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Writer's pictureDoug Weiss

The Palimpsest


The emergence of the written word, surely one of humanity’s greatest inventions, gave rise to the need for a convenient way to store and share important works. Stone, clay or wax tablets were an advance over chiseled or painted stone walls, but not very portable. Before papyrus and later, paper, was conceived the skin of various animals served as a medium for recording and sharing both sacred and secular texts. In fact, many of the words we use today to describe fine grades of paper, such as parchment and vellum were originally descriptions of the types of skins our ancient ancestors employed. The practice of using animal skins was common as recently as the medieval period and as you might imagine a written document was not something the average person owned given the labor-intensive work involved in preparing a single page for such use. It comes as no surprise that it was common to reuse skins, especially if their original content fell out of favor or had fulfilled its intended purpose. In such instances the skin was scraped to erase or at least blur the original writing and the document reused. The Greek word for such material was Palimpsest, which translates literally as ‘scraped’.

Over time, the word Palimpsest took on a broader meaning, in some cases conveying the cynical or perhaps sinister over-writing of a text in an attempt to mask or erase its meaning. As humanity’s beliefs, religious, scientific and political evolved and changed the practice of suppressing ideas and words no longer considered acceptable by altering a handful of documents and making it a crime to even possess them flourished as a tool of oppression. As recent as the 17th century it was a crime punishable by death to possess certain sacred texts such as the bible, and even today we have seen authors condemned to death by religious extremists, for the words they have written.

We have also seen the advent of a new kind of palimpsest, one that does not overwrite key ideas and important texts, but rather obscures them with a rhetoric designed to cast doubt on the integrity and meaning of the essential ideas and values that define us. This sinister practice takes many forms. One of the most successful is by casting doubt on what is reported, heard or seen; on any and everything that threatens to convey ideas and information with which the suppressors disagree. George Orwell described this practice in his prescient work, 1984. He wrote, “the party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” The command to reject all news as fake news is our reality today. It is a command to cease thinking and accept what we are told only by a certain and special few.

In an age where it would be impossible to scrape over and rewrite our history and our foundational texts due to the omnipresence of the Internet, the next best thing is to suggest that none of it is true or meaningful. Doubt is a powerful tool, as is the manufacture of distractions; ginned up controversies or stories that have a half-life of a few days but are designed to pull attention away from inconvenient facts or revelations just long enough in our over-saturated news cycles to render them less critical. When combined with the skillful removal of words and ideas from publications, and websites; especially where they convey accepted facts and demonstrated truths we can see that this not some haphazard campaign but a pervasive and consistent attempt to undermine critical thinking and negate our most powerful tool for ensuring our personal and societal freedom.

Beyond these efforts clearly intended to misinform and disinform we now face an even greater threat that moves well beyond the art of propaganda. It is the systematic denial of our right to disagree. When those in power use their offices to equate criticism and differences of opinion with disloyalty, even with treason, we cross a line not only Constitutionally guaranteed, but of such obvious truth that no one with a scintilla of respect for moral value can agree. We have moved beyond castigation, denigration and name calling to outright denial of the same basic human rights we as a country are so quick to claim set us apart from all others.

As a people, we should all be outraged, but it is no longer politically safe to express such feelings. We have bartered our rights, against all common sense and in defiance of truths every school age child understands. We are in grave danger of becoming the palimpsest, a republic scraped and overwritten by wealth, power, greed and facile pretexts.

It does not have to be this way. We have the power to alter the course, by refusing to buy into the idea that there are no truths, no values, no center on which we can depend. Most of us, most of the time know when we need to question, and we should not accept attempts to silence us if we are critical of injustices, inhumanities that we see around us. We do not have to agree—in fact a spirited and respectful approach of listening and exchanging views has a greater chance of fostering the kind of society we want than politically safe silence. Don’t become a palimpsest—do not allow yourself to be scraped and overwritten—let your true self shine through.


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