By Tyler Noreika
Maybe I’m just old fashioned, but I am a firm believer in the saying “I’ll believe it when I see it.” That being said, for some time now I have grown increasingly suspicious of a great deal of so-called “historic” events.There are wars, empires, social movements, and leaders that we know of only through written documentation, not through photographs. Thousands of years of human history are believed to be true solely because someone, somewhere, scribbled them onto paper.
To you this may be sufficient evidence, but I think otherwise. People lie. People fabricate stories. People can create that which had never existed through written language. It is my ever-developing theory that absolutely NOTHING in human history happened before the invention of the camera (in 1826). To put things bluntly, one simply cannot prove that anything happened without photographic evidence. To put it into current cultural context, I mean simply, “pics or it didn’t happen.” I have created a list of “historical” events and people that I personally believe are products of the human mind, the result of men and women with pens who went mad with imaginative power. These events include:
The plague, Charlemagne, the first six U.S. presidencies, the Revolutionary War, mermaids, Confucius, the War of 1812, the discovery of North America (we were always here), the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Roman Empire, anything that happened in 300, Vikings, the Qing Dynasty, the Opium Wars, the invention of fire, the Ottoman Empire, Napoleon, the Dodo bird, Darwin, pirates, Socrates, dinosaurs, the Bronze Age, the Renaissance, the chick in The Mona Lisa, Vasco da Gama, Michelangelo, Donatello, Rafael, the other Ninja Turtle, feudalism, the Salem witch trials, and Martin Luther.