My unconscious rewrites history

[come_to_think]

It is not just movies (http://come-to-think.livejournal.com/5669.html; https://come-to-think.dreamwidth.org/5780.html) that engage my confabulation mechanism.  Casual researches have revealed that I was harboring utterly false versions of recent history:

Musical chairs in San Francisco: Harvey Milk was the mayor.  Dan White, the chief of police, had resigned to run against Milk.  When Milk won, White asked for his job back, and Milk refused him, so White killed Milk.

Only English counts: Salman Rushdie originally wrote & published The Satanic Verses in Arabic.  It was reviewed in the Arabic-language press (including that of Iran) -- mostly unfavorably, but with no threats against the author.  Only when it appeared in English was there widespred indignation culminating in Khomeini's fatwa.  Furious threats were made to prevent the book's appearing in paperback.  I actually believed this incredible story, and remembered it as having appeared in a serious magazine article.  I can find no trace of it on the Web.  (Perhaps it was true of some other book?)

Comments

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Not one of his, at any rate. Rushdie's a Bombay-born Kashimiri. He doesn't know any Arabic (beyond the very basics that any Muslim learns) and does all his writing in English.

[come-to-think.livejournal.com]

I did not actually find that out on Wikipedia, but guessed something of the sort must be true, once I thought of it. It is an unlikely story about *any* book, but it was congenial to me in that it confirmed the terrific importance of English in our era.

I wonder if I *dreamed* the magazine article. I have occasionally remembered something and then concluded that it was a dream after noticing some inconsistency with reality, and in this case I might never have noticed a conflict blatant enough to tip me off. However, I would have had to dream up all those details!