YouTube History Introduces Its Newest Feature: Things That Never Happened

YouTube history has solved two of the past’s most vexing problems: much of it actually happened, and it was insufficiently heartwarming.

Hence the touching but glaringly bogus YouTube story of Johnny Cash showing up unannounced at a Dolly Parton small club performance. Cash supposedly slipped into the back of the room, hoping not to be noticed. The crowd spotted him. Dolly hauled him onstage. They sang together. Everybody cried, including several people who had not been invented yet.

It is a beautiful story. Its only weakness is that there is no evidence it occurred. One version places the encounter in 1971. Another moves it to November 1978, apparently because history is easier to remember when viewers are allowed to choose their preferred year. Neither version identifies the club, cites a newspaper, names a witness, or produces footage of the performance. Instead, viewers get old photographs, melancholy piano music, and a narrator whose voice suggests he personally recovered the facts from a biscuit tin beneath June Carter Cash’s bed.

That felonious video belongs to a growing historical YouYube school known as Things That Would Have Been Nice, where Bob Dylan attends a dying child’s birthday party, Willie Nelson pays off a waitress’s mortgage, and Dolly quietly adopts an orphanage during an oil change.

YouTube to their everlasting shame does not seem to be bothered. The bogus-history clip attracts viewers, viewers attract advertisers, and advertisers seldom ask whether Johnny Cash was actually in the building.

The Cash-Parton fairy tale is merely one franchise in YouTube’s expanding Department of Manufactured Memory. There are also urgent reports that an unnamed celebrity has “finally broken her silence,” generally about a subject on which she has said nothing. Clint Eastwood delivers daily “final messages.” Morgan Freeman explains mysteries in a voice that belongs to neither Morgan Freeman nor anyone born with lungs.

YouTube does occasionally remove the most industrious offenders, usually after they have accumulated a billion views and YouTube has finished loading the money into an offshore wheelbarrow.

History was once written by the victors. YouTube History is written by anonymous parasites in Southeast Asia with voice-generating software, a folder of stolen photographs, and the comforting knowledge that the dead cannot reach the Report button.

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