What Future History Textbooks Will Write About Obama's '09
When considering the plots of comedy movies, fellow Cracked columnist and comedy professor at Internet University Seanbaby advocates a policy of "Defending the Movie to Aliens," whereby the ridiculously shitty nature of the movie is deconstructed and revealed in the process of having to explain it to an outsider.
Similarly, when looking at the state of current events, I like to employ the "What Would this Look Like in a History Text Book?" method (because I'm nerdier than the rest of the Cracked staff in just about every conceivable way). Consider your high school history text (see?) and imagine where today's events would fit in. In the future, when my bastard children are reading about what life was like in their alleged father's time, what are they going to see? Take right now, for example, where there are hundreds of news articles dedicated to who tweeted about what the president said about Kanye West (who, I'd like to point out, might be retarded). How's that going to look in a history book?
It helps to do this sometimes, to say, "Hey, people just might be reading about this 40 years down the line, and what we do today might be used as barometer that determines what kind of people we were. So let's try not to be such assholes."
History won’t be that favorable to Obama. History doesn’t like people. Over time the only thing people tend to remember are the odd or bad things... that or you are reduced to some characterture of yourself.
ReplyThis is what history will remember:
Highest unemployment since the 30's.
The national debt increased four trillion dollar.
First black US president.
Most polarizing president (depended on what historian or history book one reads)
And passing universal health care (depended on where what it’s repealed or not)
Now I can see many of you fuming. But this is just how history works. Here’s a good example.
Tell me something about the following without looking them up. (I trust you)
Julius Caesar.
King George II.
Pope Gregory I.
James K Polk.
Richard Nixon.
Some of these people many of the average people don’t know and the others are known for one thing they did. And that’s what will happen to Obama; he will either be forgotten or known for one thing. Am thinking, first black US president and the high unemployment.
If history is kind to Obama he will be remembered as a footnote, the first not-white American president. That is about the best he can hope for at this point. I mean, unless he really is the anti-christ, in which case, we're just getting started...
Replystupid i am the anti-christ
Awesome. Fox News ad right underneath the article. Coincidence? I think not.
ReplyIs this the first time you noticed the ads sometimes have to do with what the article is about? Please tell me you know the relation between a penis and a vagina. Then again, with your assumed level intelligence being low, maybe it's best for the human race that you don't.
Don't worry, Dan; I'll be sure to properly cite you when I start the "Was Obama Even President?" movement.
ReplyFunny and sort of even-handed, but I hope this article doesn't start a trend; I come to Cracked to escape real-world problems.
ReplyIt's funny because it's true.
Replywhen i saw this i immediately came to the comments to see the shit-ton of hate...im impressed :)
ReplyThe pie chart is dead wrong. Half should be taxpayer-funded leisure time (golf, partying, and vacations), and the other half composed of 1.) screwing America with Marxism, 2.) acting childish & unPresidential, 3.) basking in the glow of the unending praise from his media lackies at MSNBC, and 4.) plotting revenge against Beck, Limbaugh, and Hannity.
Reply Hide All See All 4 Repliesyour a jack ass. your one term late to post this comment. that president you got in your head is bush... you jack ass
Obama is not pracitcing Marxism, that's more Communism. He really leans more towards Socialism.
How did anyone in this thread get a thumb up?
I saw the beginning of this post.. Then skipped ahead to where I knew some reply-gold was waiting to be mined.
this is so accurate it's sad and so sad it's accurate. Including the fact that we should have known Charlie was crazy when he willingly stopped banging Denise Richards
ReplyDenise Richards is smoking hot but have you actually listened to her talk? She's somewhere between Harley Quinn and a retarded chimp.
@mucky- that's why I'd bang her vagina, not her mind.
Whether you like it or not... Obama will win reelection. It is inevitable. Just take a look at the current field of GOP candidates and tell me they aren't weak.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesThe one that espouses the right ideals won't even make it to the primaries (Ron Paul) due to Media/mainstream censorship.
Oh god I hope you're right. I'm as disappointed in Obama as anyone for being too soft/nice/taking it in the ass from GOP, but dear god I don't want those other crackheads to win.
Why won't Hillary Clinton run? :[
Mickey mouse could win election over Obama, he has fucked things up more then any President in the history of this country. I did not think anyone could be worst the Carter, I miss Carter now.
LOL. It's funny cause you may or may not have suffered severe head trauma as a child.
While we're on the subject, I'd like to know if Obama has a brain. We certainly haven't seen evidence of that yet.
Reply Hide All See All 3 Repliesthe evidence is that he became the leader of the christian world with a middle name like hussein..
I don't see evidence of your brain, but you don't see me mentioning it... Wait...
@tbone
....Obama is the pope?
"God is a comedian playing to an audience that is to afraid to laugh."
Reply-Voltaire
"douchebag." -Me
nobel peace prize.
Reply Hide All See All 3 Replieswar.
torture.
murder.
lies.
telephone.
grasshopper.
chair.
lollipops.
f**k yeah, we look so badass and contemplative with our one-word sentences.
umm. dude isn't trolling. seriously, he's fighting more wars then Bush did.
Doody: True, but two of them were wars that Bush started, and the other is a part of a NATO Alliance that we're obligated to assist in, due to Ike signing an agreement in the 50's. Not really his fault. And besides, we're not sending a whole lot to Libya.
f**king awesome.
ReplyI got it. That's their plan. The Tea Party and the anti-Obama guys are forcing Obama to waste so much time answering these claims that come election season they can say triumphantly that he didn't do anything while conveniently leaving out that he spent his whole time answering the questions of morons!
ReplyDamn good strategy!
Actually, for the most part they appear to be pointing out to Americans all the insanely retarded things he did do and asking if they really want more of the same. The answer at this point appears to be no.
Yup, it's not at all Obama trying to convince us the other side is full of imbeciles by focusing on the insane parts of the conservative base while ignoring the real issues that he should be dealing with.
That Chapter 7 title made my day!
ReplyFor decades, comedians made fun of the leader, now they kiss his ass and make fun 60-80% of the people that don't like him.
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesBut thos people are Fox viewers and as such don't really count as human, so the way we treat those people has no reflection on our values of openness and tolerance.
Tolerance is when you not only do what I tell you to, but you smile while you do it.
What the hell are you talking about.
You seem to have made and contradicted several points. Is there a point to this comment?
f**k your FASCIST views on people.
...exactly what "comedians" are you talking about, praytell? Jon Stewart, for all that he's a liberal, will mock whoever f**ks up, and that has definitely included Obama.
The only reason people mock Fox News "viewers" (by which I mean not "the people who watch it because it's some pretty funny s**t" but the "people who actually take it seriously") is because they believe and slavishly follow a channel so horrifically inept as that.
Note: I did not say "biased". Every news channel is, like every human being, "biased". No, I said "inept".
After all, what else would you call a news station that a.) ran a story claiming a town was CURRENTLY out of water 'cause the gov't wanted to save an endangered fish upstream as if this were a pressing current issue... MONTHS after they in fact were no longer out of water, because it had in fact been allowed already to flow back to the town? b.) allows Glenn Beck to go on without rehearsing his acrostics first (hint: THE MISSING LETTER IS NOT ACTUALLY "Y".)?, c.) listed record cold temperatures in winter as "proof" that something called Climate Change was a myth (hint: if you hear someone refer to it as "global warming", you might wanna double-check that they actually know what it means), d.) repeatedly took Orly Taits seriously when she claimed more than ONCE to have found the "real" birth certificate of Obama... without taking into consideration that she is quite possibly the laziest and most inept certificate-Photoshopper on the planet (seriously, weren't almost all of those debunked within a day or two? I think they were!)? but most of all - and most hilariously of all:
e.) labeled a Saudi Arabian businessman as a terror-funding cad... without realizing he was a major shareholder IN THEIR OWN COMPANY. Something they literally could have found through Googling his name for a few minutes.
I'm sorry, any station that repeatedly inept is worth laughing at, as is anybody who thinks it's a credible source of information.
You severely misunderstand what people mean by "tolerance" when you try to apply it to "people who take a station seriously that can't even keep its information up to date, bother to ask its pundits to rehearse before spelling things out on a chalkboard, or remember who its own shareholders are before accusing them of supporting terrorism and claiming anyone who takes money from said shareholder is in kahoots with Al Qaeda".
Or to paraphrase South Park: "Tolerance" means you accept a person has a right to exist and have their own life and Constitutional freedoms just like you. It does not, however, mean that if they do something stupid you have to stay quiet. Freedom of speech means the government can't censor you; it does NOT mean you have the right to not be mocked for what you actually say!
As ignorant as you are, you also have a good point. Liberals, in America and more obviously in Europe feel that is okay to ignore the will of the proletariat because they're the ignorant commoners. I agree on that, but I also agree that you give anybody and everybody who is sane a headache. Also, @JamieWhite. Your incoherent ramblings are wasted because nobody gives half a f**k what you think anyway, and we really don't if it takes a f*****g dissertation to express it. It's the internet, act like it.
Aradian, tell me you are in on the joke.
Has anyone heard of Jimmy Carter and his crazy s**t? He hit a rabbit in a canoe and swears he saw aliens. This was big news in the '70's. I was born shortly afterwards and learned none of this in school. Don't worry about Obama and the history books. He will go down as an ineffectual president like Pierce, or Taylor, or anyone else people don't know of. And they aren't remembered because they didn't do anything important, not because others stopped them from doing it. Does anyone remember Clinton's scandals, how much time was wasted on those? Or Bush's coke days? Reagan was divorced? Those presidents dealt with that s**t and still did things, whether you liked what they did or not. I agree with some of the other commenters.Get off his dick already.
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesOnly Obama is the first black president, so it wont be like Pierce or Taylor.
That is true, Megdoll. Good point.
I can practically write the first sentence of that history book section myself... why? Because Wikipedia did half of it for me:
"Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office."
Rewrite that this way, with the more commonly-used variant of his name, appropriate History Book Past Tense, and a tiny note about the historical period, including its Capital Letters Name, during which he was elected, and you have what most of your history text opening lines will look like:
"Elected during the beginning of the Great Recession in 2008, Barack Obama was our 44th President, and the first African American to hold the office."
Where it goes from there, we won't be able to really guess when we're this close to it; I suspect that we won't until a couple years at least, after his first term has been completed.
I guarantee they will include something about the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and possibly the various "bailouts" of industries, though probably without all the interesting stuff like the fever pitch of the contention surrounding said bailouts or the self-contradictions of other politicians. That Health Care Reform thing will definitely make it, just like Medicare and Social Security made the history books; if the historian knows what he or she is doing, it may also include something like, "after the longest continous debate over a single bill to date...", because, well, it was. The ERA has been debated longer, but that's been on and off, whereas the health care thing was continuous and unbelievably tedious. You will not quite get the feel for how it felt to be in the middle of it, from a textbook. But they will possibly still mention it took a while, and probably mention the most famous provisions, such as the ban on canceling policies when you get sick and all the "preexisting condition" stuff. You will, however, probably not see the phrase "death panels" in your average history class textbook, because the weird and extreme and Totally Fun to Read About stuff is almost never actually in the textbooks. (A good history TEACHER will tell you that Howard Taft was our fattest President and that one time in the olden days a fistfight broke out in Congress that resulted in someone losing their wig. But the average history book will not, because they're only meant to convey the highlights, and to a textbook writer, "highlights" usually means either "momentous stuff having to do with the freedoms of entire classes of people," or "boring facts that are significant but not generally entertaining". Then again, with over two centuries of American history to cover, you can't really blame them, I suppose...?)
The Birthers may or may not even be mentioned, since most hilarious conspiracy theories are left out of text books (see above. Show me a history or science textbook that tells you there are people who think the 1969 moon landing was faked, and I will show you a textbook that does not have much distribution in public schools). Though the Tea Party might be, simply for how it has impacted the Republican Party and for the fact it managed to get at least one or two candidates of note elected to the House and/or Senate (I say "at least", because I can only think of Scott Brown at the moment; all the other candidates that I can think of, like Christine O'Donnell, have only won primaries so far, since we're not at Novemeber elections just yet. There could definitely be a politician I'm forgetting though...).
Really, most of the really entertaining, weird, wacky, wild or flat-out JUICY stuff, including the gossip about the Jedi fly-swatting incident, Obama calling Kanye West a "jackass", or the whole Birther thing and most especially Orly Taits? That will be the inspiration to legions of historical writers in the What You Don't Know About History But Totally Will Find Much More Entertaining/Interesting genre.
Seriously, I have an entire book call "Presidential Campaigns" that details in a fair amount of space every single wacky, shameful or confusing bit of mudslinging and every witty slogan ever slung into a Presidential campaign the entirey of US history I think up to the Clinton administration or so.
The Birther/Tea Party/Orly Taits stuff? Totally would fit right in.
Precisely Meg, he could effective tag a s**t on the American flag whilst wanking into Uncle Sam's face and singing the Taliban praises, yet he'd still go down in history as, at very worst, 'that guy we don't say was a shite president because we don't want to seem racist'.
What I hate the most is how people categorize others with no middle ground, you're either Fidel Castro or an imperial wizard.
Replyhey, you watch your tone about the imperial wizard.
I wanna read Chapter 7....
Reply