CSotD: Fake History
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David Horsey leads today with a provocative cartoon, using "provocative" in its best sense: He accompanies it with a thoughtful essay on how we teach, and understand, our history that will, at worst, provoke you to think and, at best, provoke actual conversations on the topic.
And I particularly like that he echoes a peeve of my own:
When I was growing up, the history I learned was much the same as it had been taught in American schoolrooms for decades. The mostly uplifting, positive story was told East to West, from Plymouth Rock to Daniel Boone’s Kentucky to bold settlers and brave cavalrymen settling the Great Plains to the California Gold Rush.
I worked for a publisher who was a transplanted Westerner and sponsored a small PRCA rodeo on the East Coast, which I found interesting because it's the only rodeo I've been to where the animals were favored in most events, given that most of the human competitors were hobbyists. If you simply stayed on the bull for eight seconds, you'd come in either first or second, regardless of form, and the suspense in some contests was wondering if anyone would qualify at all.
I was tasked with writing a curriculum to go with this annual event and came up with one that traced the sport's history, starting before the arrival of the horse and going up through the glorification of the cowboy as an American icon, such that I ended up not just writing about Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show but interviewing tribal historians from the Comanche and Lakota, as well as writing about the vaqueros and the slave culture of the missions in the Southwest.
So it was wonderfully inclusive as well as fun and exciting, but what I heard back from teachers was that they couldn't use it in the fall because they taught American History chronologically, which means they didn't get to the West until second semester. My suggestion that pre-Columbian Sioux culture and the coming of the conquistadors were, perhaps, chronologically a bit ahead of the American Revolution and the Civil War fell on deaf ears.
I cynically began to refer to American History as "the virus that spread from Plymouth Rock," and I could go on, but Horsey covers it well. Read his essay.
Then weep at the futility of trying to get anyone to teach a history that isn't one of the two extreme, ahistorical options in his cartoon.
We need to embrace the complexity. American history is not just a glorious panorama of heroic quests and grand achievements, nor is it just a dismal sequence of exploitation and racial strife. It is both of those, and much, much more.
Similarly …
And La Cucaracha hits on a related irritant, those DNA ads in which a woman happily chirps that she just discovered she's one-quarter Native American and can't wait to learn about her culture.
Granted, knowing your background can help explain family culture: Hanging out with Irish ex-pats in my 30s greatly expanded my understanding of my mother, despite her never making soda bread or hauling us off to step-dancing classes. It goes way beyond those externals. She always acknowledged her Irish roots, but the nearest immigrant was in her grandparents' generation, so the influence was more subtle; you had to know what to look for.
I suspect that if your heritage is so far back and forgotten that you didn't even know about it, that sort of influence is pretty diluted.
And I'd add, referencing today's La Cucaracha, that if you don't know if your Hispanic heritage is from Peru or Puerto Rico, or whether your native heritage is Seneca or Navajo, it's a bit like being European but not knowing if you're Swedish or Greek.
They only "all look alike" from the outside.
I'm a little pissed at Alcaraz for using the Sam Cook punchline, because I'd have cheerfully snagged it.
More History
Francesco Marciuliano is marking his 20th year writing "Sally Forth," which came as a bit of a shock to me mostly because it meant it's been 20 years since I re-did the comics page at the Post-Star in Glens Falls.
There's a link in the right gutter here about how to re-do a comics page without bringing the wrath of readers down on your head, but the bottom line was that reader feedback did not champion Sally and she got dropped. Afterwards, I did hear from one or two people who wrote "I'll miss it, but I'll give these new strips a try," but that isn't exactly passion and the strip, well, it lacked passion.
And then Ces took it over and I soon found myself really wishing he'd started the transformation a few months earlier.
Hey, timing is everything.
And now this
Here's an ending that perhaps signals a moment in history we'll mark later: Mile High Comics has announced that they won't be back at the San Diego Comic Con next year.
Too much expense, too few sales, too much of a shift away from comics towards movies and games and cosplay and other ephemera. Who can blame them?
Derf Backderf has a most excellent rant on the topic, which not only echoes yesterday's wise-ass comment here about pegging the value of the bitcoin to vintage comics, but takes me back to the 1980s when I tried to explain to my boys the folly of buying "collectible" comics as they were being published.
I had #1s of Spiderman, Fantastic Four, Thor and Hulk at summer camp. We read them, we traded them, we tore, creased and mutilated them, and those who kept them came home from college to find them either mildewed in the basement or tossed out by unthinking parents.
That's what made the mint-condition survivors valuable.
It's called "supply and demand" and I guess if we ever figure out how to teach history, maybe we can start doing a better job of teaching that, too.
Now here's your moment of historic zen:
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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