When Did Thomas Edison Become the Bad Guy?

Sometimes I feel like there's a meeting I missed, like there's some committee that gets together in the middle of the night and makes changes to the culture.  Everyone else seems to be instantly on board with these changes.  No one else seems thrown or confused by them.  In fact, sometimes I wonder if anyone else even notices that a change has happened.  I never hear anyone ever mention it.  There just seems to be this unspoken understanding that the thing is different now.  If I were living in the world of 1984, I'd be the bewildered guy wandering through the crowd asking, "But weren't we just at war with Eurasia?", that is until the Thought Police hauled me away and put a rat cage on my head and showed me the error of my ways.

For instance, I can't remember the first time I went into a restaurant and  a "server" took my order, but I definitely remember that they used to be called "waiters" and "waitresses."  I understand the reason for the change in terminology, obviously, the whole politically correct agenda behind it all.  I just don't know when this was decided or by whom.  There was never any big announcement on TV or in the town square where someone got up on stage and declared, "Henceforth, they shall be called 'servers.'  Woe be unto them who use the gender specific job title....Oh yeah, and by the way, we're getting rid of 'actress' altogether."  No, it all just seemed to happen overnight, and everyone fell right in step with it as though the job had never been called anything other than 'server'.

Another odd example I've noticed is "they" changed the "B.C/A.D." dating standard to "B.C.E/C.E.", which means "Before the Common Era" and "The Common Era" respectively.  What the heck is the "Common Era"?  Common to what?  The years haven't changed.  We're still dating everything from the same moment in history.  Isn't it disingenuous to discard the religious references in name but to keep them in number? At least when the French Revolution threw God out the window they started over with year one.  So far, I've only heard this one on TV and it seems confined to academic circles, but what do I know?  When the date comes up in casual conversation, people rarely feel the need to specify, "that's 2010 Anno Domini...in the year of our blessed Lord.  Amen."  So for all I know, the change might already be widespread in the public consciousness.  But I doubt it.  Even the world of historical TV documentaries seems to be struggling with this one.  I think I caught one of them using good old "B.C." the other day.  Maybe the secret midnight committee got together and decided, "This one just isn't catching on." 

Even the news often makes me feel like I've been left in the dust.  It used to be that the anchorman would come on at six, tell you what was happening in the world, and leave it to you and your friends to scratch your head over the human condition.  Now, with the proliferation of the 24 hour news channels, I constantly feel like I've walked into a room in the middle of a conversation.  They've already moved on to speculating about the meaning and the impact of such & such, and I still have no idea what they're talking about.  A few years back, I heard people gossiping and grumbling about Rev. Jeremiah Wright for a month before I even had the slightest idea who the man was and what he had said to get people so worked up.

The process sometimes even extends to history itself, and there they even have a name for it.  They call it "Revisionist History."  The problem with this term is that it's used indiscriminately.  On the one hand, it's used as a pejorative term, meaning someone who distorts or misrepresents the facts of history in order to promote a specific agenda.  On the other hand, it's used again as a pejorative term, but this time meaning someone who has brought new facts to light that challenge a common, established, and traditional view of a historical subject.  People are rarely willingly to admit that they're using the term in this second sense, but I have actually seen a few cases.  Mostly the term just gets thrown around as a vague accusation in cases of historical disagreement.  The problem is, watching these arguments from the sidelines, the double meaning makes it easy to get confused and awfully hard to keep score.

I remember Christopher Columbus was an early target.  Some time in the early 1990's some nebulous powers-that-be seemed dead set on burying this man's reputation.  Some people objected to this, calling it "revisionist history."  But the nature of the objection wasn't always clear.  Some people meant, "They're making stuff up to make Columbus sound bad."  Then there were other people who meant, "Columbus is a revered American icon and you're ruining his image by bringing up facts that make him look bad.  I'm going to stick my fingers in my ears so that I don't have to hear about it...la-la-la-la."  Then, of course, there was a lot of grey area between these two viewpoints, where people we're just pissed off about the whole thing, but they really hadn't thought out why.

But somewhere in all this crossfire, I get to feeling like I can't keep track of what the truth is.  You grow up hearing one thing about history and then the secret midnight committee has another one of their damn meetings, and the next day everyone's saying, "Nope, it actually happened like this."  What are you supposed to believe?  Is this new information any more reliable than the old information?  You certainly can't dig up Christopher Columbus and ask him if he really chopped off an Indian's hand. 

For instance, not to sound like some lunatic fringe, holocaust denier, but until about 8 years ago I had never heard about these Japanese Internment Camps that they had in America during World War II.  I never learned about it in school.  I never heard anyone talk about it.  This information just seemed like it popped up out of nowhere, and everyone acted like it had been common knowledge forever.  I'm not saying it didn't happen; I'm just wondering why I never heard of it.  Then, of course, there's Thomas Edison.  When I grew up, he was the symbol of the American dream, a genius and a great man.  Now, it appears he stole all of his ideas, destroyed brilliant careers, engaged in all kinds of illegal acts, and probably strangled puppies because he didn't like the way they wagged their tails.  

There are two possibilities, and sometimes it's hard to tell which side of the line Occam's Razor falls on.  One, people of the past were ignorant, unenlightened, bigoted, and apparently willing to credit Paul Revere with feats of daring and bravery solely because of the rhyming potential of his name.  Or two, someone is fabricating a bunch of elaborate smear campaigns to push an agenda or cause trouble or just to let people know they're too original and clever to be impressed by the conventional image of Thomas Edison.  I guess it all comes down to the real question:  Who are these people, and where are they holding their damn meetings?