prompt: dirt, title: Mrs. Ruth Didn't Even Name Him Babe in misc. flash fiction

Someone once asked John Lennon an obvious question, as to whether the song “Lucy in The Sky with Diamonds” was actually about drugs, because yes, of course it was about drugs. The initials were L.S.D. for heaven’s sakes. Whether in jest or to avoid album-burning protests, John told the journalist, ‘It’s about my kid’s schoolmate Lucy. Don’t read into stuff so much.’ This wasn’t just a lie, rather a doubly-false deception, a lie with a big flashing ‘I’m a lie!’ sign over its head. That was The Joke! He pretended to lie but didn’t think anyone would believe it anything more than a dodge. The problem was, Lennon’s charms made folks want to believe it. So, it became the story. Go to any retirement home and ask a few residents about that song name, the majority would tell you the press claimed it was about drugs but was just an innocent reference to a kid! “Journalists turn everything good into dirt just to sell it!” the elders might say, “Go back home, in your fancy limousines!” Even though their song really was just about massively abusing psychedelic drugs.

History isn’t the things that happened. History is counter-factual, on its best day. History is the story we tell of the stories we’re told. If enough people are wrong, on accident or purpose, and no one remembers the truth, the mistake or the lie is now history. The real thing happened, but the truth was lost, we can only conceive a lie we received. History’s not just written by victors, it’s what the victors’ rich descendants think the victors would want written. Without a chain of memory, it’s just that old camp-fire game of “telephone” on the scale of civilization instead of boy-scout. We know the lie so well, we can’t imagine anything else in its place. Truth’s lights only make Lie’s shadows longer.

They started calling those caramel-and-chocolate bars “Baby Ruth” to capitalize on the massive popularity of a base-ball star nicknamed Babe Ruth. It wasn’t coincidence the company thought that could be a better name than “Kandy Kake”, at the same time Old Disabled-List-for-Syphilis was really mashing dingers. The thing is, though, Babe’s lawyers realized that he wasn’t pulling any cheddar from that cheese and sued the hell out of Baby Ruth. After what must have been the 1925 equivalent of a Wikipedia rabbit-hole, The Baby Lawyers decided their best shot at getting away with stealing the slugger’s likeness was to claim it was named after a president’s kid who was herself two decades dead. But today the majority believe this charmingly-ridiculous lie, just because the falsehood was memorable. Even though, no, of course, they named it after the most famous man in America, just to sell us more goddamnably-poisonous garbage.

History isn’t the things that happened. History is a granite rock-wall of surety, shot through with rich veins of accumulated misunderstanding and bald-faced propaganda, mistaken for the past’s reality. But that just makes history more interesting, really, not less.