The History Channel lately invited us to "Remember The Alamo," a more "politically correct" Alamo, as a runup to the much-touted movie on the subject. I'd confused the movie with the "documentary" and so was a bit let down by the latter, essentially a gathering of often contradictory talking heads, mixed up with snippets of dialogueless reenactment.

Let's face it: Television can't teach history. Ideas can't be put across in "visuals," to use an entertainment-industry barbarism. Thought requires the printed word.

One shouldn't complain, I suppose. It could have been far worse. But "Remember The Alamo" seemed to be trying to say that there were two sides to the story, not just one, as supposedly we'd been taught. Two equal sides, that is. Equally valid.

Well, let's see. My not inconsiderable reading tells me that Mexico had as little claim to Texas as the U.S. had to Canada. "Mexico" was merely modem central Mexico. Spain, not Mexico, conquered or claimed the rest, including Texas. As Frederick Jackson Turner notes, the U.S. merely annexed "fragments from the disintegrating Spanish empire." Any "Mexicans" in the far north were would-be colonists Spain had imported by force. The effort was such a failure Spain turned to Americans, who seemed more willing to face frontier hardships.

Then the Mexicans won independence. Still, they went on welcoming Americans.

But the Mexican republic proved rather more fragile than the American. As the country went into meltdown, Stephen Austin, the "father of Texas," found himself in Mexico City's calaboose for 18 months. Texas was attached to the neighbor province of Coahuila and shorn of its representation in the national government. Then in 1833 the president, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, scrapped the Constitution. Mexico, he said, just wasn't ready for self-rule. It needed a despot, and he was more than happy to take on the job.

When the province of Zacatecas objected, Santa Anna punished it in a ruthless campaign of rapine, pillage, and ruin. Texans (both Anglo and Mexican) were warned of a like fate. Americans, who'd entered Spain or a republic, found themselves in a brutal dictatorship.

Yet, said some of the talking heads, the Texans weren't fighting for freedom! They were freebooters and adventurers, motivated by greed! Santa Anna's brutalized conscripts, in contrast, were patriots fighting for their country (by butchering their fellow countrymen?), a "country" that had existed for just 12 years, after 300 years as a possession of Spain!

When the Texans first took the Alamo, they paroled the Mexican general and his soldiers. When the Mexicans took it back, they cut down the survivors of the siege (including the bedfast Jim Bowie) in an orgy of sword- and axe-thrusts and pointblank gunfire.

When 400 Texans formally surrendered at Goliad, the Mexicans pretended to be marching them off to captivity, and then on the road shot them all in the back.

The talking heads conceded that there were "Tejanos" (Mexicans) fighting with the "Texians" (Americans) in the Alamo, and that prominent Tejanos signed Texas's Declaration of Independence. And that Jim Bowie had dozens of Tejano spies and scouts, led by Juan Seguin, the last faithful courier sent out of the besieged Alamo. They seemed to fancy they'd just discovered Seguin's existence, though he has a Texas town named after him.

Santa Anna's army was described as "state of the art." No mention was made of its lack of siege-guns, explaining the fact that it took the Mexicans 13 days to manage a single breach in the walls, through which, in their thousands, they were at last able to overwhelm 250 defenders. "State of the art" or no, in all their thousands they crumpled before a few hundred Texans at San Jacinto, where Santa Anna signed Texas away in trade for his own skin.Nor was any mention made of the legendary "line in the sand" drawn by Travis with his sword, or of the one man among the 250 who declined to step across it and so escaped and lived to tell the tale. He was a 50-year-old Frenchman named Rose, who figured he'd endured enough wars already. It seems to defy common sense that he'd have simply "made up" a tale in which he himself cut so inglorious, if not downright cowardly, a figure.

And of course the talking heads made much of Mexico's having done away with slavery, while the Americans, being mostly Southerners, clung to it. This is fudging the fact that, under Santa Anna and his ilk, all Mexicans, of whatever hue, were slaves.

Anyone who persists in this argument of "moral equivalency." harping that the Mexican cause was every bit as just as the Texan, if not more so, should be prepared to answer one question: Would you rather have lived under Mexican rule as it's unfolded since 1836, or under the Texan law and order, the American dynamism, of the same period?

We were told much of the character flaws, however irrelevant, of the men in the Alamo, especially of the three folk heroes, Travis, Bowie, and Crockett.

So Travis deserted his wife and fled Alabama owing everybody money. In the versions I've read, he fled a murder charge. He'd killed a man who made advances to his wife, an insult no Southerner of that day could let pass, law or no law, and retain his honor.

So Jim Bowie was a wheeler-dealer, turning out counterfeit landgrants, working rackets in smuggled slaves, and marrying or otherwise finagling land and money. In other words he was a type who's existed, and filled a perhaps necessary niche, in every age, including our own.

Only nowadays they do their skuldugging more sordidly, and with less panache! The Mexicans made him out a coward, huddling under a blanket (a reasonable place to find one already near death of disease), who didn't fight back as they heroically hacked him to death.

The worst they could say of Davy Crockett was that he didn't kill dozens before himself being killed, but was captured and heroically hacked down with the rest.

The talking heads did have the grace to grudge that these and the other 186 known and 60 unknown flawed men had every opportunity to break out and save their own lives, but that to a man (minus Monsieur Rose) they chose to stay and sell themselves dear, taking some 1500 of the attackers with them, and giving the rest of Texas the breathing space to fight on and live.

What is it about these men that most matters, and so most deserves to be remembered as "The Alamo"? Their human-all-too-humanness (which the "politically correct" talking heads chose to stress) or their last-minute rising above it?