Musings on Fairy Tales and Bullshite or How I Emerged from Fairy Tales into Reality

Once upon a time I believed in fairy tales. I believed what my seventh grade Texas Civics class socialised into me about the joys of being a Texan and living in Texas, the best state in the United States. I believed that the Texas city I lived in, Dallas, was one of the best if not the best city to live in in the world. I believed that the Dallas Cowboys were the best football team in the National Football League or the American Football League. I believed that those "damn" Yankees victimised the wonderful Confederacy politically and economically. I believed that the United States was in Vietnam to protect the world and the democratic South Vietnam from a communism that wanted to take over the world. I believed when I was doing duck and cover drills at school, that I was doing this because the evil Russkies wanted to bomb the US back to the stone age, because the USSR was the devil incarnate, and because the Soviets hated our "democracy", our "freedom", and our best of all possible worlds.

Then, thanks to my best friend at T.W. Browne Junior High School in Oak Cliff, my colonised by boosterism mind suddenly saw the empirical light. I learned that Texas, like any state in the Union, and Dallas, like any city around the world, had its problems. The Texas and Dallas I lived in was still segregated, thanks to Jim Crow, just like in the other states of the former Confederacy. I learned that the Confederacy was the land of cotton and slavery and that the Southern mantra of states rights meant protecting the peculiar institution. I learned that while no place is perfect I preferred Austin to Dallas. I learned that the US was a democracy in myth only. I learned that the US, like the USSR, was a great power, that it had, like other modern core nations, been involved in imperial projects including a territorial expansion driven by the notion of manifest destiny around the globe, that it was presently engaged in the covert destabilisation of nations that it perceived of as dangerous enemies, and that it wanted to make the world safe not for real "democracy" but for American business interests. I learned that those who politically and economically controlled South Vietnam were a Christian minority put into power by the American powers that be. I learned that the US had given permission for the overthrow of the South Vietnamese leader and that the American political elites had lied about what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin. I learned that the media lied about Spain bombing the Maine in Cuba, about Germans bayonetting Belgian babies during World War I, and about the supposed North Vietnamese massive attack on "peaceful" American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam. 

I, in other words, grew up. I was no longer the boosterist true believer. I was no longer someone guided by socialised emotions of national pride, emotions that blinded me by their opaque light. I was now someone who had the critical and empirical abilities to recognise that politicians and corporations lie, propagandise, and bullshite. I learned that one had to apply one's critical intellectual faculties to explore and to interrogate that bullshite and in order to learn about what really happened. I learned that I preferred to live in the truth rather than in a mental world of bullshite. I have never looked back.