Sunday, April 19, 2020

Standard School Broadcast: Our Nation's Heritage program 20, America Through Five Centuries - Epilogue

ROBERT KENNEDY: No one, no matter where he lives or what he does, can be certain who next will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.
VOICE: Now that second one is really Robert Kennedy, right?
HISTORY: Wrong.
VOICE: Hm?
HISTORY: Neither of these is the real voice of anyone, and we must never believe that it is.
VOICE: Oh, but that was really Robert Kennedy!
HISTORY: They are both electronic images of the real voice preserved on magnetic tape. Just as we never see a dead body on television news. We must never believe that we do.

Still as subversive a thing as ever's been said about the media’s relationship to real history, and an exchange all Negativland fans know well from its re-use on the album Helter Stupid. And all of it from a record paid for by Chevron! This, that sample’s source record, is practically a Negativland album all on its own; it’s the last in the 20-record “Our Nation’s Heritage” series, and it casts a sceptical eye on not just all 19 previous volumes of the history it’s tried to tell but the whole concept of keeping and re-telling history: how media doesn’t qualify as history, how even History itself is less a science with a marble foundation and more a giant fanfic built of papier-mache. Like program 8, “Cornerstones of a New Nation”, this valedictory episode was written by playwright Mariah Marvin and produced by series supervisor Edward Franklin.


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