History TV

12/31/06
Last night I watched a complete evening of History TV. It's not something I normally do, but when I do watch this type of programming I sometimes find them enjoyable.
It all started when I flipped on the TV in the early evening, I was tired from a holiday trip to the TV holy land of Los Angeles, and I had driven nearly 300 miles just to get home from the Minneapolis/St. Paul Airport, so I was in a mood to veg out.

I caught a show already on about the history of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) - well actually it was called 'Aftershock'. I always considered myself fairly knowledgeable about the Klan and the Civil War, but found I actually knew very little about the time period shortly after the Civil War ended, and the Confederate soldiers headed home.
I did not know they had to unpledge their allegiance to the Confederacy, and more shocking was that the 14th Amendment that gave freed Negroes the right to vote (men only don't forget), also took away the right to vote for all of the confederate soldiers. So while blacks everywhere were registering to vote, a huge portion of the Southern population of America was unable to. And, of course we all know that women didn't get the right to vote until 1923.
Now it makes a little more sense about why an organization like the Klan could ever exist and even flourish. It had less to do with people who were getting the right to vote, and certainly much more to do with having the right to vote stripped from you when you are an American, and even having vocally pledged allegiance to America before being allowed to return home. They called this time period "Reconstruction" in the South, it was really just a nice way to say they were punishing the rebels.
(Dare I mention, most Freed Slaves voted Republican in those days.)

After that, I watched 'Decoding the Past'. The description on the info button was wrong. It wasn't about Mayan predictions for doomsday 2012, as promised, it was instead about the Tsunami of 2004, meteors or astroids hitting the earth, and other disasters. It was Disaster TV - Fear it , Fear It!

Finally, I caught a good amount of the new show about Nostradamus, called Nostradamus: 500 Years Later, what can I say, I never could make heads or tales of his predictions, and after watching some of this show I understood why. Because he was full of shit, that's why. I fell asleep on the sofa while "experts" talked about the marvels of his predictions, and what they "of course" mean, then they would show the prediction on the screen and it would be about as direct as a fortune cookie.

I fell asleep, with the boob tube on...