Category Archives: History

Yep! This is where I put the stuff that pertains to history. Take notes, because there will be a test.

Violent Memories and the Civil War Era in the Southwest

20 Sunday Aug 2017

Posted by in History, Native American Issues, Politics

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It must have been a couple decades back. I was at a small party in Forth Defiance. Those attending included a number of officials in the Navajo tribal government. Fort Defiance serves as kind of a bedroom community for the capital of the Navajo Nation, so this was hardly unexpected. What none of us expected that evening was a quick lesson that began when our host asked if anyone knew the name of the main street going through the town? No-one did. As it happens, the name was Kit Carson Drive.

Kit CarsonApparently, it still is.

To say that most of the party-goers found this shocking is putting it mildly. It may not be obvious to some of my readers why a room full of Navajos would object to a street named after Kit Carson, but even the most cursory knowledge of their history would make this pretty well obvious.  The man is popularly known as an old western Indian fighter, and as it happens, a good number of the Indians he fought were Navajo.  When General James H. Carleton, the Army Commander for the Territory of New Mexico decided to go to war with the Navajo people, it was Colonel Kit Carson that he sent off to do it. Carson marched through Canyon de Chelly, the heart of Navajo territory, destroying resources (just as Sherman might have) and letting winter bring his enemies in to surrender. This campaign, and the four years of internment at Hwéeldi (Fort Sumner) still constitute the darkest chapter of most historical narratives about the Navajo people. So, you can just imagine what it must have meant for people who can still tell you about relatives lost on the long walk to Fort Sumner to learn that a road right through their community bears the name of the man responsible for their deaths.

Kinda put a damper on the party.

You might think it odd that folks didn’t know the name of the road to begin with, but it’s hardly unusual. Folks don’t pay that much attention to street names out that way. Many of the roads don’t have signs at all, and I don’t recall seeing that particular name on a street sign when I lived out there (though one can certainly be found in Fort Defiance today). This party was the only time anyone ever mentioned it to me.

The old south isn’t the only place in this country with a questionable sense of public history from the Civil War era. Those in the Southwest have less to do with the war between the states than the early stages of the Indian wars which would dominate the interior west for a couple decades. Kit Carson Drive is one of many such examples. The Obelisk in the town square of Santa Fe provides another. It’s had its own share of controversies over the years, not the least of them being this dedication:

20914595_10214035631069907_2575022190736341192_n“To the heroes who have fallen in various battles with savage Indians in the Territory of New Mexico.”

It should come as no surprise that this line acquired its share of critics over the years. It has had some defenders as well, to be sure, but plenty of critics. The sentiments might have seemed appropriate enough to those who erected it in 1868, but in the 1970s, sentiments had changed a bit, as had the political status of some of those ‘savage Indians’ referenced in the piece. So it really should have come as no surprise when calls went out for removal or modification of the monument. Today, at least, it may seem a little surprising to find the monument had Native American defenders, which apparently it did. Attempts were made to put the original wording into it’s proper context, so to speak, preserving it without appearing to endorse it, but some clearly weren’t satisfied with this way of thinking about the issue. Resolution apparently came in the form of a chisel, and the result is a monument with its own fill-in-the-blank question.

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It seems, the American public is hashing out a new round of debates over public monuments, particularly those in the South. Some no doubt find the entire debate quite trivial. Who reads the placards on a monument anyway? Of course when people fight over seemingly trivial things, you can bet your ass they aren’t really fighting over the trivial things. It isn’t actually history (much less historical monuments) that has people up in arms over Confederate Statues, just as it wasn’t really history that caused a word to fall off the monument in Santa Fe. Such battles are always about the present. They are about the way that people think and use history to shape the present, and there are usually some very specific present implications in these battles.

People typically see the present interests loud and clear when they confront advocates of social justice. If anyone ever forgets this, the term ‘political correctness’ is right there to remind us that someone (or at least someone on the left) has an agenda. What folks are slower to get, it seems, is the fact that these sorts of gestures are hardly neutral to begin with. There is a reason James W. Loewen devoted a fair portion of his book, Lies Across America, to Confederate monuments, and it wasn’t because these monuments contain sober and thoughtful commentary on the actual history of the region. A statue to a confederate hero isn’t just a reference to history as such; it says something to those who those whose ancestors those heroes fought to keep in bondage. And a monument to heroes who died fighting ‘savage Indians’ may say something noble to those descended from colonists (Spanish or Anglo) in the American southwest; it says something else to those descended from those very ‘savage Indians’.

To be sure, complications abound. Some folks may have ancestors on either end or neither of his memorial demographics, and some people may have no dog in the fight at all. Also ironic usage happens. Not every Native American takes umbrage at the word ‘savage’ just as not every Native American objects to the term ‘Redskins’. But we should be wary of efforts to make these exceptions into the rule. The Washington football team has, for, example paid good money trying to find, cultivate, and promote just about any Native American willing to help foster the notion that the team name reflects anything but a racist stereotype. Were the team name really so bland, one might almost wonder what use it would have for people interested in such a martial sport! And of course we now have the Cheetoh-in-Chief (who has his own bullshit civil war monument) mourning the loss of beautiful artwork and a desecration of history with every Confederate statue that goes down. His language is so flowery and positive. You’d almost think these monuments held no serious political significance in the present age.

Of course the folks delivering the Nazi salute in defense of Robert E. Lee might seem to argue otherwise.

To be sure, there are people, times, and places who don’t find it necessary to remove or modify monuments to their sordid past. Some of these might not even be terrible people, places, or times. But if the monuments to an abusive past aren’t so toxic, this isn’t simply because potential critics choose to let it slide; it’s because the community as a whole ha somehow managed to handle the issues in question. When the dominant voices prove tone-deaf or outright hostile to the interests of those on the wrong-side of monumental history, then we are all a lot less likely to get along. Then statues get pulled down.

…or someone just shows up with a chisel.

***

Just a few pics of Canyon de Chelly (click to embiggen):

 

 

When Culture Appropriates You

04 Wednesday Jan 2017

Posted by in History, Museums, Native American Issues

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15871703_10211699926478752_5551079935863716489_nTo the left is one of my favorite images from a mural painted by Shonto Begay and Mike Scovel at the Fort Sumner Memorial in New Mexico. What’s to be memorialized at Fort Sumner, you might ask? It was the site of an internment camp, one which held the Navajo people for roughly 4 years (about 1864-1868). It also held Mescalero Apaches, but Begay’s and Scovel’s  mural is about the Navajo end of this story. Specifically, it is about “the long walk” to this place, still called Hwéeldi out in Navajo country.

What fascinates me about the image is a trick of context. It’s just one part of a rather breathtaking piece of art, but to me it’s definitely the most interesting. The larger mural wraps around the wall on both sides of a hallway at the memorial. If you follow the hallway, you come to a small movie theater where you an watch a short film about the long walk and the Navajo experience at Hwéeldi. The images are striking. Devastating. They depict a national disgrace, and in surrounding us with the images, this mural invites us to see that disgrace, not from the standpoint of objective observer, but from the standpoint of someone in the midst of it. Walking down that hallway, one is surrounded on both sides by images of people (Navajos) herded along by soldiers and scouts. The mural depicts a great deal of suffering, and it places that suffering all around us. Begay’s and Scovel’s work seems denies us the chance to step outside the event and view it as a disinterested party.

But when you come to this image, the immersion takes on a different significance. Suddenly, it becomes clear why all the solders seem to be facing us. The Navajo figures simply plod along, mostly looking in other directions, but the soldiers, they look right at us as we stand in that hallway.

It’s an interesting effect to begin with, but when you walk down that hallway, at some point that soldier’s rifle is pointed at you. The soldier in that painting doesn’t care who you are, what your ethnicity is. He doesn’t even care what your plans are later in the day. And as my girlfriend pointed out, his rifle seems to follow your movements a bit, at least for a step or two. (I swear it does!) It’s a rather brilliant move on Begay’s part, because it places his viewers in the scene more effectively than anything else. More than placing the viewers in the scene, it confers a specific role on the viewer, as one of those forced along the walk.

It’s just art of course. We will at some point walk on to other parts of the exhibit, and many of us will no doubt shake off the effect of the image a bit quicker than those whose family histories include stories of those lost along the way. Still it’s an interesting contrast with the many times non-natives have chosen ourselves to assume some aspect of a native identity. Whether playing Indian as school-children, wearing a headdress at some music festival, or aping the Tonto-speak of Indian characters in countless westerns, many of us have done it at one time or another. Hell, some people have made a life out of it! Countless non-Indian actors have played Indian on screen, and countless non-Indian characters have become Indians in the story-arc of a common movie theme. And of course there is the Washington football team! What all of these other examples have in common, is a choice to assume some part of native identity, if only for a moment. They also have in common that the identity assumed is positive. When we non-natives play at being Indian, we get something out of it. It may not be much, often little more than a momentary source of amusement, but the choice is ours, and when choose it, we do so to our own advantage.

That’s the genius of this particular image. It forces that same transformation on anyone walking through the memorial. For just a moment, it makes us play Indian, and to do so on terms we didn’t choose for ourselves. On terms no-one would choose for themselves! We will survive that moment of course, perhaps even without really learning much from it. Still, it’s an interesting twist in the narrative.

That moment, when the business end of a rifle points you right into the story.

***

Here are a few more images from the mural (click to embiggen)!

Southern Paiutes As Portrayed in Las Vegas Area Museums.

17 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by in History, Las Vegas, Museums, Native American Issues

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Paiutedisplay

Clark County Museum

One of the dominant themes in Vegas area museums would have to be the struggle with nature. By ‘nature’ I of course mean the desert. It’s kind of fascinating to me as parallel themes dominate literature and cinema dealing with the arctic. It’s a pretty straight-forward notion in either event. Extreme environments help to frame a basic man-against-nature story-line, which is a common enough theme in fiction as well as some historical narratives, even a good number of anthropological works.

Where the arctic narratives focus on cold and the lack of food, Vegas area narratives focus on heat and lack of food & water. Both themes definitely have a little space reserved for the indigenous peoples of the region. “How did THEY survive?” would seem to be a common question, one which segways easily into stories about how WE survive now. The part about how WE survive typically morphs into a larger narrative about thriving civilization. Okay, so the North Slope of Alaska may be a little soft on the civilization theme, not that that’s ever stopped a runaway narrative, but more to the point, in Vegas that narrative steams full bore ahead to land us in a world of casinos, mobsters, and showgirls.

…but those narratives often start with Paiutes.

Okay, so sometimes these narratives start with older Puebloan societies or even Paleo-Indians, but even then the stories quicken with the arrival of Paiutes into the area. These were the indigenous community of Las Vegas when Europeans arrived, so they figure more prominently in plot-lines anticipating those casinos and showgirls. Not surprisingly, the Vegas area museums often use the presence of Paiutes in the valley to frame general questions about survival in the desert, questions that will then play well into later developments in the area. Their own modest use of the area sets the stage in these stories for the mega-resorts of today. And if that seems an odd contrast, that is precisely the point. A miracle in the desert, so to speak. It’s all the more miraculous if we catch a glimpse of its modest beginnings.

SouthernPaiute

A Convenience Store (Not

Of course, American stories of progress often treat Native Americans as just one more feature of nature standing in the way of progress, but I honestly think most of these museums try to handle things a little better than that. Still, there is a bit of slippage here and there. Anyway, the topic is worth a little time on my keyboard, so let’s just get on with it, shall we?

***

What first got me interested in this was a visit to the Mormon Fort, a state park commemorating the first Anglo-American settlement in the Vegas Valley. It contains a number of exhibits, one of which enables you to watch a video recounting the history of Vegas from the creation of the fort itself up through to the development boom of the 1980s (about the time my own family moved into the area). It’s the story of a city built in the midst of a hot desert, and that story begins with the discovery of two springs by European explorers.

As with other such discoveries, it turns out someone was already there. According to one of my old anthropology professors, Martha C. Knack, the Vegas Valley was already home to about a 150 Paiutes with a variety of related communities nearby. It was at these Springs, a kind of Oasis in the middle of the hot desert, that the story of Las Vegas begins.

This story takes off when Brigham Young sends a small group of missionaries to build at Fort at the Springs to serve as a weigh station on the way to Southern California. According to the video, local Paiutes had used the Springs for irrigation projects, so there is little doubt as to a native presence at the Springs. Still, when those first missionaries up and leave, the video suggests that their major accomplishment was to prove that people could make a permanent settlement in the area.

…which of course leaves me wondering what about the Paiute? Hadn’t they already proved that?

This may not be as egregious as it sounds. I could well see white folks at the time thinking of it in that light, biased as it is, so I could see the point of calling attention to this perspective. Still, the commentary in the video is as invested in the bias as any Anglo-American might have been at the time the missionaries left, and so the resulting narrative does seem to erase the Paiute. There is enough information about the local Paiute around the rest of Mormon Fort and even in the video itself to contradict that kind of thinking, but the story-line has its own impact.

Could be worse, could be better.

Mostly, it could be better.

***

That said, the Mormon Fort is a great place in its own right. If you’re in the area, and have a little pocket change left, I would definitely go check it out.

***

I found a couple of interesting origin-narratives for the local Paiute, one at the Clark County Museum and one at the Springs Preserve. Each of these are Coyote stories, so it goes without saying that something is going to go terribly  wrong in them. That’s how trickster narratives work. Each presents the choice of a Paiute homeland as something of an accident. At the Springs Preserve, this accident seems to suggest that Paiute ended up in the wrong place. Coyote opened the basket early (somewhere between Las Vegas and Moapa). The Clark County variant suggests that people had already been escaping and heading in different directions, and Coyote closed the sack before carrying it a ways further and pouring out those who would become Paiute. Whether this means they ended up where they were supposed to go or not, I can’t tell from the source at the museum.

I’ve presented both of these stories directly below (a video and a picture). Of course this kind of presentation strips a lot of the context out of each narrative, but I think a bit of the flavor in such stories does come through. I find myself thinking of the accident in terms of the arid setting, as if it were meant to explain how Paiute ended up in such a dry location with its sparse resources. Still, I’m not sure how much of that would have been the point of the Paiute story and how much of that may be the rest of the presentations in which they occur. With so much of each exhibit devoted to explaining how these people survived in the local desert, it seems easy to think of this as the point of the accident, that Paiute weren’t really meant to be here, but perhaps just me. Either way, I can’t help thinking it’s an interesting way of thinking about how one’s people ended up where they are. Mistakes happen. Sometimes a mistake mean you ruin lunch, put up a video with bad sound quality, or end up with a low grade on a test.

…and sometimes a mistake create a world to live in.

Sackofalltribes

***

Now the Springs Preserve is interesting in itself. This place is huge, and after four visits, I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen everything. It contains the Nevada State Museum and the Origin Museum as well as a number of outdoor exhibits (one of which is the Paiute village where I recorded the origin story above). That story is one of several narratives relating to Paiutes that you can find in the Springs Preserve. The Origin Museum contains a couple more videos. One appears to be a straight-foreword history of Las Vegas beginning with the arrival of Native Americans in the area. It further mentions the brief history of interaction (including conflict) between whites and natives. A second, more dramatic video (set up in a stand of artificial tulies) appears to depict a Paiute elder greeting us (the visitors) as if she were meeting non-natives for the first time. She is friendly, of course, and explains a thing or two about her people’s survival strategies, but the video ends on a dark turn. She sees change coming, and it seems to fair to suggest this is an allusion to the hazards of contact and colonization.

Neither of these videos goes into much detail about the troubled relations between Paiute and non-natives, but each mentions them. Where the first is dry and a little up-beat, the second is cryptic and disturbing.

A quick listen to the Coyote narrative always seems to put things in perspective for me. Odd, I know to want to follow modern history with an origin narrative, but I doubt Coyote would object.

Oh, the videos!

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***

The Springs Preserve also contains a history of Las Vegas as portrayed in paintings by the artist Roy Purcell. The only explicit mention of natives I recall seeing in this exhibit is a reference to Spanish raids on local Indians. That’s pretty much it. It’s an interesting history. I at least would have found it a bit more interesting if it had a place for the indigenous population. His website suggests that Purcell is working on Native American subjects now. This sounds promising.

No pictures are allowed in the Purcell exhibit, so I haven’t anything to show for that part of the Springs Preserve.

***

The Nevada State Museum (also in the Springs Preserve) doesn’t seem as focused on questions of subsistence, but it does have a few interesting pieces on indigenous peoples of the area. A life-size photo of Sarah Winnemucca had me wondering if she wasn’t a bit south of her usual residence. My personal fussiness aside, she certainly deserves a place in the Nevada STATE Museum. The museum also includes a video presentation in which a modern actress interprets some of her words for visitors at the Museum. Similar videos provide a glimpse of Wovoka’s prophesies, and a woman whose name translates to Little Willow teaches us a bit about basket-making. Please accept my apologies for the poor quality of the audios. To get the full experience, you’ll just have to go to the Museum.

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***

CnNS4cNUMAELRKRThere is one other thing I really must say about the Nevada State Museum, and that it that it seems to contain the White Tree of Gondor. Oh, they call it a Great Basin Bristle Cone Pine, but I know the White Tree of Gondor when I see it. You can’t fool me!

I know, this has nothing to do with Paiutes, but seriously, I think the White Tree of Gondor deserves at least a mention. Don’t you?

***

I’ve written about the Atomic Testing Museum before, and I don’t have a lot to add here, except to note that the museum does reference the indigenous populations of the testing zones. It’s a smallish display by comparison, focusing primarily on cultural preservation. By some accounts Newe Segobia is the most bombed nation in the world, but that story falls a bit North of this post. It’s worth noting though, the general tenor of the Museum’s approach to Native Americans. They want us to know they are trying to do the right thing, but their treatment of the issue doesn’t really escape the largely pro-testing narratives of the museum as a whole.

Let me conclude with a smattering of selected photos from the museums. As always, you may click to embiggen.

Paiute Village in the Springs Preserve
Springs Preserve (Origen Museum)
Mormon Fort describes pre-contact use of the Springs area for crops
Display in the Mormon Fort
Very cool diorama in the Mormon Fort
White Tree of Gondor, …duh!
Sarah Winnemucca at the Nevada State Museum
Atomic Testing MUseum
Atomic Testing Museum
Atomic Testing Museum
Clark County Museum
Clark County Museum
Clark County Museum
This mural depicts Southern Paiute. Yes, it’s on the side of a 7-11. I don’t know what to make of that.
Close-up

Thieves Road (A Review)

28 Tuesday Jun 2016

Posted by in Books, History, Native American Issues

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Thieves RoadAside from being my birthday, last Saturday (June 25th) was the anniversary of Custer’s Last Stand. So, I suppose it’s fitting that I finished a book about the man that afternoon. A 336 page volume written by Terry Mort, it’s called Thieves Road: The Black Hills Betrayal and Custer’s Path to Little Bighorn (Prometheus Books, 2015). No, the book doesn’t cover the events at Little Bighorn. As the subtitle suggest, this book is about Custer’s expedition to the Black Hills, which is to say that this book is about the reconnaissance expedition that lead to the war that lead to Little Bighorn. Officially the expedition had been tasked with helping to establish a Fort in Sioux territory. Unofficially, they were looking for gold. The discovery of that gold would lead to the Great Sioux War of 1876 (and among other things the death of Custer and his men). This particular expedition is a subject I’ve wanted to know more about for sometime, so I was happy to pick this one up.

I’ve written about Custer before, minor tangents here and here, and of course he is the principle villain in the movie Little Big Man, which is an all-time favorite of mine. So, anyway, this isn’t the first time things-Custerly have made their way into my blog. All references to significance of the date aside, it probably won’t be the last either.

Anyway…

For me, the most interesting part of the book would have to be Mort’s efforts to connect this expedition to the larger political economies of the gilded age. All-too-often people (even historians who should know better) speak and write about the the events of western history as though their significance could be understood entirely within the confines of life out on the frontier. We may appreciate that immigration is pushing folks out there or that the civil war affected the availability of troops, and so on, but rarely does anyone make a serious effort to elaborate on the connection between events occurring out west and the larger patterns of U.S. and world history. Mort is definitely an exception to this pattern.

Mort links the effort to find gold in the  Black Hills to the financing the financing of the civil war (in particular the need to pay off war bonds in gold currency), to the failures of the Northern Pacific Railway (due in part to fears over Indian raids … fears ironically triggered by Custer’s own reports), and by a cascading series of bank failures stemming from post-war sales of Yankee wheat to Britain (a problem for Russian nobles). If all of that sounds interesting to you, then well, …you know what to do.

I am less impressed with Mort’s approach to activities of Lakota (Sioux) and Cheyenne during these events. He doesn’t embrace stereotypes, but his account of Native American lives never strays far from them. In fact, much of Mort’s approach to native culture and native actions in the days leading up to the Great Sioux War consists of a critique of the very stereotypes held by whites of the day (particularly those in western states). He gives us just enough to appreciate that those stereotypes are not accurate, but not enough to outgrow them altogether.

What makes this problem particularly interesting to me is Mort’s claim that the Lakota did not really want peace, at least not a lasting and general peace with everyone around them. This, according to Mort, would have left Lakota men without any means of proving themselves. In Lakota society, according to Mort, one became a man primarily through honors that had to be earned in warfare. Significantly, it is this incentive to raiding that provides the critical moment in history as far as Mort is concerned, because it was Sioux raids that provided the reason Custer’s expedition was authorized as a means of establishing a fort in Sioux territory (p.296). It was Custer, according to Mort that chose to combine this expedition with a search for gold, and it was of course the discovery of that very gold that lead to the Great Sioux War.

Don’t get me wrong. Mort’s treatment of the Sioux is very respectful, but respectful and a buck will buy you a beer. The question here is whether or not his treatment is actually fair to them, and frankly I don’t think it is. Mort places the ultimate responsibility for the coming war on their shoulders, and specifically on their interest in perpetuating war for its own sake. The critical moment in history, the moment when things could have gone some other way, is thus one determined by the Sioux themselves. To be sure, Mort has a lot to say about the decisions of any number of parties in events leading up to this war, but the foibles of non-natives are largely those of individuals in his treatment, and I at least cannot help but sense a kind of fatalism in the overall story. However Custer might stumble, his direction seems a foregone conclusion. This is not simply because we know the end of this particular story; it’s a sense that the U.S. would inevitably go after the Black Hills. It’s just what we do, at least when vast stretches of land lay in the hands of people like the Lakota and the Cheyenne.

The historical moment that settled everything was, as Mort understands it, the one in which young Indian men took to leaving the agencies in the summer and engaging in raids before coming back to those same agencies for the winter. For all we can say about the vagaries of finance, the consequences of greed, or the recklessness of Custer’s particular quest for fame and fortune, in the final analysis, the cause of the coming war at the close of the book is a feature of Lakota society.

…not ours.

To say that I am uncomfortable with this is putting it mildly. I suspect others might choose pick apart the centrality of warfare among Sioux and Cheyenne. For myself, I am more concerned at the failure to find comparable incentive to warfare in other circles, particularly in those of American society itself. Lakota are not the only society that has struggled with the question of what to do with young and violent men, nor would they be the first (or last) to answer that question by sending such men off to visit their violence on someone else. The honors accorded to warriors can be seen all across popular U.S. media, both in Custer’s day and our own. IF an eagle feather might be thought a cause of war to a Lakota, can a medal be any less for a U.S. soldier? If such honors may be thought the reason nations go to war, is this any less true of the U.S. army than it is for people First Nations?

Of course, we normally account for the warfare of nation-states by looking at the larger political and economic forces guiding hands of key decision-makers not the ambitions of particular warriors, and Mort does that very well for both the Indian and white side of this story. Yet, he sees in the actions of native warriors a sort of cultural pathology that seems absent in his treatment of U.S. soldiers.

It’s clear enough that Custer sought honors comparable to those of Sioux warriors, as Mort himself points out, but the cultural significance of those honors doesn’t seem as fatal in Mort’s treatment (except perhaps for Custer and his troops). Of course not every American male goes to war whereas such conduct would be far more normative in Lakota society, so perhaps there are some dissimilarities. Yet the same markets that provide for diversification of labor also create the need for resources that send particular troops to particular paces (like the Black Hills) even as others stay home. Mort himself does a great job of explaining exactly how that happened in this instance. So, if it is fair to say of the Sioux that they didn’t want a lasting or general peace, I think that is every bit as true of the U.S. (then and now). We may not all be warriors, but in a nation like the U.S. that simply isn’t how things work. We have the likes of Custer to secure needed resources for us.

As Vine Deloria might have reminded us, Custer died for our sins.

 

The Fog of Hedges

05 Tuesday Apr 2016

Posted by in History, Movies, Politics

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thumb_624_default_bigFor me, The Fog of War (2003) is absolutely the gift that keeps on giving. I get more fascinated every time I watch this film. There are so many angles to it, so many sub-themes to explore. Lately, I find myself more and more interested in its language. The Fog of War was directed by Errol Morris (of the Thin Blue Line). It consists of a series of interviews with Robert S. McNamara, a man at the center of conflict throughout much of the twentieth-century. Few people could have provided more direct insight into the thinking behind some of the most terrible decisions of that era. By ‘terrible decisions’ I don’t mean poor choices so much as decisions with so much at stake, one can’t help tremble at the thought of them. That many of these decisions were also (arguably) also poor choices in the other sense, choices that cost the lives of countless people is also a big part of this story.

A lesser man might not struggle with such questions at all, resting certain in whatever rationalizations suited him best. But there McNamara is in the Fog of War, right on screen talking about those very decisions, and trembling at the thought of them, right in front of the camera. For a man with blood on his hands (and frankly, enormous quantities of it), McNamara is remarkably candid. Also remarkably thoughtful. Still, there are moments when his honesty fails him. Limits he doesn’t seem quite willing to cross, and possibilities he clearly doesn’t want to explore. In those moments, the hesitation is all over his language.

It begins in some of the first frames of the movie. McNamara tells us that in the course of his life he has been “part of wars.” Fair enough, one might say, but more fairly still he has been more than part of wars. He has been a driving force in wars, perhaps in some cases against his better judgement, but he has certainly been more than part of wars. The wording is mild, perhaps a simple lead-in, but the phrase just doesn’t do justice to the facts that will follow.

***

The film is punctuated with lessons drawn from McNamara’s experiences. It is Morris that pulls the lessons out of the narrative and presents them as bullet points for our benefit. The first lesson begins with the importance of empathy, not simply as a source of human kindness, but as a method of survival, a means of understanding adversaries. This alone saved the world from total devastation during the Cuban Missile Crisis, according to McNamara. Morris interrupts him to suggest that McNamara left out a few things in his account of the Russian motivations. Perhaps he didn’t like being interrupted. Perhaps, he wasn’t prepared to acknowledge some of the facts at issue. McNamara is reluctant to get into the issue of genuine Russian grievances, but rallies so to speak, even going so far as to add a few facts in their favor. Still, he wavers at the end, not quite able to come clean on his own role in some of those grievances.

Morris: “Also, we had attempted to invade Cuba.

McNamara: Well, with the Bay of Pigs, that undoubtedly influenced their thinking. I think that’s correct, but more importantly, from a Cuban and a Russian point of view, they knew, what in a sense I really didn’t know. We had attempted to assassinate Castro under Eisenhower and under Kennedy, and later under Johnson, and in addition to that, major voices in the U.S. were calling for invasion.

Every time I watch this film, I wonder what that means. In what sense is it that McNamara didn’t know that the U.S. had tried to assassinate Castro? Is this a fatal failure moral courage? Is McNamara simply unable to admit what he knew? Or is this a key to understanding the (dis-)organization of American diplomacy? Is it possible that he was the left hand, only dimly aware of what the right one was up to? Don’t know, but seriously, that’s a Hell of a hedge coming through an otherwise brilliant narrative.

***

McNamara served in the U.S. Air Forces during World War II, serving under General Curtis LeMay. He provided statistical analysis of U.S. bombing missions. I know paperwork, right? But sometimes the pen really is mightier than the sword, or even the canon. Clearly, McNamara’s reports were not simply filed…

McNamara: I was on the island of Guam, in his command, in March of 1945. In that single night, we burned to death a hundred thousand Japanese civilians in Tokyo. Men, Women, and children.

Morris: Were you aware this was going to happen?

McNamara: Well, I was…, I was part of a mechanism that in a sense recommended it.

I analyzed bombing operations and how to make them more efficient, i.e. not more efficient in the sense of killing more, but more efficient in the sense of weakening the adversary. I wrote one report analyzing the efficiency of the B-29 operations. The B-29 could get above the fighter aircraft, and above the air defense, so the loss rate would be much less. The problem was the accuracy was also much less. Now I don’t want to suggest that it was my report that led to, I’ll call it the firebombing. It isn’t that I’m trying to absolve myself of blame for the firebombing. I don’t want to suggest that it was I that put in LeMay’s mind that his operations were totally inefficient and had to be drastically changed, but anyway that’s what he did. He took the B-29s down to 5,000 feet, and he decided to bomb with firebombs.

The first phrasing of interest here is the recommendation. This is a double hedge. McNamara doesn’t take personal responsibility in this statement. He submerges himself in a larger “mechanism,” but that isn’t enough, because that mechanism only recommends the firebombing “in a sense.” McNamara thus starts his answer to Morris two full shields removed from personal responsibility for the firebombings. He then goes onto assure us that the measure of efficiency he used was not simply the number of people killed but the effectiveness of the bombing in weakening the enemy. It is an interesting distinction, albeit one perhaps lost at the moment when the fires reached their victims. That McNamara struggles with this is clear enough throughout this and many other segments of the film. I don’t mean to suggest he is insensitive to the topic. Rather, his struggle seems to suggest the opposite. McNamara hasn’t quite explained his own role adequately to himself, and the result is the final mess of hedging about the question of personal responsibility. He denies it, but he also denies that he denies it. It’s easy enough to point to LeMay, and with good reason; it was LeMay’s decision. Still, I can’t help thinking that answer wasn’t even sufficient for McNamara.

***

Morris: The choice of incendiary bombs, where did that come from?

McNamara: I think the issue is not so much incendiary bombs. I think the issue is in order to win a war should you kill a hundred thousand people in one night, by firebombing or any other way. LeMay’s answer would be clearly ‘yes’. McNamara do you mean to say that instead of killing a hundred thousand, burning to death of a hundred thousand Japanese civilians in that one night, we should have burned to death a lesser number, or none, and then had our soldiers cross the beaches in Tokyo and been slaughtered in the tens of thousands? Is that what you’re proposing? Is that moral? Is that wise?

Why was it necessary to drop the nuclear bomb if LeMay was burning up Japan? And he went on from Tokyo to firebomb other cities. 58% of Yokohama. Yokohama is roughly the size of Cleveland. 58% of Cleveland destroyed. Tokyo is roughly the size of New York. 51% percent of New York destroyed. 99% of the equivalent of Chattanooga, which was Toyama. 40% of the equivalent of Los Angeles, which was Nagoya. This was all done before the dropping of the nuclear bomb, which by the way was dropped by LeMay’s command. Proportionality should be a guideline in war. Killing 50% to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional, in the minds of some people, to the objectives we were trying to achieve. I don’t fault Truman for dropping the nuclear bomb. The U.S. Japanese war was one of the most brutal wars in all of human history; kamikaze pilots, suicide, unbelievable. What one can criticize is that the human race, prior to that time, and today, has not really grappled with what are, I’ll call it the rules of war. Was there a rule then that said you shouldn’t bomb, shouldn’t kill, shouldn’t burn to death a hundred thousand civilians in a night. LeMay said, if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say  I were behaving as war criminals.  LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if your lose and not immoral if you win?

This one of the most fascinating monologues I have yet seen in a film. McNamara seems determined to ensure we understand the full gravity of the situation, almost urging the case against himself and others. He wants us to know this was a terrible decision, perhaps even a crime. And yet, he builds a kind of defense into the narrative. It begins with his refusal to answer the question. He had been asked who was responsible for the decision to use incendiary bombs, thus generating more civilian deaths than conventional ordinance might have. Whatever else, McNamara’s speech here gives us, it does not give us a direct answer to that question.

The narrative also serves to shape questions about McNamara’s own role in the affair in terms of his relationship to his commander. It is LeMay’s thoughts on the subject which control McNamara’s story-line. His own decisions are thus framed in terms of what LeMay might have said in response to any argument against the decision to firebomb the Japanese cities. If McNamara himself might have objected, this story suggests, his concerns would have been simply overruled.

Lastly, McNamara deflects the moral questions onto humanity itself. Nevermind who was responsible for this particular decision. The real question is one that falls to humanity itself. How might humanity have handled such an issue? McNamara seems to suggest, the answer would take the form of a rule of war. The specific feasibility of such rules at that time (or any other) is not so clear, but seems to be how he wants to address the issue. And in the end, this means NOT addressing the issue of just who is responsible for burning all those women and children up during World War II. McNamara wants us to understand it’s a serious issue, but he is at great pains to avoid dealing with it too directly.

***

This may seem like a side-issue, but I can’t help thinking it points to a Hell of a drama in its own right. McNamara’s thoughts on his own family and the impact of his service as Secretary of Defense under President Kennedy contain some interesting hedges of their own.

That’s the way it (his role as Secretary of State) began. You know, there was a traumatic period. My wife probably got ulcers from it, may have even ultimately have died from the stress. My son got ulcers; it was a very traumatic, but they were some of the best years of our lives, and all the members of my family benefited from it. It was terrific.

I can’t help wondering how McNamara could say that his service benefited all members of his family while telling us the job may well have killed his wife. It seems cruel to me, even to point this out, and yet, it seems an important fact. Among the many who suffered through this man’s career, one may well count members of his own family. No doubt, this too has its reasons, reasons he doesn’t owe us, but as much as he gives is damned disturbing. And I wonder if that sort of story isn’t a bit more common than one might suspect.

***

Regarding the build-up of the Vietnam War…

There was a coup in South Vietnam. Diem was overthrown, and he and his brother were killed. I was present with the President when together we received information of that coup. I have never seem him more upset. He totally blanched. President Kennedy and I had tremendous problems with Diem, but My God! He was the authority, he was the head of state, and he was overthrown by a military coup, and Kennedy knew, and I knew, that to some degree the U.S. Government was responsible for that.

Here again, one seems to see McNamara posing as the left hand struggling to understand what the right hand was doing. Government is complex, sure, but I can’t help wondering; if I were in a more polemic mood, might I start a criticism of this war by asking just how in the Hell the CIA could give it’s blessings to a coup the President and his Secretary of Defence didn’t support?

***

Speaking of Vietnam, there is a fascinating moment covering the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Twice in August of 1964, the Destroyer USS Maddox reported attacks from North Vietnamese forces. These attacks have long been disputed, but nevertheless, they provided the rational for a resolution authorizing use of greater force by Lyndon Johnson. McNamara provides his own take on the details. One of the more interesting gems here is an audio-taped recording of a man on the Maddox reporting the attacks. Asked if he is sure that a torpedo had been fired at the ship, he replies in the affirmative; “No doubt about that, …I think.”

***

“What I’m doing is thinking it through with hindsight, but you don’t have hindsight available at the time. I’m very proud of my accomplishments, and I’m very sorry that in the process of accomplishing things, I’ve made errors.”

This line comes toward the end of the film as McNamara is beginning to summarize the whole thing. One might question whether or not ‘errors’ would be the most appropriate word to use for the sense of moral transgression that haunts this film. Perhaps, this may seem unfair. McNamara and those he served with had responsibilities some of us will thankfully never know. Had he done too little, he might well have faced similarly questions about the loss of American lives due to failure of nerve. So, does this render the whole issue a kind of practical calculation, a simple cost-benefit analysis? McNamara seems to have been well trained in such accounting. This might well be his honest sense of the issues. Sill,  one has to wonder at the use of ‘error’ to describe the moral significance of lives lost wasted.

***

What is morally appropriate in a wartime environment? Let me give you an illustration. While I was Secretary, we used what’s called “Agent Orange” in Vietnam, a chemical that strips leaves off of trees. After the war, it is claimed that that was a toxic chemical, and it killed many individuals, soldiers and civilians exposed to it. Were those who issued the approval to use Agent Orange criminals? Were they committing a crime against humanity? Let’s look at the law. Now what kind of law do we have that says these chemicals are acceptable for use in war and these chemicals are not. We don’t have clear definitions of that kind. I never in the world would have authorized an illegal action. I’m not really sure I authorized Agent Orange. I don’t remember it, but it certainly occurred, the use of it occurred while I was Secretary.

What is moist striking about this passage is the distance between McNamara and a decision for which he was clearly responsible. It seems plausible enough to suggest that he may not have been directly involved, or at least not in a way that fully impressed upon him the significance of this choice. Still, McNamara does acknowledge this happened on his watch. And yet he discusses the issue for the most part as though the responsibility must fall on the shoulders of someone else. Again, McNamara seems to look to the laws for answers to these questions, but that too seems to be a bit of a dodge. Does he really need a law to tell him not to poison people.

…also noteworthy hear would be the sense that something is odd about the claim that a chemical that strips leaves from plants might be harmful humans. McNamara doesn’t quite acknowledge that it is harmful. He is content to tell us that “it is claimed…”

***

Near the end of the film, McNamara relates the story of a protester. His account here is fascinating in many ways. What interests me about it at present is the way he frames the moral questions again in terms of humanity itself. This was a protester who died trying to communicate something to McNamara himself, but McNamara saw the significance of his death in the language of the man’s wife, as a question for all of humanity. Perhaps such questions are well asked of all of humanity, and yet I can’t help thinking that a question asked of all of humanity isn’t really asked of any particular person.

…or perhaps, more to the point, a person weary of answering such questions in his own life, weary of his own answers and the consequences of the answers he has given, might well prefer to have humanity itself grapple with those questions.

Anyway, we’ll leave it with this last quote.

Norman Morrison was a Quaker. He was opposed to war, the violence of war, the killing. He came to the Pentagon, doused himself with gasoline. Burned himself to death below my office. He held a child in his arms, his daughter. Passersby shouted, “Save the child!” He threw the child out of his arms, and the child lived, and is alive today. His wife issued a very moving statement, uh; ‘Human beings must stop killing other human beings.’ And that’s a belief that I shared. I shared it then and I believe it even more strongly today. How much evil must we do in order to do good? We have certain ideals, certain responsibilities. Recognize that at times you will have to engage in evil, but minimize it.

 

Black and Blue

11 Thursday Feb 2016

Posted by in History, Music, Politics

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I’ve been thinking about what Stacy Dash said about black history month, and I think I agree with her. We shouldn’t have black history month. Let’s put getting rid of it on the agenda. We’ll do that immediately after we get black history a secure and solid place in the rest of the curriculum.

Yep!

In the interim, here is Leyla McCalla putting an old Langston Hughes poem to music.

Think I’ll listen to it while I put together a lesson on the Harlem Renaissance.

…no reason.

A Visit to the Museum that Goes Boom!

23 Wednesday Sep 2015

Posted by in History, Las Vegas, Museums, Politics

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IMG_4686The Atomic testing Museum in Las Vegas would be among the more interesting places I visited this summer. The museum has two major exhibits, one for Atomic testing and one for Area 51. I’m really not sure what to make of the Area 51 section, and really I’d just as son not be picked up by the Men in Black, so we’ll just leave commentary on that aside for the present. Besides, the Atomic Testing Museum provides plenty of interesting material t consider.

Seeing the Dina Titus reading room in there made me smile. It’s been a long time, but I do remember my old Political Science Professor rather fondly. Her book, Bombs in the Backyard would be the most obvious connection to this facility, though I’m not entirely sure how much of a role she played in the development of the museum and it’s collections. She does provide one of the more critical voices in one of the films shown in museum. I find myself wondering if her views couldn’t have received more coverage.

I’d have to say the material collections in this museum are fantastic. I’ll include a few pictures, but they really don’t do the place justice. It’s worth a trip to see this stuff, so remember this place if you’re ever in Las Vegas and your hangover is under control. Of course you may also pick up a bit about Nuclear testing at the Neon Museum, because nuclear tourism was once so very Vegas. But of course the Atomic testing Museum is a long way from Neon. Much of it is drab green and grey, just like I remember my dad’s old military paraphernalia, which is very fitting I suppose.

There is a tremendously matter-of-fact tone to the presentation in this museum. As you proceed down it’s halls you will learn how scientists first came to understand the possibilities which would give rise to nuclear technology; you will learn about the rush to acquire that technology during World War II, and you will learn about the many twists and turns of the nuclear arms race which would follow. Also you will learn about the steps and procedures taken to set up and run the actual facilities in Nevada.What bothers me is just how unproblematic each step in this process would seem to be in the narratives this museum provides.

The Atomic testing Museum presents the rationale for each stage in the history of its subject in a very straightforward manner. It does the same with protests, and even with various decisions to scale back nuclear testing and/or to discontinue certain programs. I wouldn’t say that the museum slights the protest movement in an overt manner, but the museum leaves a strong impression that the development of nuclear technology proceeded along a rational course. Whatever the pros and cons of nuclear testing, and of specific events in the history of nuclear testing, the planning process behind that history was, at least as far as the narrators here would have it, utterly reasonable.

This is of course exactly how I remember those in favor of nuclear testing presenting the case for it when I lived in Nevada. It’s also what I see whenever I dip my toes into the history of Atomic power. For whatever its worth, this does appear to be the view of those who worked in the industry. And of course those who worked in the industry are strongly represented in the Museum and its supporters.

This doesn’t mean that the museum is insensitive to critics of Atomic testing, but it does mean that the narrative presentation at the museum provides a strong bias in favor of the grounds for testing in each of its various phases. Whether testing is right or wrong, so it would seem, the case for doing was always a function of careful, rational consideration. The problem is of course that this just isn’t entirely true. It may well be that the arms race was inevitable. It may well be that the bomb needed to be dropped on Japan, as so many still argue today. It may even be that we needed to keep testing for so many years into the cold war. All these things may well be (and yet they may not), but that doesn’t mean that each step in the process can be fully explained as a rationale decision by someone genuinely interested in pursuing national security.

There are moments in the history of Nuclear testing in which the larger narratives just don’t fully explain what’s going on; moments in which the fingerprints of Dr. Strangelove seem to be found all over the course of nuclear testing; moments in the mad scientist seems to upstage the soldiers and scientist doing heir grim duty for the sake of loved ones, the nation, and possibly the entire world. When I see images of U.S. troops marching towards ground zero of an explosion because someone wanted to see how the bomb would affect troop movements, I can’t help thinking that I’m seeing one such moment in the history of nuclear testing

I look at such an image and I can’t help but wonder at the supposed reason for putting those troops in harms way, at least on that particular day and in that particular manner. Was this really a serious research question? Or was someone doing that simply because they could? Because they could put people out there and expose them to great danger in the name of science, and because being able to put human beings in danger for any reason must be one of the surest signs ever that you are somebody and that what you do is important.

I’m fairly certain that I see one such moment in one of the smaller placards of the museum, that devoted to Operation Plowshare. The placard reads as follows:

The Atomic Energy Commission’s Plowshare Program was named after a Biblical verse referring to “beating swords into plowshares.” The program was intended to find peaceful applications for nuclear weapons.

The Plowshare program, initiated in 1958, sought to develop peaceful uses for nuclear explosives to construct major facilities such as canals, harbors, earthen dams, and other engineering projects. Twenty-Six of the 35 Plowshare nuclear experiments were conducted at the Nevada test site. In 1961, the first off-site multi-purpose experiment, “Project Gnome,” near Carlsbad New Mexico was fired in a salt dome to study heat generated by a nuclear explosion, isotope and energy production, and seismic measurements. The most notable experiment in 1962 was Sedan, a 104 kiloton thermonuclear detonation, equivalent t an earthquake magnitude of 4.75 on the Richter Scale. The blast displaced 12 million tons of earth, creating a crater 1,280 feet in diameter and 320 feet deep. The crater could hold four football fields, end to end. Concluding the experiments in 1973 was Rio Blanco near Rifle, Colorado which focused on fracturing natural gas-bearing formations. The Plowshare program terminated in 1975 due to waning industrial interest and mounting public concern about the environmental consequences.

Not mentioned in this placard would one of the Plowshare projects never completed, Project Chariot. Project Chariot was an effort to build a harbor via nuclear detonations at a site just south of Point Hope, Alaska. Dan ONeill’s book, The Firecracker Boys provides a pretty thorough account of the politics behind this project as well as the opposition which eventually killed the project. Rachel Naninaaq Edwardson’s documentary, Project Chariot, also provides an interesting take on the subject, one focused the local Iñupiat population and their efforts to deal with the lasting impact of their brief encounter with an almost-bombing. I don’t particularly wish to rehash the full subject here, but it’s hardly a study in rational scientific inquiry. The Atomic Energy Commission ignored a great deal of science in planning the project, misrepresented the findings of its own scientists, lied to the people of Point Hope, and finally, when forced to abandon their plans to bomb the Alaskan coastline, the research team left radioactive material buried at the site without telling anyone.

I think about project Chariot when I read this placard telling us about the many successes of Operation Plowshare, when I see this matter of fact discussion of Plowshare’s goals and the simple decision to discontinue it. I think about the lives of scientists whose careers were trashed because they opposed it, and I think about the people in Point Hope today still unsure of just what did actually happen in their region, still wondering what effect it had upon them. In it’s pursuit of Project Chariot, the behavior of the Atomic Energy Commission was (as ONeill suggests) closer to that of kids with firecrackers, all-too eager to blow something up, than the sort of benign search for new ways to help mankind that one might expect from reading this placard on Operation Plowshare.

I think about all that, and I wonder how many similar stories never made it into the placards at the Atomic Testing Museum.

***

(Gallery. You may click the pictures. Don’t worry. They won’t explode!)

Today’s Kinda Loaded Question – How Do You Read a Bible?

31 Monday Aug 2015

Posted by in atheism, History, Religion

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006I always wonder what it means to ‘read the Bible’. The question comes to mind when people tell others to read the Bible; when they say they’ve read the Bible, and when they ask others if they’ve read the Bible. These questions and comments often seem intended to pack an extra bit of punch; something of value always seems to rest on them. But the phrase ‘read the Bible’ could mean anything from reading random passages to a kind of epic cover-to-cover journey. It could also mean reading specific (and very deliberately chosen) sections at length. Hell, it could mean a few other things too, but for me those are the ones that come to mind.

We could also talk about different versions of the Bible. It certainly matters what translation you look at.

The random passage reading approach is always interesting to me.  People using this approach open the book randomly and read what’s in front of them in the belief that they may be led (perhaps by the Holy Spirit) to some significant passage that will help them resolve a question or a problem of some sorts. It’s a fascinating approach to reading, one which gives the process more than a little trace of divination.

…a bit like palm reading or crystal gazing.

Which reminds me that I’ve been told many times one must be guided by the Holy Spirit to interpret the Bible correctly. Whatever else this claim means, it usually also means that my own heathen reading skills won’t account for much on Biblical topics, at least not in the ears of the person telling me this.  This may be a trip down the fallacy highway with stops in the Cities of Petitio and Ad Hominem-Circumstantial. It’s also a world in which spiritual powers and personal authority cut right across basic reading and reasoning skills, and parsing a simple sentence becomes an act of communion.

Do we want to get into the whole question of sola scriptura versus the authority of the Pope or some other religious authority?

No.

I mean, we could, but seriously, let’s not.

I sometimes wonder at the degree to which the simple physical act of opening the book could skew this divination-reading approach to the topic. I mean just how often would you land on one of the first or last pages when you try this? And if you did, would it be due to a conscious effort on your own part or guidance by …you know who?

Ah well!

What actually started me down this path was a slightly more mundane question. Do you read the whole thing or do you simply read parts? People often claim to have read the Bible. I think some folks are just bluffing really. It’s a big damned sleeping pill of a book, and I somehow doubt that some folks could actually make it from cover to cover. A much more interesting question though would be whether or not it’s actually worth it to do that? To just read the Bible cover-to-cover.

Now a serious Biblical scholar might get something out of such a reading; he presumably already knows a lot about the context behind the text. I’m talking about your average Jane just sitting at home with as much knowledge of the text, it’s language, and its relevant histories as regular life gives your average Jane. Okay, I know the average Jane is itself a tricky concept, so let’s just say that in my mind she’s a middle-class American with a high school diploma (and perhaps a college degree). She watches a lot of TV, and she’s been to church a few times in herlife; perhaps she even goes regularly. You can skew this Jane-image in whatever direction you like. The point I’m trying to make is that their daily lives haven’t prepared most people (including I’ll warrant most people who claim to have read the Bible) to understand what they are reading as they go skipping along the pages of scripture. Without giving necessary consideration to the linguistic and literary traditions encompassed in the book as well as the (often murky) historical context in which the texts were written and/or translated, I don’t see how any substantive understanding (inspired or otherwise) could come out of the epic cover-to-cover reading quest. People have enough trouble getting the cool parts from Shakespeare. I somehow doubt this even older text is more transparent on first or even a third pass. No, I can’t see reading the Bible working without a lot of side reading as you go.

And somewhere in there, I can’t help thinking this ceases to be about ‘reading’ and starts to become an exercise in ‘studying’.

I’m not just saying you can do some extra study to get more out of the Bible. What I’m saying is that the exercise of simply reading that text is a rather meaningless ritual without the studying. …Okay, so perhaps the ritual does have meaning (Holy Spirit and all that) but if it does have meaning, that meaning has little to do with what we conventionally understand to come from the act of reading. I am accordingly unimpressed when people tell me that they have read the Bible cover-to-cover. When people tell me they have read the Bible, I figure this is either a hollow exercise or an occult activity with principles quite different from those of conventional reading skills. When someone tells me that they study the Bible, well that might be interesting…

It might be.

An evangelical Christian might be tempted to think that this meditation is a trap of sorts, because of course that process of study leads one to an awful lot of perfectly mortal sources of authority. How can one truly learn the word of God if doing so requires one to make decisions about alternative translations, assess the historical context based on books written by mere mortals (some of whom may not even be Christian!), and make a number of choices oneself about how to frame the context of understanding any particular passage. Far from a discrete project, the effort to study-up on the topic if a potentially infinite regress. Most believers aren’t going to want to do that any more than the rest of us. In any event, this process will never lead to anywhere near the conviction that this or that moral principle is the absolute and unvarnished word of God. For myself, I’m comfortable with that, and I suspect there are a few liberal Christians that could say the same, but I don’t think the notion that the Bible is the infallible word of god survives this process. More to the point, I don’t think that notion survives any serious attempt to think about what it takes to understand an historical text like this.

That’s my spirit-unfulfilled 2 cents.

Rooting for the Indians and Damn that Custer Anyway!

04 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by in History, Movies, Narrative VIolence, Native American Issues, Politics

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Dances-With-WolvesWhen Dances With Wolves came out in November 1990, audiences throughout the country cheered as Kevin Costner and his Lakota friends killed U.S. soldiers in one of the final scenes of the film. The Lakota in this film were decent (perhaps noble?), and the soldiers had been as contemptible as any character could be. More than that, the soldiers were emissaries of an aggressive nation bent on taking everything Costner’s Lakota friends had. Nothing could have been more obvious than our loyalties at that point in the film. Of course we rooted for the Indians!

Two months later, American troops and attacked Iraqi forces that had taken Kuwait, and Americans cheered as bombing attacks appeared on CNN just about all day every day. Iraqi treatment of the Kuwaitis had been cruel and Saddam Hussein posed a threat to world peace comparable to that the great Hitler (as some would have it anyway). Nothing could have been more obvious than our loyalties at that point in history. Of course we rooted for the American forces!

The transition always appeared to me rather seamless. It was a very disheartening moment, an indication of just how powerless the left wing critique of American imperialism had been. For once, the American public seemed to have gotten the message, at least one some level, and then it went right out and repeated all the same mistakes over again. Just as sensationalist accounts of Indian atrocities had once fueled military aggression against them, lurid stories of Iraqi conduct fueled support for military action in the Gulf War. And once again, America expanded its military presence in the world, to what end, we are still learning.

There are differences between these stories of course, and we could haggle over the details, but I’m not particularly interested in debating the Gulf War here. What concerns me is the question of which difference made the distinction matter? I can’t help but think that difference was time.

I would say that the critical difference is also a question of entertainment versus reality, but of course few war movies have provided near the entertainment value that the Gulf War presented to the American public. Whatever else that conflict represents, it was also a tremendous achievement in the theatrical violence. Plus, the conflicts depicted in Dances With Wolves have real world analogs. The specifics may have been fictional, but the issues in question were quite real. no, the difference is time. Dances With Wolves depicts a conflict most Americans believe to be over, and that makes it safe to flirt with critical appraisal providing it isn’t going anywhere.

Dances With Wolves was a story about America’s past. Cheering for the Indians in a fictional skirmish about an event long ago didn’t pose much of a personal cost for the average American. Sure, there may be some jingoists out there who really couldn’t stomach the thought that any aspect of American history had been anything short of a gift from God himself, but any discomfort they might have felt at the final scenes of Costner’s epic was surely the price of their own extremism. More folks could flip loyalties for that one brief moment, and then flip them right back again when push came to petro.

Custer Little Big manThat’s hardly an unusual transition. It’s as easily done as shifting from present to past tense when the topic of Indians comes up in a conversation, or shifting from particular issues to a great big general narrative about the history of Indian white relations. The hat trick is of course the phrase; “what we did to the Indians.” What continually fascinates me is its appearance in otherwise focused conversations. You could be talking about some specific policy and its impact on some specific native community, and the next thing you hear is someone telling you that they really think it’s sad what ‘we’ did to the Indians.

…except the past tense undermines the ‘we’ part. Those saying this know very well they aren’t including themselves in the damned ‘we’ of that sentiment, not really. A good portion of the times I’ve heard this, the impact of the utterance was precisely to shift the conversation away from anything that ‘we’ really could be do anything about today. And that is of course my rather long winded point; it’s easy to root for the Indians in Dances With Wolves, much easier than it is to support them in present, and much easier to support them than it is to question attacks on any prospective enemy we have today. Whether it be casinos, tribal mascots, or tribal jurisdiction, the same folks who will happily root for the Indian in a fictional battle set in the remote past are much less likely to support the native side in present day conflicts. As to foreign policy? Well…

Bombs away!

But let’s stick with Indian-white relations for a bit. You can see the whole transition in a stanza from one of Alice Cooper’s more obscure songs, but to get the full effect, you have to listen to the full tune. (Don’t worry; it’s one of his less shocking pieces.).

In case you missed it, the relevant lines are as follows:

I love the bomb, hot dogs, and mustard.

I love my girl, but I sure don’t trust her.

I love what the Indians did to Custer.

I love America.

There they Come. There they go.

– Alice Cooper

The line about Custer fits with the rest of Cooper’s rhyme scheme, but the line about Custer is a bit of a twist. The over-the-top jingoism of Cooper’s song seems inconsistent with the celebration of a set-back to the march of American history. We wouldn’t expect Cooper to root for the other side. And then suddenly, he isn’t cheerful at all, or at least the song isn’t, as we hear an Indian war-party come and go accompanied to faux-Indian music right out of the movies. He drops his rhyme scheme and sings almost as an aside, “There they come,” and then “there they go.” And thus a line about the demise of Custer and his troops becomes a comment about the proverbial vanishing Indian.

It’s safe to root for him, because he’s vanished.

Cooper’s song celebrates an Indian victory in order to mourn a Native loss, and of course that loss is precisely what the voice of the song calls for, the removal of an obstacle to the America cooper loves so much. And then of course the song picks up again as Cooper continues to celebrate all-things red, white, and soldier blue. It seems likely that Cooper’s treatment was deliberately ironic; it seems equally unlikely that he appreciated the full depths of that irony.

alicecooper13I don’t think Cooper’s attitude is at all unusual. I’ve heard similar sentiments many times. I understand why my old professor, a Choctaw celebrated the Custer’s last stand, and I understand why Lakota and Cheyenne do today, but they are celebrating a victory, something their people did right. Folks like Cooper are celebrating a loss, and one has to wonder just what they think that loss means?

As with any other great cultural icon, what is said of Custer is often really said of other things. At this point he seems to stand in proxy all of western history. The man has always had his critics, but it was probably the movie Little Big Man that taught the public to think of him as a raving lunatic. The Custer of this film is as ruthless as he is incompetent, and he is clearly the voice of western expansion. In the real world, it was Horace Greeley who advised young men to go to the West. In Little Big Man, it is Custer who tells the main character, Jack Crabb, to go West. It is Custer who carries out the most horrible atrocities of the film, the ones which make that migration possible, and ultimately, it is Custer (along with his troops) who will pay the price for Western expansion.

I grew up with that vision of a Custer in mind, one shared by multiple sources of popular culture in the 70s and 80s. I can’t recall meeting anyone personally who defended Custer in my youth, not once. From time to time, I heard or saw echoes of Custer’s previous incarnations in popular culture, the heroic Custer of Anheuser Busch or the onion-loving Custer of some old movie whose name I’ve long since forgotten. I could easily think that heroic vision as deluded, but of course that was a Custer who belonged to someone else, one who had been slain literally and figuratively on the screen of Little Big Man.

While we can haggle over the facts of Custer’s career and the details of his final battle, the successful caricature of Custer doesn’t facilitate a pro-native view so much as a an easy dismissal of the larger problems of American expansionism. This is where Little Big Man fails in its politics. (It was of course also a commentary on Vietnam.) In framing the horrors of American Indian policy as a reflection of personal lunacy, the movie invited us all to feel far too much relief at Custer’s ultimate defeat. It’s simply easier for all of us if Custer can take responsibility for all the horrors of America’s Indian policies, easier because he lost, and in his loss, folks can well imagine that he carries those horrors with him into the grave.

All of which brings to mind the title of Vine Deloria’s old classic, Custer Died for Your Sins.

abu+grahib+photo+4To be sure films like Little Big Man and Dances With Wolves call attention to larger problems, but they also point to a way out which all too many Americans seem to have taken, the belief that the ugly side of American military can be laid at the feet of the occasional lunatic clad in buckskin.

Or perhaps to a cigarette puffing soldier who lost her moral compass somewhere along the way.

Because surely the problems don’t go any further than that!

 

 

 

 

An Uncommon Holiday Celebration

22 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by in Alaska, History, Native American Issues

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???????????????????????????????Take a look at this image from an old Thanksgiving celebration. It’s part of an exhibit at the Alaska Native Heritage Center (which is definitely worth a visit if you are ever in Anchorage).

These children are Alaska Natives, in this case Yupiit, which would have placed them a long way from New England during the mythic days of the first Thanksgiving celebrations. Still, I can’t help but shake my head at the notion that someone thought to costume these ‘Eskimos’ as ‘Indians’ for Thanksgiving.

So yeah, that happened.