Look Away

On Nazis, Not-Sees, and Singing ‘Dixie’ in My Middle School Chorus

Obviously, revisionism is a problem. In America, there are real children in real schools reading textbooks that say that black people thought slavery was awesome. But at least revisionism requires some time to go by. Revisionism concedes that reality cannot be altered, and so it exploits the fact that memories fade. There is another phenomenon that makes no such concession. It is not a revision of what one saw in the past; it is a real-time filter that alters what one is seeing before the rest of the brain can …