I told you so! CBC disowns Douglas biopic

You know, as an historian, I've found it awfully interesting (and convenient) that all of the countertheories in this debate come with no sources (no, unsourced and unevaluated internet sites don't count). Sorry, but without sources, your statements have no value. You could just be making it up as you go along.

There are always going to be different views of history. Since there are radically different views of current events, why should this surprise anyone? When people come out and say "No! This is the real truth!" it just reminds me how ignorant most people are about history--dangerously ignorant.

Tommy Douglas was a controversial figure. This biopic jumped right into the controversies surrounding him from beginning to end. Of course it had some inaccuracies. But not everything being claimed here is an inaccuracy or error. They are, instead, controversial events or trends or movements, ones on which people did not agree at the time and do not agree now. That's a very different thing from errors, which crop up in every single work.

For example, if Jimmie Gardiner put forward an image of himself as a teetotaler, yet liked the odd drink, it is *not* inaccurate to then show him having a drink. It makes me laugh when people trot out the dissatisfactions of much younger family members as proof positive that something was inaccurate. The Braveheart script was written by a descendant of William Wallace and it's one of the most inaccurate pieces of historical tripe out there. Family members very frequently have a vested interest in putting out a specifically sanitised version of their sainted ancestor's life story. That does not make their version more accurate than anyone else's. All that Gardiner's descendants' complaints really show is that they have a vested interest in his being portrayed as a teetotaler who opposed the KKK.

Further, telescoping events has always occurred in movies based on historical persons or events. Complaining about it is a bit like complaining that astronomical posters of the planets are not to scale. No, they're not, but if they were, you could never get a representation of the planets together into one poster and people would have no idea of what their solar system looked like. Similarly, this biopic attempted to give us an idea of what Saskatchewanian politics were like over several decades during the 20th century. I think they did a pretty credible job. Would I take what they said as gospel? Of course not. But I might use it as a teaching aid. You can get as much mileage out of pointing out the inaccuracies (and the reasons behind them) in an historical work as you can showing what it got right--though rarely can anyone really agree on what is "right".

If you didn't like Prairie Giant, I say: Write your own damned biopic and get it out there. Give it to the schools and let the two versions duke it out. The kids will be smarter for it; it'll actually force them to learn some reasoning skills. To yank Prairie Giant off the shelves is censorship, pure and simple, and you cannot argue otherwise. To those of you who approve of such censorship, be very, very careful--censorship always ends up cutting both ways. That's why so many people don't like it.



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