A Sense of History
When you spend as little time asleep as I do these days (roughly four hours spread over a 24-hour cycle) there are times when your mind opens all its doors and windows and you neither know nor care what floats in or out. Sunny days are particularly good for this, but unfortunately, that’s not a call one gets to make. If anything, it’s like a magician’s box, the kind they put the lovely assistant in, then spin around to show there’s no secret panel just before shoving a half dozen swords into it only to open the door and … she’s gone! And that’s very much what it’s like: here one minute, gone the next.
And then there’s this: I am unable to take any sort of sleep-aid – from melatonin to prescription downers - because they don’t work. At most, they make me feel bad and I take myself to task for thinking “this time it’ll be different.”
Instead, I watch a movie, sometimes two. It will come as no surprise the movies are old, as in Hollywood Classics. There are others – quite a few, actually - that may not date back to the Thirties or Forties, but to my mind they are classics all the same.
I don’t concern myself with production values or even how historically hyper-accurate they are, though I cannot abide anachronisms. And because I tend to lose myself in movies, as long as they are true and consistent within the framework of the story, I’m okay. I don’t care what quadrant of space or which alternative universe the story takes place in, as long as it’s believable within the context of the story.
What I often find myself thinking though, is that for some of these movies, it’s safe to assume everyone whose image appears onscreen is long dead and gone. Stars, bit players, extras, animals, lighting and sound technicians, the director, all gone. So, watching something like The Ten Commandments is like watching a documentary on ancient Egypt: the several thousand extras building a city of monuments for Ramses or making bricks for the pyramids are just as dead and dusty as the slaves they are portraying.
Same goes for the Egyptian charioteers (and their horses) who followed the Hebrews into the recently parted Red Sea. Even the duck who is shown waddling onto dry land at long last is, alas, long gone. (There’s something to think about: how long would it take a duck to traverse the width of the Red Sea on its little webbed feet?)
And then there are all those films that either weren’t properly preserved over the decades or went up in smoke some time ago in a storage warehouse fire. All those images – perhaps the only evidence of the existence of countless thousands – gone forever. All that’s left may be a property inventory or a cast list or sometimes just a title. (We have a similar problem with many Greeks from the ancient world: we have names – philosophers, playwrights, mathematicians – and the titles of works they were supposed to have produced, but no trace of the work has yet to be found. Aristotle’s second book of Poetics, which reportedly dealt with comedy, being perhaps the most famous).
What bothers me about this is that no one else seems too bothered by it. These lost films are a part of our cultural heritage, but not only are they old, they are also in black and white. And, again, they’re old. The only sort of history the majority of Amerikans seem concerned about these days is invariably related to sports or celebrities. Ask anyone involved with the education system and you’re likely to be told there simply isn’t enough time to cover any aspect of Amerikan history in depth. Really? You can’t cover 240 years of history in a school year?
(Yes, 240 years. Forget the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The 13 colonies didn’t become an independent nation until The Treaty of Paris in 1783, and it was another two years before it went into effect. Look it up.)
But that doesn’t really matter, does it? It’s just a seven-year difference. Well, it matters because history isn’t about approximations, at least not when there is verifiable documentation available. So, we’ve made a habit of manipulating or simply denying our own history, even though we taught it in our schools for decades. It’s become inconvenient to do so. Do today’s chilluns actually need to know about the Gadsden Purchase? Seward’s Folly? The Louisiana Purchase? The “yellow journalism” that led to The Spanish-American War? Who John Brown was? That the Revolution was won largely due to the influx of French money, and the assistance of the French army and navy? That the men who wrote The Declaration of Independence were heavily influenced by French philosophers? There was time enough in the school year for such things during my school days, but hey – those ended in 1972, half a century ago. Old, old, old. And that’s for well-documented events.
Now, there was another stream of history running through Amerika, concurrent with the events listed above. It wasn’t an alternative history, nor was there a political agenda behind it. But it had one crucial flaw: it wasn’t written down. It was an oral tradition, which is what made it so easy to wipe out. Yes, I’m talking about The People that were scattered from sea to shining sea who were here long before 1492, long before the Pilgrims, long before the establishment of the Jamestown Colony, even long before the Vikings. Of course, they were considered subhuman because they were animistic, non-Christian, barely a step or two this side of the Stone Age, hadn’t invented the wheel or written language or even had a true, common language. Apart from the 200 or so years of the Iroquois Confederation, they weren’t organized. Worst of all, they were in the way.
(That was something else I learned about in 8th grade: Manifest Destiny, Look it up.)
It’s a lesson the ancients knew well: kill, enslave, or assimilate a population, then destroy everything associated with them, their culture and their history (see The Third Punic War and the fate of Carthage).
The United States had a strong sense of history back then, and saw nothing wrong with failing to honor every treaty with The First Nations, scattering the people, and conducting a well-documented policy of genocide with the aim of erasing them from the pages of history. And in the end, even a centuries-old tradition of oral history requires qualified and sympathetic translators to preserve it, something the government never saw fit to provide.
But it’s not as if The First Nations have been completely forgotten or have disappeared, they’ve just been pushed way out of the way. As recently as the mid-Nineties, the Lewisville (TX) Independent School District was showing its American History classes Dances with Wolves as their way of covering the period known as The Indian Wars. And even here in windswept Holland, on weekends one can find “drum circles” in the city parks, with good burgers of all ages communing with their inner Comanche or Shoshone or whatever it is they’re doing.
(PLEASE NOTE: I make no claim to being an expert or an authoritative source. As I called one of my early albums, I’m just another white boy. I have no special insight, no inside sources. I’ve read Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. All I have is a love of history and its preservation, no matter whose it is, no matter how inconvenient it may be to others.)
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