Time & Perspective Quote by Dick Gregory

Gregory flips a childhood memory into a razor-blade critique of who gets to name history. The line lands because it’s funny in the way the best political comedy is funny: it treats “the history books” as a character with a bias, a narrator who hands out moral titles like trophies. “Great victory” versus “massacre” isn’t just word choice; it’s a rigged scoreboard. Same event structure (one side wins, the other loses), radically different moral framing, depending on who’s holding the pen.

The intent is less to romanticize Indigenous resistance than to expose how innocence gets trained. Kids “rooting for the Indians” reads as playful contrarianism, but Gregory uses it to show how quickly a reader can sense injustice before ideology hardens it into “common sense.” The subtext is about power laundering itself through language: empire doesn’t only take land; it takes the right to describe taking it. Once you accept the label, you accept the logic underneath it: the cavalry’s violence becomes order, the Indians’ violence becomes savagery.

Context matters. Gregory came up as a comedian when mainstream American culture still told Westerns as bedtime stories for the nation, with Native people as scenery or threat. He’s pointing out that propaganda doesn’t always arrive as a speech; sometimes it arrives as a caption. Comedy lets him say what a sermon might not: that “fairness” is the first thing you notice when a story is lying to you.