OUR AUDIO-ANIMATRONIC FAUX-HERITAGE

On Wednesday night, I heard Robert Siegel's NPR story about the booming Florida retirement community known as The Villages. I was struck by the fact that The Villages is full of history ... but all the history is fake:

Mr. ANDREW BLECHMAN (Author, "Leisureville"): Nothing is what it seems in The Villages. I mean nothing.

SIEGEL: Andrew Blechman wrote about The Villages in his book "Leisureville." He calls it an age-segregated community, something unprecedented in history. But then, history means something different in The Villages.

Mr. BLECHMAN: You have a manmade lake, which is supposed to be hundreds of years old with a lighthouse. And they even have boat tours on it, even though you can swim across it in about five or six minutes. You have buried trolley tracks, which were supposedly abandoned in favor of golf carts years later, which dont - you know, never existed. The whole place was built in a year or so. And it has two manufactured downtowns and they were themed by entertainment specialists from Universal Studios.

SIEGEL: The entertainment specialists even provided fake historic markers and plaques of rich and playful back-story.

For Villagers like Dan Hahnfeldt, the made-up history is part of the decor.

Mr. HAHNFELDT: This is the original downtown area and you see quite an interesting street here. The buildings look like they're all from the 1800s and so on, with their little historical plaques like the Cattlemen's Association and all that sort of thing. Here's one established 1872. Thats all just made-up history and fictitious...

(Soundbite of laughter)

SIEGEL: More like established 1999, you'd say.

Mr. HAHNFELDT: Yeah, it's great fun and part of the interesting story of The Villages.

When I heard that, it occurred to me: this is how the modern right sees history.

Teabaggers see themselves as part of the great struggle against big-government tyranny, even if they're on Social Security and Medicare, and even if they never had a thought in their heads about politics until the first time they watched Glenn Beck -- they just declare that they have deep roots in a long-standing struggle against oppression, and then they believe it's true.

And (as McClatchy's Steven Thomma noted this week), if real history doesn't fit their preconceptions, right-wingers just rewrite it:

In articles and speeches, on radio and TV, conservatives are working to redefine major turning points and influential figures in American history, often to slam liberals, promote Republicans and reinforce their positions in today's politics.

The Jamestown settlers? Socialists. Founding Father Alexander Hamilton? Ill-informed professors made up all that bunk about him advocating a strong central government.

Theodore Roosevelt? Another socialist. Franklin D. Roosevelt? Not only did he not end the Great Depression, he also created it.

Joe McCarthy? Liberals lied about him. He was a hero.

It doesn't surprise me that The Villages would be full of easy-to-swallow, appealing faux-history -- because, as a 2007 Miami Herald article makes clear, it's also full of right-wingers:

Retirees' dreamland is Republican bastion

...In the Central Florida development that sprawls over three counties and two Zip Codes, Republican voters outnumber Democrats roughly 2-1. Turnout in Sumter County, where the bulk of the community lives, was among the highest in the state in the 2004 presidential election.

"It's safe to say that the road to the White House is through Florida, and the road to Florida is through The Villages," said Richard Cole, president of the largest of the community's four Republican clubs. "We're a substantial political force." ...

The cluster of Republican voters in The Villages is no accident. While South Florida draws liberal-leaning Northeasterners via Interstate 95, The Villages is just a little ways off Interstate 75, which winds through the nation's conservative Midwest...

A Sarah Palin rally in The Villages in September 2008 drew the biggest crowd up to that point for the GOP ticket. And, really, who has more of an imagineers' version of history than Palin?

Lefties may get some things wrong, but our version of America's past isn't a gee-whillikers crayon sketch. That's more the right's style.

(McClatchy story via Steve Benen.)