History Songs

Waaayyy back in 1996, the band Barenaked Ladies released their first moderately successful single in the U.S.:

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Broke into the old apartment – this is where we used to live 

Broken glass, broke and hungry, broken hearts and broken bones – this is where we used to live

Why did you paint the walls? Why did you clean the floor?

Why did you plaster over the hole I punched in the door? 

…

Why did they pave the lawn? Why did they change the locks?

Why did I have to break in? I only came here to talk – this is where we used to live

…

Broke into the old apartment – tore the phone out of the wall

Only memories, fading memories, blending into dull tableaux – I want them back…

History is a tricky thing. Personal or collective, it’s ridiculously difficult to reconstruct the past – even on those rare occasions when we have an abundance of materials with which to try. 

It’s a paradoxical truth in teaching history that the only two things you can say with any certainty are that (1) people everywhere, throughout time, are all basically the same – no matter what their circumstances, and (2) we can’t possibly fathom or understand people in other times, places, and circumstances – our worlds are simply too different. 

Plus, we never have ALL of the information and experiences needed. While we gain wonderful perspective from time and distance from whatever subject we choose to examine, we lose detail – seeing only through a glass darkly, or a rather pixelated type of historical Google Earth. 

Even when documentation abounds, it turns out we can hardly trust those who WERE there, consciously recording. Our human perception and memory are apparently pretty much crap whenever anything important needs recalling.

On the other hand, how many ugly break-ups does THAT explain?

And so far we’ve been assuming that all involved WANT to accurately preserve or recapture the past. That may not always be the case:

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As he feeds them to the fire, one by one, he’s dimly aware – he may have learned a thing or two, but tuition wasn’t cheap. And he’s only got these foggy notions of what he paid…

Author Milan Kundera of Czechoslovakia began his 1979 novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, with a true story embedded into the narrative of Mirek, a fictional protagonist:

Chapter One: Lost Letters

In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in Old Town Square. That was a great turning point in the history of Bohemia…

Gottwald was flanked by his comrades, with Clementis standing close to him. It was snowing and cold, and Gottwald was bareheaded. Bursting with solicitude, Clementis took off his fur hat and set it on Gottwald’s head.

The propaganda section made hundreds of thousands of copies of the photograph taken on the balcony where Gottwald, in a fur hat and surrounded by his comrades, spoke to the people. On that balcony the history of Communist Bohemia began. Every child knew that photograph, from seeing it on posters and in schoolbooks and museums.

Four years later, Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately made him vanish from history and, of course, from all photographs. Ever since, Gottwald has been alone on the balcony. Where Clementis stood, there is only the bare palace wall. Nothing remains of Clementis but the fur hat on Gottwald’s head.

It is 1971, and Mirek says: The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting…

As it turns out, the fictional ‘Mirek’ is distracted from his otherwise tiny, irrelevant revolutionary efforts by his own quest to secure the return of some embarrassing letters from a former girlfriend – someone he now finds a bit ugly and offensive. 

You see the irony, of course. 

More recently, textbook behemoth McGraw-Hill took some heat when an annoyed mother circulated a snapshot of this insert from their Texas-approved history textbooks:

It sounds like they got a great deal on a vacation package from those people who keep spam-calling me from Orlando while I’m trying to eat dinner.

There are far more subtle ways to rewrite history than burning letters or euphemizing slavery, as this piece so effectively demonstrates. It’s not just Texas, of course – history is rewritten every time there are no normal-sized women on TV or in every chapter summary focused on Generals and Presidents over factory-workers and midwives. 

I own a dozen well-intentioned U.S. History texts from 1876 – 1961 which portray Christopher Columbus a dozen different ways and paint Indian Removal as everything from travesty to unfortunate necessity to “You’ve Just Won An All-Expense Paid Trip To Oklahoma!” 

Those same books, however, avoid any controversy at all regarding the women’s movements of the early 19th century. That’s because there’s no mention of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, or even Susan B. Anthony in any of them. They simply didn’t make the cut. 

Kinda makes you wonder which is more troubling – being misrepresented, or being erased. *shudder*

It is, in fact, largely unavoidable that we’re going to make draconian compromises any time we try to write or talk about history, assuming we wish our discussion to take up less time and space than the original events. All the more reason, then, we should be hyper-aware of what’s NOT being told, and what’s NOT being asked. 

What’s happening just off-screen, as it were.

Even when we have the purest intentions, capturing the past – be it events long gone or the shifting shaping swirling of our own experiences – is an undertaking both elusive and unfair. Perhaps it’s a blessing to work from a scarcity of information; the impossibility of conveying the richness of the better-known may prove far more daunting.   

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It’s as if a fin, reaching from the swamp, grabbed me by my arm – tried to pull me in. But my arm was strong, and the fin was an inaccurately reconstructed fake…

For those of you less metaphorically inclined, the past is always “an inaccurately reconstructed fake.” Even when it does pull us in, it’s an interpretive approximation at best.  

It was right through those trees – I’m not insane! That’s where the fin tried to drag me in. Don’t look at me, look at where I’m pointing – close your eyes, see what I see!

That’s one of my favorite lines in all of known music. “Close your eyes, see what I see” – there’s the human experience in a nutshell. Please ‘get’ me – just a little! Fathom collectively with me, if only for an instant, said the shepherd boy to the lonely king. 

Please?  

If you can draw it in the air, or write it down, then you weren’t there. What’s gone is mute – someone changed the truth – they smoked the proof and there’s nothing left… 

But there is. There are our stories, and fragments, and framings, and efforts to capture – however imperfectly – some critical bits. Faded memories blending in to dull tableaux, yes – but also photos revealing Clem’s fur hat on someone else’s head. 

The past is maddeningly foggy, to be sure, but the lessons – and the flavors – too important to give up. So we grasp at the smoke and fill in the rest. Hoping.

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