Alternative Histories
“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent,” Thomas Jefferson wrote. “If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so,” he argued. “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take away everything that you have,” he concluded.
Or might have—there’s just no proof. These grave comments (and more of their ilk) appear in a list of “Spurious Quotations” featured on the visitors’ website for Monticello, where Jefferson famously indulged in the tyranny of slavery. Each is a wild paraphrasing at best and invented from whole cloth at worst, though one suspects this hardly matters to the truthers, militiamen, secessionists, etc., who share and repost them online. It’s not even especially important which wig-wearing moral hypocrite of a founding father is supposed to have said this stuff, the aggrieved rhetoric is all. What counts is that a true patriot from centuries ago, an expert in these matters, has eloquently summarized and justified their rage.
When American maniacs do boil over and decide to take what they often call revolutionary action, it often means that innocents will die—in bombings, chemical attacks, or, most commonly, mass shootings. The victims will not be considered innocents by the killer, who has cloaked them in the air of an existential threat. This radicalism, as well as what could be called the Jefferson paradox—caring so deeply about a sentence that you fail to see its phoniness—were seemingly forefront in the mind of Jared Lee Loughner, who targeted U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords in the 2011 Tucson shooting that left six people dead. According to a friend, Loughner had held a grudge against Giffords since she had made an inadequate reply to his riddling question at a public event. “What is government if words have no meaning?” he’d asked.
Loughner was also allegedly interested in lucid dreaming and alternate realities, the idea of being able to control and shape another universe, which squares well with delusions of revolutionary glory. Everything is a nexus, history always headed down a path parallel to the one it ought to follow. Loughner might well have become fascinated by the Alternate History Wiki, which provides, among other speculative works, a timeline for theFailed American Revolution. In this version, “British soldiers capture Revere, Prescott and Warren as they head towards Concord to warn the residents that the British are coming to seize the arms hidden there.” After their weapons are sacked in that city and Worcester, the rebels suffer a string of defeats, and the colonies never cohere in a way that presents a true threat to the crown. With the uprising quashed, Britain consolidates power in North America. The real fight is a turf struggle with Spain.