CSotD: The Search for Thucydides
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Start with a juxtaposition and something to ponder:
These are both good commentaries on the gap between the image of the United States and what it stands for and the proposals of Donald Trump, and not the only two contrasting the Statue of Liberty with the Statutes of Trumpery.
We could have an interesting discussion of the historic setting, that, when the Statue was placed in the harbor, we were actively seeking warm bodies both for our factories and to settle the land alongside our burgeoning railroads and begin feeding those factory workers.
We're not having that discussion and it's absurd to even envision it.
The Know-Nothing riots, in which Catholics were beaten and at least one orphanage burned, were before the statue went up.
And that utterly asinine justification for slavery that Bill-O raised a few weeks ago was first run up the flagpole just before the Civil War, helping to fuel sentiment against abolition of slavery by recruiting the rising forces of organized labor to envision free blacks as competition, not brothers.
Also before we started shipping in potential farmers and settlers and such, and certainly before we all got weepy and sentimental about our parents and grandparents who sailed past the statue to land at Ellis Island.
Which most of them didn't; When I look at the time period for that immigrant intake point — 1892-1954 — I don't see my forebears, most of whom had been here quite some time, a couple of whom might have noticed the construction, if that were the port by which they arrived.
But, then, I don't know how many might have sailed in on a foggy day, or at night, and missed seeing the statue entirely.
It's kind of similar to V-E Day: The entire stateside population of the United States did not, in point of fact, flock to Time Square for the announcement, but, if you ask around, that's all you'll hear about.
We lease our memories from a central repository, and, if they don't fit, we'll make them fit.
We also choose our memories, and I've noted before that, if everyone who claimed to have been at Woodstock had actually been there, the Eastern Seaboard would have tilted up and slid into the ocean from the weight of the crowd.
Until the Iran hostage crisis, that is, during which some Vietnam vets asked "What about us?"
And so we all tied yellow ribbons 'round the old oak tree and suddenly everyone who said they were at Woodstock remembered that, no, come to think of it, they were in a hooch in the 'Nam, man.
Matt Wuerker posted this video of W.H.Auden reciting "1st September 1939" on his Facebook page, and I was less struck by Auden's reflections on the start of WWII as I was by the fact that, whoever mounted it on YouTube, added a note explaining who Thucydides was.
My comment being that, if we taught people who Thucydides was, maybe we wouldn't have so many poems like this.
"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake," Stephan Dedalus remarks to the smug, condescending principal of the school where he teaches, and I think both he and Joyce would appreciate that history is whatever faddish notion captures the public at a particular moment.
McDrama
Sheldon is riffing on something I've seen in elementary schools for the past decade or so.
I fell for the first one: We got a call in the newsroom that a school was putting on a production of "The Little Mermaid," and it sure sounded ambitious, so I grabbed notebood, pen and camera, and found a gymnasium full of rugrats, and two very recent, very high energy drama majors, plus a vanload of costumes, props and rudimentary scenery.
The kids were quickly divided up, assigned parts, coached and dressed by the excited-or-at-least-animated drama majors.
That evening, parents and grandparents bought tickets, the play went on, and then everything went back in the van and the two recent drama majors headed for the next school on their map.
It beat driving around the country selling magazine subscriptions, I suppose.
This teaches kids drama, in the same way that having them microwave some chicken nuggets teaches them to cook.
It's better, I suppose, than those cheesy high school plays where every kid gets a line, though, while my elder brother was in a Senior Play called "The Funny Brats" (they weren't), my sister got to be in "Death Takes a Holiday" and I played Ko-Ko in "The Mikado" senior year.
However, elementary plays were generally some recap of what they'd learned about Abraham Lincoln or the Oregon Trail, in construction-paper hats and cotton-ball beards, and, while we could certainly critique the history, at least it tied into that vain, eternal search for Thucydides.
But maybe enhancing the streaming of movies and watching of TV to an art form is the best prep we can offer at the moment for the world we will be sending them into.
Now go read this
Boulet does a fine job of sticking pins into self-important images, and don't expect the narrative arc on this one to proceed upward.
I probably wouldn't feature it if it did. Go read the rest.
Maybe I should have added a trigger-warning for fantasy buffs who take that stuff seriously.
Oh well.
Thucydides isn't here, either
This episode of Existential Comics, on the other hand, also veers from the sublime to the ridiculous, but from a much higher level, so they get additional points for Degree of Difficulty.
As with Boulet,this is but a snippet. It gets much worse. You should go read the whole thing.
I would definitely pay to watch a group of 10 year olds act out this one.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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