I have said that I like historical fiction much more than establishment history because it is MUCH more accurate. The writer has several hundred thousands history buffs checking what he says. History students couldn’t care less and they couldn’t KNOW less.

I am going to write one such hisfic writer about an incident in one of his books. The year is 1775. A black walks into an exclusive London club. He says, “Is this because of my COLOR?! Like modern Brits, everybody there goes into fetal position and starts weeing on themselves.

All one Brit in 1775 would have done was say “Well, DUHH!!” or its equivalent.

Real Brits were known for their dry sense of humor, that is, for telling the obvious truth. Other countries didn’t do that an more than modern Englishmen do and for the same reason.

I hope this clown will get more than one criticism of this crap.

This was an exercise in Temporal Provincialism. Sheri described something as Temporal Provincialism but I think she was describing historical DISTORTION, a very different thing. If we cheapen the term Temporal Provincialism as a standard insult it will lose its bite.

Temporal Provincialism is certainly a great EXCUSE for historical distortion and it is A, one, cause of such distortion, but it is one of our special terms in BUGS, so it should be understood very clearly here.

No room full of Englishmen in ANY age before ours would have peed on themselves fro the room going quiet when the first black in its history walked into an exclusive club. In fact historical fiction by definition consists of historical distortion.

We certainly don’t mind if a Bill Jones who never existed is described as walking in London. In 1850 We DO mind if said fictional character is walking across Olde London Bridge in 1850 because by then Olde London Bridge no longer existed.

We don’t mind a fictional black man walking into that club is what is called a work of historical fiction. We DO mind if the room full of eighteenth century Brits goes into the fetal position modern Brits do. A writer of historical fiction is expected to get his fiction and his fasts clearly separate, unlike the BBC or Oxford.

That’s one reason I like it. Margaret Frazer writes about people in the fifteen century following the old wisdom of washing out wounds with wine so they didn’t infect. They only stopped that when Mommy Professor medicos showed that it was not part of the True Roman Theory of Humors.

Vikings didn’t get scurvy. It was not until medicos got the filter-down from Intellectuals that that crap happened. But you won’t see any of the real medicine practices in the Middle Ages mentioned in any Oxford History book. You only see this kind of thing mentioned accidentally by people who actually know something about the time.

Historical provincialism is the Brit who was terrified of Political Correctness. Historical Provincialism is the writer who says nobody ever cured anything until the Renaissance showed them how, as a recent BBC did. Historical provincialism is a BBC showing I Claudius and showing his Yard covered with gray, featureless statues of the kind people dug up after they had been in ground for two thousand years. The Renaissance gave us those.

A person really raised in classical times would laugh his ass off at the US Capitol claiming to be “classical” building. The “Rome” films show would look to him like Spanish Harlem on a bad day.

These publicly financed jerks claim to TEACH us! This is not political distortion. This is silliness. This is IGNORANCE.

Historical distortion can be practiced by knowledgeable people. Temporal Provincialism is NOT.

When in God’s name will we ever get over this crap of portraying our opponents as Evil Geniuses?

We will only get rid of them by laughing at them.