Yesterday on NPR I heard an interview with the co-author (Dana Lindaman) of a book about textbooks called History Lessons. They've excerpted passages from history textbooks around the world that treat of America and Americans in some ::ahem:: interesting ways.

Entertaining was the portion from North Korea which called Americans "the bastards" who crossed the border into "our republic" after plotting invasion and jumping around like maniacs.

But something interesting happened. Lindaman was asked whether the book had new signifcance after 9/11, and he had the nerve to be a spineless relativist.

One of his purposes in writing the book was to teach kids to think "critically," which means teaching kids that there is no such thing as a fact, but only the ideology with which your parents and politicians wish to indoctrinate you.

Once kids in American schools got past their disbelief that other countries would tell such lies about us, they began to question whether our textbooks lie to us. And this is good, and has significance after 9/11, because -- as Lindaman informs us -- we (America) need to understand that we leave a very large footprint abroad, and we don't think about it when we walk away. By reading his book, we might just come to understand why people hate us.

Up till that point Lindaman seemed to suggest that it was the ideology of state-generated or state-supported textbooks, but then asked us to understand the rest of the world's reaction to our ignorant footsteps.

And that's unconscionable. Especially after he acknowledged that the U.S. is anomalous in being the only country in the world which does not dictate history curriculum, and that textbooks in the U.S. are black and white in dealing with historical fact, while textbooks in France, for example, (which conform to national curriculum standards) contain many shades of gray in efforts to avoid blame for supporting or aiding the Nazis.

Dana Lindaman is a grad student at Harvard in Romance Philology, so it's no surprise that his take on history is really the same old cultural studies song and dance that wants to have it both ways: to lay claim to truth through "readings" of the "narrative" of history while denying the possibility that traditional historians can report facts.

His assessment was plainly based in the soup of modern theory, but the advantage traditional history has over theory -- and will always have over theory -- is that it begins with an immense body of documentary evidence and seeks to reach a conclusion. Theory begins with a conclusion and offers novel interpretations of the world to justify that conclusion.

It's what keeps academic journals filled and pads many a CV on the road to tenure.

But what do I know? I'm only a classical philologist.