ABSTRACT
Time Warner's Home Box Office, joined by PepsiCo, is having a bit of trouble celebrating Black History Month in a truthful way. An HBO-Pepsi poster and advertisement honoring black achievement features a large picture of the pyramids, and many smaller images, including one of the Sphinx. "What we are witnessing is the transformation of facts into opinion," wrote the editors of The New Criterion. A Gallup poll last month showed that 33 percent of Americans think it seems possible that the Nazi extermination of Jews never happened. A lot of it comes from some disastrous intellectual trends on campus. History is not true, merely a story imposed by the powerful on the weak. At the extreme, some of these theories say there is no external reality at all, merely consciousness, and some say that personal experience or stories are the only source of truth. Otherwise reasoned discussion in America will descend further into a fact-free opinion fest.
