Troubling...grading student essays...come across this statement on alternative histories:

"There are two ways to look at history. There is the dominant way and the alternative way. The dominant way would be looking at it through the most common perspective and the alternative way would be having a different voice or opinion about the subject. A good example of this is the incident of 9-11. Americans look at this as a day that we were betrayed and attacked without warning. On the other hand, the Iraqis look at this as a day that they died for what they believed in, as a day of victory. The dominant history would be the one of the Americans and of many other countries where we felt that we were attacked abruptly and very harshly with our own weapons. We felt that this was a very tragic day where a lot of good innocent people died. On the other hand, the alternate to this history is that the Iraqis led by Sadam Hussein felt that this day was very victorious and some even died for this cause. Alternative history is something that we have been discussing all week in class and have read about a lot. I am going to be using some of the readings to explain this topic and give examples."

This student refuses to read almost anything for the class so I can imagine how difficult it would be to sway her opinion with something like an alternative newspaper. This view was not created by any one source; it would seem to be the development of a defense mechanism of some kind, a willfull deception to prevent the cognitive dissonance that would come with admitting you are at war with another country for no reason at all. Further, the sort of radical relativism that she and other students adopt also seems to go hand in hand with this. Students (Americans? People?) who have only been schooled by unread textbooks and the evening news and can initially only absorb the perspectives of an alternative history if they can equally dismiss them as simply a counterbalance or as an "alternative" that one can simply choose not to consume completely--like alternative rock or an alternative lifestyle: it's fine for them, but it's not my cup of tea.