Well, I wrapped up Colin Woodard’s American Nations: A History of the Eleven Regional Cultures of North America over the weekend. It’s been only about a month since I even learned of the book, and given that I’ve already made reference to it a half-dozen times on this blog, it is fairly safe to say that I really enjoyed reading it, although that is not to say that I was necessarily persuaded of the entirety of the book’s premise.
As usual, so as not to spoil the book for anyone who intends to read it for themselves and draw their own conclusions, my thoughts on American Nations are below the fold.
During The Daily Show’s first segment last night, Jon Stewart went after Fox News for again turning the Holiday Season into a trumped up culture clash that Fox insists on describing as “The War on Christmas.” Once again, blogger doesn’t seem to be able to embed video from The Daily Show but you can watch it here. (It really is very funny.)
As always, right-wingers’ complaints about their so-called ‘War on Christmas’ devolve to an assertion that “America is Christian nation” and – when called upon to defend this patently untrue statement – they point to the Pilgrims, who settled in New England seeking ‘religious freedom.’
(For the record, Americans may be a Christian people – by and large – but that does not make us a Christian nation. The First Amendment makes clear that the government is to neither establish a religion nor to interfere with its citizens’ religious observances. Our governing document, in other words, is religion neutral. Of course, being ‘neutral toward’ religion is not the same as being ‘hostile toward’ religion.)
But hearing this sort of stuff always sticks in my craw, because it is very, very stupid. I can never help but think that the people who make this argument betray that they never acquired more than a Fourth Grade education of American history, and that they should by all rights be embarrassed by their own ignorance. So let me get just a few things off of my chest:
If you are at all like me you already know that actual history is about 1,000 times more interesting that the bland, pre-digested stuff they serve up as "history" when you are a kid in the United States. I couldn't stand studying American history when I was in school because it was just. so. god. damned. boring.
Decades later I discovered Howard Zinn's classic A People's History of the United States: 1492 to the Present.Holy crap! Now this was what I was looking for: a story rife with conflict, winners and losers, fights between vested interests, manifest cruelty and injustice and - yes - occasional victories for the progressive forces of good. This was a history I could believe in, one that explained why things are the way they are and how they got to be that way and it was filled with characters whom I could recognize as people, flawed and self-serving and occasionally bright and brilliant. These Real Life beings bore no resemblance to, for example, the pure and perfect "Founders" that I was told in school I should revere, but they were better: they were people I could believe in.
Ever since, I've delighted in discovering new, quirky details about American history that give the lie to the bland "official" record of our continual, uninterrupted progress.
Today, Kevin Drum has an interesting post up about the history of Black Friday. I always had swallowed the official story that the day takes its name from the fact that for many retailers the holiday shopping season is what ensures their profitability for the year. (Although, if you think about it, this does seem rather unlikely. Seriously, retailers operate at a loss 11 months out of the year and only make a buck during the last four weeks? I marvel at my own credulousness.)
Anyway, click on the link to read Drum's article in its entirety, but here is the gist. "Black Friday" apparently started as a pejorative term coined by department store clerks in the Philadelphia area about 50 - 60 years ago to describe the "hoards of obnoxious brats and their demanding parents" that would descend upon the stores following Thanksgiving. Later it seems to have been adopted by the Philadelphia police to describe the terrible conditions and traffic jams occasioned by the Army-Navy football game played in Philadelphia on Thanksgiving.
And as late as 1985, "Black Friday" apparently wasn't known at all outside of Philadelphia; its now national use seems to have been the creation "sometime in the 80s of an overcaffeinated flack trying to put lipstick on a pig that had gotten a little too embarrassing for America's shopkeepers." You'd think -- having been alive back then -- I would have remembered that prior to the mid-80s nobody ever used the term, but like everybody else I apparently am inclined to accept at face value whatever the TeeVee wishes to report.
Well we just passed the 10-year anniversary of the September 11th attacks and it looks like nothing else got blown up, so that's good. I spent the day avoiding any coverage of the remembrances. I remember that day all too well, thank you very much, and what I mostly remember is that it was a goddamned tragedy. There is a fine line between commemorating an event and celebrating it, and I didn't watch the TeeVee because I didn't want to see anything that crossed that line.
But I think they pull your license if you are an American blogger and you don't mention 9/11 on its 10-year anniversary, so I thought I'd write about something tangentially related that bugs the hell out of me: am I the only person who thinks that our pre-9/11 history is being rewritten to make that goddamned day even more important than it already is?
The New York Timeshad a story yesterday about how American students know less about U.S. history than any other subject. This seems to be old news. I remember reading a story a year or so ago that reported a significant portion of American adults were unable to correctly identify two of the three countries America fought in World War II.
I remember marveling when I read that. Even if no one surveyed ever attended a history class in his or her life, World War II is part of our national culture -- had none of those people ever seen a WWII movie? Sure, Italy tends to get short shrift in these films, but I just don't understand how one can grow to be an adult in our country and not at least know that WWII involved us fighting Germany and Japan.
I was reminded of that when I read the New York Times story and saw that one example of our country's high school seniors' ignorance of American history is that few were "able to identify China as the North Korean ally that fought American troops during the Korean War." Was this really supposed to be surprising?
Korea is often referred to as "the forgotten war," and with good reason. WWII basically supports an entire entertainment industry, as does the Vietnam War. But you just don't see a lot of documentaries or films being made about the Korean War. And I don't recall ever learning anything about that war when I was in high school, or even during the history classes I took in college. In fact, the only reason I learned that China was a North Korean ally is because - like a lot of people my age - I grew up watching M.A.S.H. Pathetically, the sum total of my knowledge of the Korean War comes from that television show.
Which makes me wonder why the New York Times's Sam Dillon picked this factoid to put in the first paragraph of his article. Is it really the case that most people think the Korean War was a central conflict about which all U.S. high school students should know? Or is it more the case that - like me - Dillon absorbed a few basic facts about the Korean War from watching one of the most popular television shows of all time and now can't comprehend how other people don't know what the both of us unthinkingly imbibed through our popular culture?
Its ability to round out my knowledge of recent events is one of the reasons I am a big fan of popular culture, at least that part of it we have easy access to. Watching movies and television shows, listening to music, and reading popular books produced in the 50's, 60's and 70's catches me up on a lot of stuff I missed simply because I wasn't around for it. Pop culture can't supplant studying actual history, of course, but it can supplement it to a great degree. Especially with the Internet, recent pop culture is more accessible now than ever before.
Which is one of the reasons I get so incensed when I see people opine on things about which they do not know, and then when called on it reply: "Well, that was before my time." As if because it was before their time is sufficient reason not only for them not to know about it, but for them to dismiss it as irrelevant.
The most egregious example of which I am aware occurred about two years ago, back when President Obama had been in office for about 5 months and was struggling (as supposedly he still is) to get the economy back on track. Meghan McCain had been invited to appear on Real Time With Bill Maher, ostensibly for what she had to contribute on presidential politics.
At one point, McCain claimed that it was inappropriate for President Obama to blame the country's economic problems on George W. Bush -- I mean, sure Bush had been in charge for 8 years but by the time this show rolled around he already had been gone 5 months. When Paul Begala pointed out that after taking office Ronald Reagan blamed Jimmy Carter for the nation's economic slump for years, McCain attempted to dismiss this fact with the non sequitor "I wasn't even born yet so I don't know," and Begala - rightly - schooled her for it:
What rankles is not that Meghan McCain did not know recent presidential history -- though this appears to be what she was invited on the show to discuss -- but that she so obviously didn't think she should be expected to know anything that occurred prior to her own birth. Even more, she seemed to think that her own ignorance somehow rebutted actual facts presented by someone who disagreed with her.
Translating this attitude into rational sentences, you end up with something like this:
Advocate: I assert Proposition A.
Opponent: History shows that Proposition A is incorrect.
Advocate: Well, I don't know about that because that happened before I was
born. Since I don't know about that, I don't have to accept it.
Therefore, you haven't proven me wrong.
In the end, it comes down to a very basic misunderstanding that seems to prevail in our modern discourse: that all views, so long as they are sincerely held, are equally valid.
It doesn't make any sense, of course, but given that we seem increasingly to be turning into a "now oriented" society, given our media's refusal to present facts to their audiences instead of simply reporting competing claims, and given that literally everything (does smoking cause cancer? do carbon dioxide emissions lead to climate change? does life actually evolve?) is unsettled and up for debate so long as even one person sincerely claims it is, what more can we expect?
In fact, given that this is how policy debates increasingly are conducted in our country, aren't we simply fostering ignorance? It used to be that if you wanted to prevail in an argument, you had to be able to marshal facts. Now you just have to be able to marshal sound bites. And if you can maintain ignorance about what you are talking about, you never run the risk of being forced to accept a fact you don't like.
“They only call it ‘class warfare’ when we fight back.”
--Anon.
“There is class warfare in America, and my class is winning.”
--Warren Buffett
America likes to think of itself as a “classless society.”One of our founding myths was that America was created so that all men would be free and equal before the law.(Women, of course, were a different matter.As were the slaves, Native Americans and those still working as indentured servants.)The way the story is told today, our country started out as and continues to be a place of unbounded opportunity where any person, by sheer grit and talent and hard work, can pull himself up by his own bootstraps and amass a fortune.For very similar reasons, we still tell our children that – in this country – “anybody can grow up to be President.”
It is a comforting story, but it is also a lot of nonsense.It is also a fairly recent invention, one that I think was created for the express purpose of papering over the real economic differences between U.S. citizens.
Indeed, while it may be one of our “founding myths” it is not a myth that has been around since our founding.Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries every American citizen would have been keenly aware that one’s status – and legal rights – turned largely on how much wealth one had.In many – perhaps all – of the original states, even the right to vote, the most fundamental right in a democracy, was limited to those men who owned a certain minimum amount of land or had a certain minimum annual income.The poor were explicitly and literally disenfranchised.
And this state of affairs, the rights that welled up not from innate ability or merit but instead from sheer wealth, continued well into the 20th century.Nevertheless, the early part of the last century saw great strides made by those who fought passionately on behalf of American laborers, and who recognized that the interests of laborers and employers did not coincide.This progress was made despite the fact that class conflicts often turned bloody and violent, as employers (very often with the help of the public authorities) took action to force laborers to work under terrible conditions for little pay.But the story of this progress is mostly swept under the rug and, less than 100 years later, is largely forgotten.
