COLUMN: Most of What We Don't Know is Mythical

By Tobin Barnes
And we thought we had education issues here in the good old USA.

Evidently, one heck of a lot of Britons have also been left behind. Way behind. Especially when it comes to history, or maybe even common knowledge.

According to a French news agency’s report from London, nearly a quarter of the population of Great Britain thinks Winston Churchill is a mythical figure.

Can you believe it? (And please, please don’t be thinking, “Winston who?”)

UKTV Gold television surveyed 3,000 Britons to inform us about their state of misinformation.

Reportedly, forty-seven percent of Brits also think Richard the Lionheart is mythical, but maybe that’s a little more understandable. Knights and all that rot, you know. Storybook stuff, what?

But Winston Churchill? Mythical?

That’s not even an educational gap, really; that’s just plain old head-in-the-sand dumb.

Many would ascribe Great Britain’s salvation from the Nazi menace in WWII to his stirring speeches and indomitable spirit: the V for victory sign, the ubiquitous black derby hat and the jaunty cigar.

Who knows? Maybe Great Britain’s beleaguered last stand, inspired by Churchill’s dogged example, saved our country’s bacon, too.

But has “Who can forget?” now become “Who can remember?”

How could such a momentous leader, one of the two or three greatest people of the 20th Century, be so quickly marginalized? Or even worse, fictionalized?

Well, the educational exasperation doesn’t end there. Florence Nightingale is right there with Churchill. Yes, like Churchill, 23% of Britons think she’s also some author’s creation. (But at least she’s got a fictional-sounding name.)

And Mahatma Gandhi’s name is prominently in the top ten list of mythical people, too. On the other hand, some thought a great writer must have made up Charles Dickens.

But that’s not all to make you wonder what the heck’s going on.

A whopping fifty-eight percent of Britons thought Sherlock Holmes really existed, for crying out loud. Not much deduction going on there, eh Watson? Though certainly Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is smiling in his grave knowing that he’d created a more realistic character than Winston Churchill.

All this makes me wonder what some Americans are misconstruing about our history—even our recent history.

For example, is Richard Nixon real or fictional or even mythological? That is, to the cross-section of our citizenry.

After all, how could we have had a president who resembled a swarthy hitman when looks are so important in our society? And someone had to have made up that CREEP outfit, right, and given him that Tricky Dick nickname? Besides, Presidents don’t swear like sailors and spy on their political opponents, do they?

Someone had to have made up all that stuff.

Just like someone must made up that stuff about another of our President’s having a nickname like Slick Willy and getting impeached because he hadn’t been forthright about his hanky panky. But whoever is forthright about their hanky panky? Certainly not numerous other presidents.

All that’s gotta be fictional, doesn’t it?

And how about when we invaded a country because it had nuclear weapons and a mouthy dictator, except it didn’t—the nuclear weapons, anyway. That’s mythical, too, right?

How tens of thousands of people have died in that misbegotten conflict, and we’re still spending money like oil sheiks on the mess. Looks like it’s heading toward a trillion dollars, easy. But nobody knows when it’ll be over or what we will have accomplished when it is, but some think we oughta keep doing it because it’d be even worse if we don’t.

Wowsa.

If only all this were mythical, like Winston Churchill and Richard the Lionheart. Stuff we could forget because it’s not real.