Benjamin Jones
Simon & Schuster
We may receive an affiliate commission for anything you purchase from this article.
In his new book, “What This Comedian Said Will Shock You” (to be published May 21 by Simon & Schuster), Bill Maher, the stubborn host of HBO’s “Real Time,” hilariously criticizes what he sees wrong with America, from its culture wars to its stagnation policy.
In the excerpt below, Maher takes aim at those who shamelessly invoke today’s standards to rewrite history in ways that even “Star Trek” would think 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
Prefer to listen? Audible has a 30-day free trial available now.
The past and the furious
You can be creative with a novel, a TV show, or a movie, but story books? This shouldn’t be fanfic. The way we teach history to our children has become a huge controversy these days, with liberals accusing conservatives of wanting to cover up the past – and sometimes that’s true.
But the woke want to abuse to control the present, and in 2022 a scholar named James Sweet caught fire for criticizing them for doing just that. He criticized a phenomenon known as “presentism,” which means judging all people in the past by the standards of the present; is the belief that people who lived a hundred, five hundred, or a thousand years ago really should have known better.
Which is so stupid – it’s like being mad at yourself today for not knowing what you know now, when you were ten. I was stupid, spending all this time creating Sea-Monkeys and playing with slot machines and lusting after old PlayboyIt’s in the woods behind my house.
Who doesn’t have moments from the past that make you cringe? Who ever said “I can’t believe I said that, I can’t believe I thought that, I can’t believe I did that…” You ate dirt, you wanted to be a Ghostbuster, your gum was stolen, you tried to be a white breakdancer. You wanted to marry Scott Baio.
I did incredibly stupid things that of course I regret. I smoked. I liked numerology. And astrology. And Christianity. I read Hemingway.
Yes, because we hadn’t yet grown into the people we would become — and humanity at large is just the collective version of that.
Did Columbus commit atrocities? Clear. But people back then were generally atrocious. Everyone who could afford it owned a slave, including people of color in other parts of the world.
The way people talk about slavery these days, you’d think it was a uniquely American thing we invented in 1619. But slavery throughout history has been the rule, not the exception: the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the British, the early Americans – even R. Kelly.
The Holy Bible is practically an instruction manual for slave owners. The word “slave” comes from “Slavic,” 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 kept their own slaves. Humans are not good people. We are a species prone to making others of our species our bitch. And the capacity for cruelty is a human thing, not a white thing, although that doesn’t fit the current narrative.
But in today’s world, when the truth conflicts with the narrative, it’s the truth that has to apologize. Being woke is like a magical moral time machine, where you judge everyone against what you imagine you would have done in 1066, and you always win. Professor Sweet is right about presenteeism: it’s just a way of congratulating yourself for being better than George Washington, because you have a gay friend, and he didn’t. But if he were alive today, he would, and if you were alive then, you wouldn’t.
Portland Public Schools teaches children that the idea of gender being mostly 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 they would try that story, where they discover a planet and give them separate bathrooms. It’s as if they’ve finally discovered a Unified Awakening Theory, incorporating all their ideas about race, gender, and colonizers. As if the New World was one big diverse disco and the Pilgrims were the bridge and tunnel crowd that came in and ruined everything.
The game I, Joanna was recently performed in London, written by Charlie Josephine, who identifies as non-binary and uses they/them pronouns. The play portrays Joan of Arc as — surprise — non-binary with they/them pronouns. Which, if you think about it, makes even less sense because Joan, 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 Euphoria.
And while it’s true that Joan wore pants, that’s what soldiers wore – and she was a soldier. But in the retelling, Joan would rather die than stop wearing men’s clothes. But Joan of Arc was not executed by the fashion police – her trial lasted more than two months, we have the transcript – and not once did she complain about being misgendered.
Which does not mean that the old rubric that history is written by the victors and that it is subjective is not true. Napoleon said that history is just a fable that we all agree on. And he should have known, because it was a deaf woman named Diane.
But it’s also true that much of history is indisputably factual, because we have artifacts and coins and birth records and archeology and someone in Mesopotamia kept a record of how much grain they ate. Not everything is up in the air to change, delete, or reinvent based on what makes you feel best today.
A few years ago they made a movie 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 changed one of them to a woman because, as the director explained, “representation is important.” So true. Women never get enough credit for the things they didn’t do. Meryl Streep should play Seabiscuit, so all the girls know that she too can become a racehorse when she grows up.
Excerpted 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.
Get the book here:
“What This Comedian Said Will Shock You” by Bill Maher
Buy locally at Livraria.org
For more information:
