Marco Polo History

June 10, 2018June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

I have not told half of what I saw. (Marco Polo on his death bed, when encouraged to retract some of his crazy stories before facing judgement)
It’s unlikely that Polo actually observed firsthand everything he claimed… (Every Polo biographer since then)

I’ve been watching Marco Polo on Netflix. The series didn’t last long – it started strong, then tanked after two short seasons. Apparently Netflix took quite a loss.

It’s interested me enough so far, though, that I started a book about Polo and his travels. I picked it up used a few months ago for my classroom library, then forgot about it until packing up for the summer. Since I’m watching the series, I figured I’d bring it home.

Marco Polo is an interesting tale on several levels, not least because it’s not always easy to tell when he’s reporting hard facts (however unbelievable they must have seemed to readers), when he’s employing hyperbole or artistic license to make a larger point, or when he’s repeating legends and hearsay as firsthand experience. Further complicating matters, his account was written many years after the events it describes, and with the help of a successful romance novelist. So… take his story for what it is.

Except… I’m not actually reading Marco Polo’s account of his travels – I’m reading ABOUT Marco Polo and his account. While I don’t doubt the expertise of the author, I’m learning the parts SHE finds most significant or interesting, through HER voice and interpretation of HIS voice and interpretation. Modern commentary, facts, and expert insight into a seven hundred-year-old travelogue shamelessly mixing commentary, facts, and hearsay.

And wild lesbian orgies.

Or are those just in the Netflix version? I’m still learning as I go on this one.

Which brings me back to history according to Netflix. The series is an artistic spin on Polo’s account, itself an artistic spin, both based-on-but-not-bound-by factual history. I’m hardly an expert on the subjects involved, so I’ve developed a system for determining historical validity.

If a passage in the book connects with something in the show, and they more or less agree, I consider that information irrefutable. If I watch the series struggle through something counterintuitive in terms of accessible storylines, I internally file that information as plausible. And anything including extended lesbian orgies, I accept as artistic discretion – essential to a larger truth, whether they fit the story or not.

And oh, what artistic discretion! Here, I’ll rewind and show you again as proof…

I fear perhaps I’m modeling some rather shoddy history. It seems like I should be far more concerned with accuracy and documented facts as best they can be discerned. I used to cringe at Disney’s Pocahontas, and I still resent The Patriot and Cold Mountain. Why go soft now?

Still, the show DID get me reading the book. And much of the information I’d have otherwise had difficulty synthesizing or retaining has proven “stickier” because I enjoy the show. Events or characters which wouldn’t necessarily rouse my intellectual ya-yas on the printed page give me a bit of a rush when I recognize them from the screen. When I recently predicted the behavior of a character based on my reading, you’d have thought I’d just translated the lost languages of Mohenjo-Daro or unearthed a pristine copy of the Trump pee-tape. The circle was now complete! I was but the learner. Now, I am the Master! Step aside, David McCullough – I GOT THIS.

I had a professor at Tulsa Junior College back in the day who taught several of the required history classes most four-year universities expected as part of a well-rounded transfer student. I remember two big things about those classes.

The first was Hannibal – the only Black kid in the room. Hannibal knew a great deal more than I did about American (or any other) history. He and I had several interesting conversations about being Black in a socially “white” world, especially in the context of public schooling. Whatever clue-age I managed in my early years of teaching students who weren’t entirely like me was largely due to his patience and clarity. I wish I could thank him.

The other part I remember was the impact of Professor Burke’s stories about American history. I was particularly entranced by my first exposure to the tawdry tales of Andrew Jackson and Rachel Donelson.

Donelson was a divorced woman at a time when aspiring public figures did not associate with – let alone marry – such soiled creatures. Jackson fell in love with her and they wed, only to discover a few years later that her original divorce had never been finalized and they’d been living in bigamy. Jackson fought for her honor – sometimes literally – but his political opponents fed on the fallout and it was simply too scandalous to fully overcome.

After losing the controversial Election of 1824, Jackson finally won the Presidency in 1828, a watershed moment in the expansion of American democracy and for all practical purposes the birth of the modern Democratic Party. Rachel died before Inauguration Day of heart failure; Jackson forever blamed his political opponents.

Professor Burke’s tales of Jackson and Rachel and her ex-husband – an abusive scoundrel named Lewis Robards – were the sort of baroque melodrama cable TV and YA fiction later learned to weave into dirty gold. The stories were full of anachronisms and hyperbole and plot condensations – reduced like soup to their tastiest elements. I wasn’t the sharpest kid in the room, but even back then I was pretty sure Rachel hadn’t telephoned Jackson in distress (“Andy! Andy! He’s fulminating at me again!), nor had “Andy” hopped onto his duel-sport to Lancelot her away to the Hermitage.

But I didn’t care – I loved his stories and felt like I was learning. Years later, Professor Burke’s stories repeatedly anchored the “real” learning I did about Jackson and his world – kinda like this silly Marco Polo show.

Other times, though, the ways in which history is presented, distorted, or simply fabricated, aren’t intended to enlighten, educate, or even entertain. Sometimes people just LIE – to manipulate, to justify, to obfuscate. In recent years, I’m not even sure many of the worst perpetrators actually KNOW what’s supportable and what’s not in their bizarre renderings; they don’t even seem to care. Simply repeat the lie ad infinitum, and make its refutation personal – as if history is just another religious doctrine or political ideology to be hurled at one’s enemies or slathered like cheap gilding over your own corrupted ideologies.

Not to be too dramatic or anything. I mean, I’m not Marco Polo.

Reality matters. Oddly, this is a controversial and politically loaded statement at the moment. Facts are important, even when they’re inconvenient – sometimes BECAUSE they’re inconvenient. They don’t change based on the sheer repetition of bombastic nonsense or the lusts and machinations of the powerful.

But compiled facts aren’t usually SUFFICIENT if we’re trying to learn cohesive lessons. They can’t teach us what matters, or explain causes, effects, motivations, failures, or human nature. All history is interpretive – no matter who’s telling it or who pretends it could or should be otherwise. Events happen for reasons, they have effects, they fit into various contexts and complicate multiple lives. There’s also simply too damn many of them to present the entire record of mankind as an unbroken, sterilized anthology. And we keep learning about and creating more of all of it – daily.

How to best pick and choose, present and shape that history is a valid question and an appropriate debate. It assumes, however, that those so engaged are operating within an agreed upon range of morally defensible goals. Choosing a Black guy to play James Madison who breaks into song while engaging an Asian Aaron Burr is artistic discretion; insisting that the Civil War was about states’ rights or that most slaves were slaves by choice are damnable lies which do real damage to living people and our collective memory, no to mention our collective ideals.

Netflix, presumably, wants to make a few bucks pushing popular history. Polo likely wanted to thrill his audiences while still introducing them to an exotic world he found genuinely amazing. Professor Burke just wanted to help a bunch of clueless kids learn and remember some American History. I’ve shaped a few tales myself over the years, attempting to emphasize a lesson or better understand an era. Sometimes it works, other times I’m just… wrong.

None of which deserve the sort of condemnation earned by intentional twisting or recklessly disregarding our collective past in the service of narcissism, power, marginalization, “other-izing,” or the deification of evil.

History teaches us. It challenges us. It entertains us. Sometimes it confuses or discourages us; other times it exhorts and enlightens us. It’s bigger than our understanding and better than our application.

History may be complicated and subject to some interpretation. It may provide inspiration for some questionable artistic spins in the name of entertainment or experimentation. What it should NEVER be, however – what it MUST NOT become – is the subjective plaything of whoever’s in charge, to manipulate and discard as they whim.

Compared to that, how much harm can a few more lesbian orgies really do?

Now where’s that remote…?

History Songs

November 4, 2015June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal ~ 1 Comment

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.

Joan of Awkward, Part Two – Hide It Under A Footnote? No! I’m Gonna Let It Shine…

October 30, 2015June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

The story of Joan of Arc forces historians to deal with overtly spiritual claims and potentially miraculous outcomes in ways historians do not generally wish to do. We’ll cover the role of religion in the most general ways, if absolutely necessary, but we DON’T LIKE TO TALK ABOUT IT IF WE DON’T HAVE TO.

We don’t actually like to talk about it even when we DO have to.

But Joan, by all historical accounts, followed up the predictions of her ‘voices’ with successful action. She – a peasant girl – wrangled an audience with the Dauphin Charles VII. She shared with him secret words of God which seem to have immediately turned him from manipulative skeptic to temporary believer and gave him the strength to actually lead his nation in a renewed war for independence.

In a time of drastically divided sexual roles, she ended up leading battlefield troops to greater successes than they’d seen in a generation. And, when the same king she’d brought to power began to tire of her – perhaps fearing her popularity, or perhaps simply believing she’d exhausted her usefulness – betrayed her and allowed her to be captured and tried by the English, she held to her faith, and to her convictions regarding God’s calling for him and for France.

She refused to renounce her unusually clear and personal communication with God, and was violently executed for a combination of heresy and cross-dressing – a condemnation of her innermost spiritual status mixed with outrage over her hair length and attire, her literal facade.

Plus she’d helped France kick England’s oppressive %** around a bit. That charge was implied rather than officially recorded in court or church records.

She was burned at the stake (in some accounts calling out to Jesus), eyes locked on the Crucifix she’d requested be held up before her eyes. Extant accounts suggest witnesses cried out for forgiveness, many repenting of their role in her martyrdom. Of course, people write lots of things after the fact – so who knows?

I will take a cynical leap and dismiss accounts that her heart was left undamaged in the ashes. We simply lack sufficient documentation for something so… unusual.

Immutable internal organs or not, how can you tell Joan’s story without pondering her faith? Her voices? She was either crazy with a healthy side of lucky, a very effective liar, or God spoke to her and sent her on a miracle-laden mission to save France from the English. The idea God could like France is problematic enough – but successful wars based on divine visions? Is that something we wish to encourage?

Thus, the political intrigues and battlefield strategies are explored endlessly, while Joan’s voices are rushed past, as if we’d rather not draw too much attention to THE MOST INTERESTING THING IN THE ENTIRE ACCOUNT.

To be fair, it’s tricky territory even for those not teaching in public schools to presume to understand the spiritual realities of another – particularly someone six centuries gone. But we do our past a disservice when we circle so widely around the subject instead.

If we’re going to acknowledge the hypocrisy and cruelty done in the name of God by early Spanish explorers confronting local Amerindians, let’s recognize the good intentions and legitimate faith of many others in similar situations. If we’re going to explain the cultural destruction done by Anglo-American missionaries to the tribes in their purview, let’s be a bit more vocal about the role of faith driving Samuel Worcester and his nameless ilk who served among the Natives with little reward in this life.

Yes, people taking part in the Second Great Awakening did some weird things – the barking and the roaring and the writhing about. Perhaps we could better tie these experiences to the increased efforts to help the poor and reform society in practical ways which tended to follow the path of such festivities. I’ll take some speaking in tongues of angels if it leads to better social services – especially the non-governmental type.

And this same revival movement ‘democratized’ Protestantism in a powerful way, giving the average American far more agency in their salvation than the Calvinism of the previous generation could have even considered without doing some frothing and noise-making of their own – albeit of a less ecstatic nature. In other words, it made Christianity itself more reflective of American ideals regarding personal improvement and potential, and the power of personal choice.

We don’t have to mandate any particular interpretation regarding the spiritual accuracy of this to note that it’s PRETTY DAMN INTERESTING HOW THAT COULD HAPPEN and that the shift has continued through this very day.

As we approach modern times, it makes for a rather lopsided view of Presidential paradigms when we discuss foreign policy through every lens but the one most-cited from the Big Podium. “For we must consider that we shall be as a City Upon a Hill…” said John Winthrop in 1630 – a sentiment echoed, reworked, expanded, and cited over and over and over and over by men deciding whether or not we put our best in harm’s way in hopes of spreading that light a little further, or at least holding back the darkness a little longer.

In other words, sometimes we do stuff for oil. Sometimes we do stuff for business. Sometimes we do stuff out of an exaggerated sense of noblesse oblige. But in the mix is the conviction by many that our calling is divine – that there are times standing back is not an option, lest we lose the favor of God Himself.

That’s a thing, and if we are to debate it intelligently, we must know it exists.

We don’t have to solve or resolve the ethereals in order to acknowledge them. We cover tons of other complicated stuff without feeling compelled to either exalt or belittle the veracity of those involved. I’ve heard a dozen different explanations of how and why salmon swim upstream in their endeavor to spawn in their birth waters or whatever, but none carry an awkward fear of discussing the eternal truth vs. the practical value of this struggle. There’s no implied Rod’n’Reel of Damocles hanging over the topic, waiting for a lawsuit or angry phone call. It’s just fish doing part of what fish do.

Surely it’s OK to allow humans to be at least as complex as Friday’s dinner?

If we’re in the business of educating, however imperfectly, let’s try to educate them – about whatever parts seem relevant at the time, and without carrying around the distorted notion that somehow dancing around the unknowns makes history more legit or more clear.

If anything, recognizing the complexity and depth of mankind’s many motivations and the varied realms in which we run has at least some small chance of bringing back a sense of relevance – maybe even stimulating some interest – which our past seems to have lost for far too many kids.

Joan of Awkward, Part One – Missing Voices

October 29, 2015June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal ~ 2 Comments

Several years ago, I went through a bit of a Joan of Arc fetish. I watched the Leelee Sobieski mini-series again, several documentaries, and read a half-dozen historical explorations of our “Maid of Lorraine.” Several novels stood out – Mark Twain’s semi-historical fiction of her, of course, and An Army of Angels by Pamela Marcantel, an amazing imagining of her short life with just the right balance of grounded history and literary license.

In short, I got a little Joan crazy for a time.

Unfortunately for my academic credibility and witty dinner banter, I’m not a big ‘retain the details’ guy unless I’m either consciously studying it or teaching it to others. I read history for pleasure, along with whatever else grabs my attention at the time, but I don’t have the kind of memory that retains most of it in sharp focus easily or often.

That’s not actually the stumbling block you might think teaching high school in the 21st century. Nothing locks the minutiae of your subject into permanent recall like explaining it repeatedly throughout the years, and almost anything that doesn’t stick is easily researched when necessary. We’re still trying to get them to bring a pencil and check the class website periodically; there’s little danger they’ll without warning probe such historical depths that I end up academically cowed.

I can’t say that it does much for relationships, though, this hazy grasp of specifics – birthdays, middle names, her not liking raisins, forgetting her mom died last year… people get touchy about so many little details. Hey, we all have different gifts.

But I digress.

The basic story of Joan goes something like this:

Joan was born in early 15th century France, near the end of the Hundred Years’ War. As she became a young woman, the nation was enduring another dispute over who would inherit the French throne. The outcome would determine not only who’d get the nice chair and fancy castle, but who would control France for the foreseeable future – the French via the Dauphin, Charles VII, or the English through a sizeable faction of ‘Burgundians’ (Frenchmen who cooperated with the English) and their up-and-coming monarch, Henry VI.

Charles’s daddy, Charles VI (nice system, right?) was insane – even for royalty – and may not have been his daddy at all. The dear Queen was thought to be having an affair with the Duke of Orleans, aka the King’s brother, and he may have been Charles VII’s biological father. That would explain in part why the Queen was so cooperative with England when it came time to designate an official heir to the throne; she signed off on Henry VI holding that honor.

Henry was a tiny little English king-to-be, you see. He was legit, with king-blood flowing through his wee little veins. This was a big deal to royal types back in the day – hence all the inbreeding and weird genetic issues which resulted. Perhaps the Queen wanted peace with England for more traditional reasons as well, but the common people of France were not impressed, and assigned her unflattering nicknames when speaking privately amongst themselves.

See how fun it is to study history? Your family’s not as messed up as you think. “Dysfunctional” is merely a fancy term for “typical royalty, but without money or power.”

Joan dealt with none of this as a child, of course. She was a peasant, which sounds to modern ears like it must include both servitude and poverty. Neither seems to have been the case, however. Daddy Jacques d’Arc and crew were certainly near the bottom of the social hierarchy, and times were tough all over, but they don’t appear to have been in need by the standards of the day.

Somewhere around age 13, Joan begin having visions and hearing voices from Saint Michael, Saint Margaret, and Saint Catherine – telling her from God that she must be a good girl and stay faithful, and that she had a destiny and purpose far beyond her upbringing.

Divine communication. It’s a large part of what makes her so fascinating.

It’s also the kind of thing which makes historians crazy, you understand. It’s just so awkward to deal with the supernatural in an academic context, especially given the typical disconnect between those book-learnin’ types and people of faith. We’d rather not talk about it at all.

It’s downplayed even with major figures like the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Notice how many history books drop the ‘Reverend’ whenever possible. Granted, after the first mention of someone in a history text, they’re usually referred to only by their last name, no matter WHO they are – but the designation is usually missing in that first mention as well. And in sidebars. Photo captions. Even that separate section in the back with the long excerpt of “I Have A Dream.”

Usually if someone’s a ‘Dr.’, a ‘Prof.’, or even a ‘Sir’ we work it in there at least once. But ‘Rev.’ we like to slip past.

When his primary calling IS included, it’s used as framing for the story we actually wish to tell – a colorful bit of context to get past as quickly as possible. Its significance is more often than not presumed to be as preparation or practice for his “real” historical function, helping King build organizational skills and hone his powerful oratory – and what a lucky break THAT turned out to be because that kinda thing ended up SO useful later in service of the Civil Rights movement!

Faith becomes a happy fluke of background rather than a key component – as if King just happened to sit next to someone randomly on the bus who ended up playing some key role we never saw coming, or left his coat too close to the oven and accidentally invented penicillin. As if taking up the call of ministry – of spreading the Word of God to the downtrodden and fighting for justice – made a nice placeholder before changing careers and fighting for civil rights.

As if they weren’t both manifestations of the same inner fire.

It’s easier the further back we go. Dismissing the Puritans or the revival preachers of the Second Great Awakening happens almost naturally; they seem so radical by today’s mores. Any pantheistic cultures are tacitly patronized without question, as are those more driven by nature, visions, or quests than westerners find comfortable.

In more recent years it’s been quite in vogue to mock groups like the Latter Day Saints in ways which would be borderline hate crimes with any other demographic. (Can you imagine large, loud groups at Applebee’s cackling over song fragments from the hit Broadway musical, ‘The Book of Mohammed’ or ‘Sing-Along-With-Brother-Malcolm’?)

I get that issues of faith are problematic- especially if we’re teaching them in public school. But Joan, by all historical accounts, followed up the predictions of her ‘voices’ with successful action. That makes dealing with her especially tricky.

Just ask the English.

A Little Knowledge, Part Three – Liar, Liar, Pants On Fire

February 24, 2015June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal ~ 1 Comment

“My client wasn’t even IN the bar the evening of the murder, and if he WAS there, he doesn’t even OWN a gun! If he DOES own a gun, he didn’t have it with him that evening, and if he DID have it with him, it wasn’t loaded – he’s not CRAZY! Even if it WERE loaded, he didn’t use it – why would he? He didn’t even KNOW the victim. If he DID know the victim, he liked him, and if he didn’t like him, he at least didn’t kill him. But if he DID kill him, it was self-defense. And if it wasn’t self-defense, he still had a very good reason. Otherwise, he’s crazy and can’t be held accountable. Come on, he was carrying around a loaded gun – who DOES that?!
I’ve told you that one way or the other he’s innocent – why do you doubt me? That’s so hurtful!”

It is difficult for those of you with the slightest shred of decency to appreciate how the law and politics work. They do not operate according to anything most of us consider reasonable, moral, or even explicable. In the past they didn’t have to (and in some systems today they still don’t). Those affected had little expectation of being fully informed and no real control of the outcome.

In modern America, politics still doesn’t have to make sense, but for different reasons. Most of us are too busy to try to keep up and sort it all out, or too quick to follow anyone confirming what we wish confirmed or feigning outrage over whatever we find outrageous. Or maybe we’re just too stupid and easily distracted.

Not criticizing here – just keeping an open mind about possible explanations.

It’s amazing to me how easily we roll our eyes or exclamate our declamations over things done in the past – successfully, for centuries – and yet find it inconceivable the same things may be happening today, because… well, that’s CRAZY!

What, exactly, is it you think has changed about either mankind or the nature of power? Please – I’ll wait.

…

Hello?

The South attempted to secede and lost. The war destroyed lives and property on both sides, but the South had the worst of it by far. Reconstruction began, things got weird again.

And then the South began writing the history of the war and the events which led to it. The war they’d lost. The one fought over a variety of issues, but in which slavery and its continuation were central and essential as defined by the South in the very documents they issued to justify their cause.

Only suddenly the war hadn’t been about slavery at all. In fact, the South was collectively rather wounded at the suggestion! Slavery?! You think – you think this was about SLAVERY?

No less an authority than Jefferson Davis began cranking out volumes on the REAL story of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Others picked up the theme, and before long their United Daughters (still active today) were tea and cookie-ing this theme across the land.

Historians still argue about the war (they’re allowed to do that still, outside of Oklahoma and Texas) – that’s fine, it’s what they’re supposed to do.

What’s less tolerable is the fervent hurt and chagrin evidenced by the South’s defenders at the very suggestion that secession had ANYTHING to do with slavery. It’s not that they wish to lay out a reasoned argument, you understand – it’s that they’ve reshaped history and historiography solely through repetition and strong emotion.

“To suggest secession was about SUH-LAVERY, well it it it’s it’s just… *sniff* DISHONEST!”

The rest of the nation has cooperated, by the way – we don’t like acknowledging our role in making chattel of humans with souls any more than they do. Better to focus on tariffs and elections and economies and cultures – all persuasive alternatives, since all were involved.

The best deceptions are mostly true, after all – or true but for omissions. That’s how laws are made and history written – so be it.

Why does it matter if the South wishes to save a little face? What’s so wrong with simply focusing on the good parts in our collective history? I mean, the naysayers won their little war and got their way, didn’t they?

Can we at least keep the damn flag without everyone having a hurt-feelings-fit every time?

My favorite hockey team captain after a tough loss and horrible officiating: “There were some tough calls, but the real problem is that we didn’t take care of business in our own end. We let too many pucks get past us and didn’t take advantage of our opportunities.”

I hated the poor play, and the poor officiating even more – but my decisive and lingering memory is how much I love the class of my team.

Also, he’s pretty.

More importantly, the team is able to go into practice the next day aware of the things they CAN control, and which led to problems. By acknowledging what they did wrong, instead of merely casting blame, they can improve – or at least that’s the goal.

You may remember the contrast between how Kanye and Beyonce handled this situation:

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The lingering perception is that Kanye is a nut, Beyoncé is a class act, and that apparently Taylor Swift is a country artist (as she mentioned in the full version of her pre-interrupted speech). Reality may differ, but what we remember is what shapes events going forward.

It matters what happened and how it’s remembered because we can’t learn from mistakes we don’t think we made. Left uncriticized, Kanye is just a fighter for justice and Swift a bewildered blonde. Without her subsequent efforts to make things right, Beyoncé could just as easily seem a sore loser, despite winning bigger better things that same night.

If the war was about slavery, and slavery is evil, and the South lost, then the reasonable thing to do is to start trying to repair some of the damage done by slavery. If the war was about a race-based chattel system, then we have some serious introspection to do about ourselves as a people and the extent to which we’ve failed to live up to our own ideals.

Of course, if the real issues were states’ rights-ish, that’s not as bad. Federalism is about balance, after all, and if perhaps the South got out of balance, that’s clearly rectified now. If anything, the central government is much stronger than originally intended as a result!

We can spend some time trying to Reconstruct the South and push for some reforms, but at some point we’re going to need to get back to being a country again. We’ve made our point – let’s let them rebuild and trust whatever gradual progress can be made in terms of race and society.

If the war was about slavery, then both Lincoln and John Brown were right – we’ve paid for our national sin with national bloodshed. Time for a new birth of freedom.

If the war was about different understandings of the Constitution, then might makes right and we won by decimating our enemies by any means necessary. Next time the meaning of our founding documents may swing back a bit the other direction.

If the war was about slavery, then Black America may well need time and support to recover from a sort of collective PTSD. There would be imbalances to correct and scars which may never be quite healed. If we’re willing to go to war with ourselves to keep an entire race of people in degradation and servitude, what must we confess and how might we repent to set a better future course?

If 620,000 men died over tariffs or electoral procedures, then our nation is charted by whichever political and popular mechanizations produce the desired result. If the war was about anything other than slavery, maybe Black people need to just get over it and be less, you know… ‘Black’ about everything.

If our ideals are as flawless and their realizations as consistent throughout our history as current legislation insists, then inequity and suffering are primarily a result of personal or cultural failures. If America is ‘exceptional’ in the way they demand we acknowledge, whatever failures have occurred within it are individual and not national. Potential solutions or cures must, logically, come from the same.

We can’t repent of sins we can’t confess, or repair that we are unable to see as broken. This applies across any number of historical and national issues. If we build our actions and beliefs on a foundation of national amazing-ness, the ramifications are much, much larger than which textbooks we adapt or which tests we take to graduate. Conversely, if we believe the human heart – even the American heart – is desperately wicked, and deceitful above all things… who can know it? Well, that leads to humility and grace as we push forward, aware of what we are capable, for good or ill.

I’ll close with a little Bible talkin’, since that seems to be such a motivator for those pushing a better whitewashing for our lil’uns. Whatever we may disagree on, I wholeheartedly concur that we’ve lost much in our upbringing if we feel the need to run from the wisdom found in small red print:

“And he spake this parable unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others:
Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess.
And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.
I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.”
(Luke 18:9-14, KJV)

If there’s an argument to be had, let’s have it. But let’s base it on our best understanding of the truth and the wisest possible course consistent with our proclaimed ideals – not on what best covers our collective behinds and casts the remaining blame on those least able to carry the burden.