It only happened here––margarine, that is (though counterfeits like this are obviously too common to detail)––and the dye that went into it. And the marketing. The cigarette doctors spread it thick on Wonder Bread, and it was indeed a wonder. As was so much in the age of suspended belief––or disbelief, depending on the lens.
Flying cars were coming soon, so the age of advancement seemed like as good a time as ever to learn about the quaint past, like how Abe chopped down the cherry tree and Paul Bunyan sang a song and one of them had an ox, and there are those who will argue with apparent conviction, No, no it was George who did the chopping as though this is a crucial distinction––but it’s easy enough to concede, maybe he was harvesting vital wood for his teeth, and as anyone who spent any time in a grade-school classroom in the U.S. of a certain era can tell you, poor George had no business eating apples in any form but mashed, and that the careful preparation of these was a sensible act and arguably the lovingest thing to do for the man to whom you wish to offer something sweet without increasing the risk of your beloved incurring any variety of deadly oral infection most likely to spread to the brain in rapid time.
And yet, it doesn’t follow that whole histories––or even the accounts of current events, which by a certain logic are one and the same, depending on the extant understanding of the movement of time––should be treated this way, boiled and mashed into easily digestible baby food, unless the point is to hide the crushed contents of the arsenic pill that no one would swallow if they saw it whole.
Well said 👏👏🙏
Thank you, Cathy : )