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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