Travesty in the name of history

The Richard Norton Smith school of laughable, over-the-top history edu-tainment is actually going to be exceeded at the Mariner's Museum. Consider "a museum designed to retell the saga of the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor with maximum emotional impact."

We can do maximum emotional impact or we can do history. And what is maximum emotional impact?

... the Battle Theatre audience will hear and feel cannonballs hitting the turret, smell the gunpowder and hear the crew members working feverishly to load and fire.

Why not have them saw limbs from blood spurting dummies, bury the dead at sea, teach them colorful swear words, and simulate knife fights among drunken crewmen? That should be worth a PhD. I would also inform select thrill-seekers separately and privately that while they were visiting the museum the pet they left in the car died a horrible death and that the museum staff has buried it in an unmarked mass pet grave.

There's your maximum emotional impact, ghoul. Long live history, baby.

Is history so powerfully good that anyone is ennobled by the merest brush against the most diluted historical content? Are "scholars" lining up to participate in this debacle? I wondered, even as a child, about the fool who thought that showing kids an animatronic Lincoln at the 1964 World's Fair was educational. And now, we are walking backwards from 1964.

Read the linked article. Cannonballs hitting our turrets are the least of it.