas about race, gender, and colonizers. As if the New World was one big diverse dance club and the Pilgrims were the bridge and tunnel crowd that came in and ruined everything.
The game Me, Jeanne was presented recently in London, written by Charlie Josephine, who identifies as non-binary and uses those pronouns. The play portrays Joan of Arc as – surprise – non-binary with these pronouns. Which, when you think about it, makes even less sense because Jeanne, being French, spoke a language where every noun is masculine or feminine. Joan says in the play, “I’m not a girl. I don’t fit that word,” as if she were a character in the show. Euphoria.
And while it’s true that Joan wore pants, that’s what soldiers wore – and she was a soldier. But in the story, Joan would rather die than stop wearing men’s clothes. But Joan of Arc wasn’t executed by the fashion police – her trial lasted more than two months, we have the record – and she didn’t once complain about being misgendered.
Which is not to say that there is no truth to the old rubric that history is written by the winners, and it is subjective. Napoleon said that history is only a fable on which we all agree. And he should know, because she was a deaf woman named Diane.
But it is also true that much of history is unquestionably factual, because we have artifacts, coins, birth records, and archaeological digs, and someone in Mesopotamia kept a record of the amount of cereal he ate. It’s not easy to change, delete or reinvent based on what makes you feel better today.
A few years ago they made a film called The aeronauts about the scientists who broke the record for the highest altitude reached in a balloon. In fact, they were both men, but the film made one of them a woman because, as the director explains, “representation matters.” So true. Women never get enough credit for things they didn’t do. Meryl Streep should play Seabiscuit, so every girl knows that she too can become a racehorse.
Excerpt from “What This Comedian Said Will Shock You” by Bill Maher. Copyright © 2024 by Bill Maher Productions, Inc. Excerpted with permission from Simon & Schuster, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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