CSotD: Consolations of history

Mike Peterson Published: November 6, 2012 1 minute 4 comments

The Better Half wins the election day cartooning nod. How depressing.

Oh. Sorry, Randy. There's probably a better way of phrasing that.

But, first of all, he wasn't up against a whole lot. I mean, jokes about "thank goodness the political ads are over"? Is that all you've got?

That's not so bad for a gag strip — it's better than, y'know, a big bear standing behind a guy who's saying "Quit breathing so heavily. You'll scare off the game." — but I was seeing it in the political cartoons.

Come on, man. "Thank god the ads are over"??? There are political cartoonists out of work who do have a point of view.

Speaking of which, "They're all the same" is not just a cop-out. For a political cartoonist, it's a sign of incompetence. Imagine a restaurant critic who wrote about how it really didn't matter where you ate.

Earn your damn paycheck, or give it up to somebody who will.

On a deeper level, today's cartoon reminds me of a conversation I had with my mother back when I was a kid and knew everything (and which I've probably recounted here before). I said something wise about World War II and she said, "But you have to remember: We didn't know at the time who was going to win."

All those History Channel programs about D-Day and Pearl Harbor and so forth are pretty entertaining now, but only because of the massive spoilers, like the fact that they're not being broadcast in German or Japanese.

But, the actual war itself aside, the newsreels and photos from slightly earlier of Jewish people with six-pointed stars on their coat lapels invariably provoke the question "How could everyone stand by and let that happen?"

Well, they didn't know how that was going to come out, either.

Somebody on Facebook (sorry in advance if you're reading this) was talking about the complaints of voter suppression and asked why, if they didn't like the people who were keeping them from voting, they hadn't voted them out of office.

When the illogic of that was pointed out, the reply was that, when black people weren't allowed to vote back in the 60s, they demonstrated and won the right.

Well, yeah.

Except that they also weren't allowed to vote in the 50s, the 40s, the 30s, back, back … you are misreading what you see on the History Channel if you compress the Civil Rights Movement to a few years in the early-mid 60s.

Maybe my grandkids have time to work their way through another process like that, but I surely don't. And I wouldn't wish it on them, either.

Too many people worked too hard for too many years to simply hit the reset button and make us all start over.

Look: Eliot was right. The world doesn't end with a bang, but with a whimper, and if you're expecting some candidate for public office to stand up and promise Armageddon, or the suppression of freedom, or the oppression of scapegoats, you need to watch more History Channel, because that isn't how it happens.

The other factor in all this is that you never see the crisis that was averted, the disaster that didn't happen.

And so people sit on the airport tarmac and complain and demand compensation because their plane was delayed while a technical issue was resolved, but later on, when they see in the news a story about a plane that went down in flames because of faulty maintenance, they scream for the heads of the people who failed to find and correct the flaw.

One of the ads playing here in New Hampshire shows a young, attractive mother-and-wife type in an open, sunny kitchen, saying that Obama promised to fix the economy, but asking what has he done for her family? The strange thing is that it looks to me as if her family doesn't need a god damned thing. She looks well-groomed and nicely dressed, the house is beautiful, it looks like she's living the dream.

Why didn't they bring in Alice Kramden for that spot? It looks to me like this soccer mom is not asking for the economy to be fixed so much as she's asking for her dream to remain undisturbed.

She's sitting on that plane on the tarmac, complaining about the delay.

And here's an oddity of usage: We talk about "all these Cassandras" with their tales of woe and predictions of disaster, and dismiss them as over-dramatic and delusional.

But Cassandra was right. Her story in mythology is that her gift of prophecy was blunted by a curse that meant nobody would believe her.

And we know how that one came out, too: Despite her warnings, Troy was sacked and burned, its inhabitants were slaughtered and Cassandra, after being raped, was enslaved as a concubine and later murdered.

Not so encouraging.

However, at this point, we do what we can. Here's a song I've posted before, but it's relevant now, as long as you realize that it doesn't mean anything if you just sit there. The people in the song may be optimistic about how it will work out in the long run, but they are far from passive.

Go thou and do likewise.

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Mat

I was discussing with my friend the travesty that is contemporary history classes. My schooling was throughout the 1990s and college in the early-to-mid 2000s, wherein I was able to experience a full range of historical teaching from the absolute abysmal to the pinnacle of a caring educator. One complaint I have about many contemporary history classes (especially US history) is that there is a stark disconnect between what happened only 20-30 years prior and what is going on at the moment.
Civil Rights, especially, are treated as some popular movement that started in the late 1950s and ended, for the most part, with some legislative victories in the 1960s and 1970s and is handled, for all intents and purposes, as mostly settled by the time we’re learning the history. It seems to gloss over the fact that civil rights, freedom, etc were concepts being fought for since well before the American Civil War and said rights are still being fought over today.
For instance, Rodney King’s beating and the subsequent trial happened only a few years before taking a high school history class, so it certainly wasn’t particularly removed from recent history in the way that WWII felt.
The massive inequalities of black neighborhoods were subjects of numerous films (both dramatic and comedic) throughout the 1980s, 90s and beyond. Yet, the subject of civil rights is treated as “settled”. Which reminds me of the way a professor in college mocked “settled law” as something that everyone accepts, until something changes it.
So, unfortunately, education starts early ingraining people with the notion that problems have come and gone. If something is still wrong, well, the problem was fixed already, so obviously the problem is on the person’s end.
Reminds me of a video I saw yesterday. A woman complaining about how Obama is dishonorable, a bad American and doesn’t care about the country and is dividing the country. The interviewer asks: “Do you think the reason he’s having so much trouble uniting the country is because people keep calling him dishonorable, a bad American and someone who doesn’t like his country”.
The response: “I think so”. The logic totally flying over her head.
Ultimately, a lot of people seem to have trouble viewing a larger picture and tend to be very unknowledgeable (and frequently willfully ignorant) about things outside of their immediate purview, which ultimately lead to asinine “know-it-all” platitudes about how people need to do x, y and z and everything would be solved or, ultimately, why people can’t merely complain and make Voter ID laws go away.
As an aside (to this lengthy comment), I voted this morning shortly after polls opened (During my morning jog). I was asked for an ID and told the person that by law, I didn’t have to show my ID at all. On first hearing this, my girlfriend insisted I was probably too harsh and acting like a jerk (especially considering the person was obviously a teenage girl). I told her very frankly: “It’s better that I set her straight at 6:10am right after polls open than having her dismiss someone because they lacked an ID”.

Nov 06,2012
Brent

The History Channel shows history? Do they even have room for that between reality shows, and speculation about UFOs, monsters, and the apocalypse?

Nov 06,2012
Mike Peterson

Dude, Roswell is history, and so is Nessie. The apocalypse isn’t history yet, but it will be!

Nov 06,2012
Mike Peterson

Mat, I don’t follow James Loewen down the line, but “Lie My Teacher Told Me” has some solid criticism, especially his observation that we don’t have textbooks called “The Triumph of Chemistry” but tend to treat history as a story with a moral.
When I did a children’s biography of Nellie Bly, I found that most existing biographies ended with her triumphant return from the famous “Around the World” trip. The rest of her life was interesting but not triumphant, and so is left out of the narrative.
Loewen notes that Helen Keller is taught as the plucky deaf mute who learned to spell at the water pump — but they ignore her long career as a Wobblie!
We choose the part that serves the triumphalist narrative, and so MLK fits nicely into that, and we teach fire hoses and Freedom Rides, but we don’t teach the long stretch between Plessy v. Ferguson and those days, during which a lot was going on.
Worst part — and this IS a lie — is the story of the tired seamstress, in which a poor, simple seamstress named Rosa Parks decided she didn’t want to sit in the back of the bus. This ignores the fact that Parks was a well-educated person who not only knew the bus driver that day but was an officer in the local NAACP and knew the group was looking for a test case.
That would be like teaching people that St. Harriet of Tubman was planning to join John Brown at Harper’s Ferry but got sick. Hey, if it doesn’t fit the narrative, it doesn’t make the book!

Nov 06,2012

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CSotD: Consolations of history

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Mat

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