Paleontology of Delusion

And so it goes, and so it goes. And the book says, "We may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us."
Magnolia (1999)

When I watched Magnolia, I thought the narrator was referring to a book by William Faulkner, and that perhaps the narrator or writer had the quote incorrect.

I watched Magnolia in 2001 or thereabouts after it came out on video, shortly after making reading Faulkner a priority. I had read the usual "Barn Burning" and "A Rose for Emily" in high school or college. In graduate school, one professor assigned Sanctuary (1931), and an assigned text in a literary criticism class demanded familiarity with Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Moreover, Calvin Martin's The American Indian and the Problem of History (1987) drove me into "The Bear," and from there into Go Down, Moses (1942). For the most part, however, I remained egregiously ignorant of Faulkner. I passed up a seminar called Southern Literature because I was appalled that two-thirds of the texts were by one author.

In 2000 I selected Go Down, Moses as one of the texts I would teach in my introductory literature class (yep, I'm nuts), and decided it was time to begin washing away my ignorance of twentieth-century America's greatest writer.

Despite my ignorance, I have been familiar for many years with the sentiment that the past has its own ideas about when we can leave it behind, and that this idea could be attributed as a line from Faulkner. Requiem for Nun (1951) remains on my "to read" list, rather than among the dozen or so texts that I've perused. Even so, for many years I have quoted, and misquoted, and have heard others quote and misquote the line: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."


Google knows everything

A few days ago, on my Facebook page, I placed the line from Magnolia next to Faulkner's, which had been in the "about me" box for awhile. Last night, I posted the movie line as "my status". This morning I discovered how my status update failed as communication when a friend mistook it as a statement of my psychological journey, rather than what I intended: a fishing expedition to locate Paul Thomas Anderson's source. Anderson wrote and directed Magnolia.

Searching for the quote, "We may be through with the past," via Google produces pages and pages of references to Magnolia. Often I stop there. If the fish won't rise to the surface, I can do something else. Indeed I stopped fishing several times, before returning anew. After wading through perhaps five pages, I found The Internet Movie Database's Magnolia trivia. The note references The Natural History of Nonsense (1946) by Bergan Evans as the source of the line. Evans' book also is the source for the idea that it could rain frogs.

My belief that it was an instance of Faulkner misquoted proved incorrect. The Natural History of Nonsense precedes Requiem for a Nun. Perhaps Evans' book is Faulkner's source for Gavin Stevens' memorable line?

The first chapter, "Adam's Navel," begins:

We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us. Ideas of the Stone Age exist side by side with the latest scientific thought. Only a fraction of mankind has emerged from the Dark Ages, and in the most lucid brains, as Logan Pearsall Smith has said, we come upon "nests of woolly caterpillars." Seemingly sane men entrust their wealth to stargazers and their health to witch doctors.
Evans, The Natural History of Nonsense, 5

Before this chapter begins, the text offers several quotable epigrams in the front-matter. The Preface, for instance:

This book is a contribution to the natural history of nonsense. It is a study in the paleontology of delusion. It is an antibody for all who are allergic to Stardust. It is a manual of chiropody for feet of clay.
Evans, The Natural History of Nonsense, vii

Woodstock Memories

I remember Woodstock. These memories filter through intervening scenes, perspectives, and mentalités. I'm more a child of the Seventies than the Sixties and missed the festival at Max Yasgur's farm forty years ago. I was too young.

My memories of Woodstock are second hand experiences animated through Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music (The Director's Cut) (1997), The '60s (1999), and the study of history. Woodstock and the Sixties first presented themselves in my study of history through Professor Leroy Ashby's lectures in U.S. History, 1941 to present (the course covered a forty year period when I took it).

Ashby's innovative lectures brought history to life. His narratives were supplemented with clips from such music as Jimi Hendrix's Woodstock performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner," Country Joe and the Fish, and maybe Eric Burden and the The Animals or Joan Baez. I lack his song list, but attempted to reproduce his style a few years ago while teaching a course called Recent American History. My list of "protest music" included "Okie from Muskogee" by Merle Haggard, Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come," and Phil Ochs' "I Ain't Marching Anymore." I should have presented Frank Zappa's "Plastic People" alongside "For What It's Worth" by Buffalo Springfield as springboards for reflection upon the so-called riots on Sunset Strip. Seeing these demonstrations protesting the closing of Pandora's Box through the contrasting lenses of these two songs (one of which was performed in Monterey 1967), students might develop some critical historical questions for exploring the youth movement of the Sixties that Woodstock has come to symbolize.

Woodstock serves as the denouement for the fractured family sub-plot in The '60s. The Herlihy family at the heart of the film includes three typical children. Katie (Julia Stiles) gets pregnant as a teenager and follows her lover to San Francisco, where his feeble, "bummer," is offered when she needs cash in order to buy medicine for their sick baby, cash that he just spent on drugs. Through this film, we see the dark side of the Summer of Love. Michael's (Josh Hamilton) Catholic idealism carries him into the civil rights movement, the Pentagon siege, and into constant struggle with a rival suitor for the heart of a woman. She begins to consider Michael again after the rival dies in a self-created blast as a member of the Weather Underground. Brian (Jerry O'Connell) joins the Marines and goes to Vietnam. Through a deus ex machina (some movie critics use the term flaw) the divergent paths of all three siblings converge upon Woodstock where they find each other after several years apart. They return together to their parents in Chicago and enjoy a happy reunion, and start the process of healing.

Such is the hope found in the memories of Woodstock that many celebrate today.

Last weekend, The New York Times got the scoop on the anniversary and published assessments of Woodstock's legacy from such writers as Ishmael Reed, Rick Perlstein (whose Facebook alert put me onto this article), James Miller, Joan Hoff, and others. Miller called the festival a pseudo-event. Others, too, have been critical.


Freedom from Responsibility

A tone of moral censure underscores the narrative of the Sixties in A Patriot's History of the United States (2004) by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen.

Rock music reaffirmed the sexual and drug revolutions at every turn. By 1970, although still exceptionally popular, neither the Beatles nor their bad-boy counterparts, the Rolling Stones, had the aura of hipness, having ceded that to rising new and more radical groups whose music carried deeper drug overtones.
Schweikart and Allen, 703

For these authors, hipness was rebellion against authority. The music industry cashed in on this rebellion with the Woodstock festival. The authors of A Patriot's History omit stories of how the mega-concert became free as the crowds overwhelmed any semblance of security, and the promoters took a bath. But, they mention the full-length film--Woodstock (1970)--that followed the event and that continues to bring profits through several anniversary editions.

Schweikart and Allen cite one critical source for their brief discussion of the music festival: David Dalton, "Finally, the Shocking Truth about Woodstock Can Be Told, or Kill It Before It Clones Itself," The Gadfly (August 1999); their citation also mentions conversations with Dalton by one of the two authors, presumably Schweikart as he started his career in a band. From Dalton they offer the observation that at Woodstock drugs "ceased being tools for experience ... and became a means of crowd control" (704).

The authors of A Patriot's History emphasize the drugs and sex, the garbage left behind, and the commercialization of the music. They frame Woodstock between the sexual revolution and the mayhem in Hollywood perpetrated by Charles Manson's followers the week prior to the festival. They do not inquire into the motivations of the organizers nor the experiences of the participants.


People's Histories

Neither A People's History of the United States (1980) by Howard Zinn nor Paul Johnson's A History of the American People (1998) mention the Woodstock Festival. Even so, Zinn's three chapters on the Sixties emphasizing the Civil Rights Movement; protest against the American presence in Vietnam, and the crimes of Richard Nixon; and the emergence of Red Power, Black Power, Chicano nationalism, and woman's liberation all seem to suggest a broadly positive assessment. Even so, Zinn might object to the ways the youth movement was exploited by corporate America. Schweikart and Allen note how "peace, love and rock-n-roll" became an advertising slogan not only for Woodstock, but for other products.

Johnson's one indexed reference to drugs credits popular music with fomenting the spread of drug culture. From 1920s jazz, swing and bop in the 1930s and 1940s, ...

There followed 1950s cool, hard bop, soul jazz, rock in the 1960s, and in the 1970s blends of jazz and rock dominated by electronic instruments. And all the time pop music was crowding in the phantasmagoria of commercial music geared to the taste of countless millions of easily manipulated but increasingly affluent young people. And from the worlds of jazz and pop, the drug habit spread to the masses as the most accelerated form of downward mobility of all.
Johnson, 706

Johnson repeats this theme of downward mobility in his discussion of Gangsta Rap, where he segues into expressing his affinity for the arguments in Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted our Higher Education (1991). It's clear that his views of Woodstock would not deviate far from those of Schweikart and Allen.


Addendum (24 August 2009):
Earlier this morning, Larry Schweikart posted "Woodstock at 40 ... er, wait, is it 40 already?" on his blog A Patriot's History of the United States. In the second sentence, he calls Rush Limbaugh his mentor, or he imagines Rush Limbaugh as the mentor for his imaginary reader that he is quoting--the syntax of his parenthetical statement lacks some precision on this point. He then suggests that he and Rush share a love of the music of Woodstock, and that he has seen the film something like twenty times. He repeats and emphasizes David Dalton's assertion that at Woodstock drugs became a means for "crowd control".

Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance

Thanks to Pam Wilson, curator of "Indigenous Cinema and Visual Language(s): Why Should We Be Teaching These Films?" at In Media Res, I learned this morning that a terrific film is available through the Internet Archive.

Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance is an Alanis Obomsawin documentary film about a confrontation between Mohawks and the Canadian government in 1990. The confrontation resulted from plans to build a housing development and expand a golf course on Mohawk land, but the roots go back to Jacques Cartier's claim of this land for France in 1535.

The trailer is on YouTube.



When this film was available for some viewings in 1993-1994 on my campus, conversations about Native issues put sovereignty at the center.

The Sixties: A Patriot’s History

History is the memory of states.
Henry Kissinger

The chapter, “The Age of Upheaval, 1960-1974,” in A Patriot’s History of the United States by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen takes a long view of the Sixties in the United States, albeit severely circumscribed by the bounds of the history of government. Arthur Marwick also advocates a long view of the Sixties, but emphasizes cultural developments, as well as political and economic. Marwick’s The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958-c. 1974 (1998) offers an international perspective that is wholly lacking in A Patriot’s History.

Schweikart and Allen's “The Age of Upheaval” begins with Richard Nixon’s defeat in the Presidential election of 1960 and concludes with his resignation in the wake of Watergate. The authors accuse Kennedy of election fraud in 1960, while they exonerate Nixon’s behavior in 1971-72. They place the Watergate burglary in a context of “Lyndon Johnson bugged Goldwater’s campaign offices in 1964, and nothing was done about it” (716). They mention Daniel Ellsberg’s role in providing “secret documents to the New York Times” (712), but omit the burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, and nothing of the “rat-fucking” that would be familiar to anyone who had seen All the President’s Men (1976).

Nixon authorized the formation of an investigative unit within the White House and assigned it the job of cracking down on government leakers, starting with Daniel Ellsberg. In September [1971], probably with Nixon’s knowledge, the “Plumbers” broke into the offices of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist to get information that would help convict Ellsberg, who had been indicted for violating the Espionage Act and theft of government property. … Undertaking a campaign of what they called “rat-fucking,” they engaged in a series of dirty tricks to disrupt the campaigns of Democrats who were vying to oppose Nixon in the 1972 election.
Chris Finan, From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America (2007), 232.

The authors of A Patriot’s History exhibit bipartisanship in their criticism of President Eisenhower’s role in actions that facilitated the disasters of the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam, but as he “was no traditional Republican and more of a moderate … [who] posed no threat to [Franklin] Roosevelt’s legacy” (668), such evenhandedness seems easy. Nixon, on the other hand, seemed more conservative, but “his social and economic programs had far more in common with FDR than with a true conservative like Ronald Reagan” (668).

Pundits use terms like “true conservative,” but historians need to offer better definitions than I’ve found so far in A Patriot’s History. Even the divisive conservative pundit Cal Thomas has recently taken issue with declarations that Arizona Senator and Presidential Candidate John McCain is not a “true conservative”:

John McCain, some say, is not a true conservative. Was Reagan? Reagan campaigned as a tax cutter. He cut taxes, but he also raised them. He promised conservative judges and spoke of his opposition to abortion, yet named two justices to the Supreme Court (Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy) who voted to uphold Roe v. Wade.
Thomas, “Redefining Conservatism”

It comes as no surprise that attack dogs have spammed Townhall.com with ad hominems calling Thomas Republican in Name Only (RINO).

Conscience of a Conservative

Schweikart and Allen make it a point to identify the ghostwriters that penned John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize winning Profiles in Courage (1956), while leaving in place the fiction that Barry Goldwater wrote Conscience of a Conservative (1960). My conscience would rebel if I offered this fiction and knew otherwise; Schweikart and Allen certainly should know that Goldwater was not the author if either one of them took the time to read the only text they cite in the paragraph that mentions Conscience of a Conservative as “providing a list of Goldwater’s policy positions” (682). The footnote refers readers to Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001).

At least Kennedy had a hand in the production of Profiles in Courage, even if he did not write the text. Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative, on the other hand, was presented to Goldwater for his approval after having been fully written by L. Brent Bozell at the behest of Clarence Manion.

Manion had negotiated the grudging noninterference of Goldwater in their efforts to publish something under his name. … Over the holidays Goldwater skimmed Bozell’s manuscript and pronounced it fine.
Perlstein, Before the Storm, 51, 61.

Schweikart and Allen state that the ideas in Conscience, “were hardly radical positions” (682); Perlstein’s view differs:

The ideas that followed—in chapters like “Freedom for the Farmer,” “Freedom for Labor,” “Taxes and Spending,” “The Welfare State,” “Some Notes on Education,” and “The Soviet Menace”—were radical. Conscience of a Conservative domesticated them.
Perlstein, Before the Storm, 64.

Opinions will differ. Schweikart and Allen deserve credit for offering footnotes to works with perspectives at odds with their narrative. However, the notes appear as documentation not counter argument. Their intent is unclear.

Superior European Technology

Colonial Firearms

Assertions of European technological superiority appeal to our common sense. We know that guns are better than bows and arrows, and when we read some of the primary sources from the colonial era we encounter numerous references to the enthusiasm of American indigenes for firearms. Indians wanted guns, Europeans needed gold or furs or food—exchanges were made.

As he became the first European to sail around the island on the west coast of North America that now bears his name, Captain George Vancouver found several groups of Native that had acquired firearms before they had seen a European. Certainly his observations support the notion that guns were valued by North American Indians.

In the afternoon [17 July 1792] we were visited by two canoes, having a musket, with all necessary appurtenances in each. … it would appear that the inhabitants of this particular part are amply provided with these formidable weapons.”
George Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery, vol. 2 (1801), 264

The guns Vancouver saw, as well as those he had available for trade were far superior to those available in the sixteenth century, but not yet as good as those about which Ulysses S. Grant would complain more than seventy years later. Writing in his memoirs about the capture of Vicksburg, Grant wrote:

The small-arms of the enemy were far superior to the bulk of ours. Up to this time our troops at the West had been limited to the old United States flint-lock muskets changed into percussion, or the Belgian musket imported early in the war—almost as dangerous to the person firing it as to the one aimed at—and a few new and imported arms.
Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (Library of America, 1990), 384

Virginia 1607

Our common sense understanding of the superiority of European firearms runs so deep that most of us experience no cognitive dissonance when we watch scenes such as my favorite from Disney’s Pocahontas (1995). John Smith is under a waterfall when he first encounters the voluptuous Indian maiden. As she sneaks up on him as a panther might, he slowly turns and points his matchlock. The tension is broken before he fires the weapon, and this resolution benefits him because the open flame required by his gun would have been extinguished as quickly as it was lit.

Smith lacked Diamond matches that he could strike on his denim, and also lacked the denim. Nor was Smith in possession of a Zippo with its patented protection from the elements. Even if he managed to light the wick which the serpentine (the lock) delivers to the flash pan, it would not continue burning under such moist conditions. If Smith’s protection had depended upon his firearm, and Pocahontas had been hostile, he would have died a long time before he could write and repeatedly revise his Generall Historie of Virginia (1630) that spawned the misreadings and fabrications which in turn facilitated the myths propagated by the Disney cartoon.

Smith published The Proceedings of the English Colonie in Virginia (1606-1612) in 1612 and The Generall History of Virginia, the Somer Iles, and New England in 1623. The former lacks his story of the rescue by Pocahontas, which first appears in the latter. Pocahontas died in 1617. There also is good reason to believe that Smith had read an almost identical story of the experience of Juan Ortiz who had come to Florida in 1528 in search of the missing Panfilo de Narváez. His story of rescue by an Indian maiden—Ulele was her name—whose father was prepared to roast him over a fire was published in accounts of the De Soto expedition. See chapter IX of the account of The Gentleman of Elvas.

Smith might have used a more expensive wheelock, which would not require an open flame but would still fail under a waterfall. Wheelocks had been available since the mid-sixteenth century, but never became as popular with soldiers as the matchlock. A good discussion of seventeenth century British weapons is available at the Plymouth Archaeological Rediscovery Project. The world’s library offers many other sources of reliable information regarding seventeenth century firearms, including the story of a project of replica manufacturing and a newspaper story (PDF) concerned with the film The New World (2005), another Smith-Pocahontas saga.

Correction (14 Dec 2007): My brother phoned to take issue with some inaccuracies in my initial description of the mechanism of Captain Smith's firearm. I have corrected these errors.


Florida 1528

In their failed attempt to conquer the land Juan Ponce de León had named Flowery Easter (Pascua Florida), the men under the command of Panfilo de Narváez were nearly helpless against the arrows of the Indians. Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca was the highest ranking survivor of this failure. In his La Relación, first published in 1542, he recalled those traumatic days of 1528:

Good armor did no good against arrows in this skirmish. There were men who swore they had seen two red oaks, each the thickness of a man’s calf, pierced from side to side by arrows this day; which is no wonder when you consider the power and skill the Indians can deliver them with. I myself saw an arrow buried half a foot in a poplar trunk.
Cabeza de Vaca, Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America, trans. and ed. by Cyclone Covey (1998), 42

Despite its collapsed chronology, the 1991 film Cabeza de Vaca by Nicolás Echevarría captures this scene well. One moment the Spanish are cutting their way through the flora and the next they are being cut to pieces by a rain of arrows coming in fast and thick. They flee, although a great many are killed.


Mexico 1519-1521

Before his death in the failed effort to conquer Florida, Narváez had failed in another enterprise. With orders reminiscent of those given much later to Charles Marlow (Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness) and Captain Willard (Francis Ford Cuppola, Apocalypse Now) to go after the renegade Kurtz, Narváez was ordered to capture or kill Hernando Cortés, who had disobeyed orders. This part of the story of the conquest of Tenochtitlán is obscured in Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen’s A Patriot’s History. They tell us that Spanish military technology—guns and tactics—“made any single Spanish soldier the equal of several poorly armed natives” (7). They tell us that Narváez’s “force of 600, including cooks, colonists, and women” was able to “overcome native Mexican armies outnumbering them two, three, and even ten times at any particular time” (7). They do not tell us that Cortés was able to overcome Narváez with a smaller army, nor do they tell us why he did so. In any case, the reinforcements from the captured army of Narváez and their Tlaxcalan allies returned to Tenochtitlán where they suffered astounding defeat on Noche Triste (melancholy night), returned a third time and laid seige , and finally overcame the great Aztec empire.

Mexico was born as Cortés put himself in place of Montezuma and his heirs in the now destroyed city.


Wars of the Iroquois 1648-1652

In the middle of the seventeenth century, the Iroquois all but destroyed the Huron, their traditional enemies. Many historians that have narrated these events have attributed the Iroquois success to the so-called 400 guns of the Mohawks, which allegedly they had acquired through trade with the Dutch. Brian J. Given investigated these claims, and published his findings in “The Iroquois Wars and Native Firearms,” in Bruce Alden Cox, ed., Native People, Native Lands: Canadian Indians, Inuit and Metis (1988).

Given notes, “[t]he premise that the European harquebuses of the seventeenth century were vastly superior to aboriginal projectile weapons is pervasive in the literature” (3). In his examination of these claims he set up field tests firing at a target measuring 2’ x 6,’ finding 50 to 75 yards the maximum range at which it could be hit when stationary “under ideal conditions” (10). In his summary of the bow vs. seventeenth century firearms, he points out the native bow had six times the rate of fire, could be reloaded while crouching (extremely difficult to do with a muzzle loaded firearm), and had an effective range of at least 100 yards. The bow could penetrate armour, and was accurate.

Bows never blow up and seldom misfire; the musket does both. A 20 to 50 percent misfire rate is usual in good weather under field conditions. In the lightest of rains the flint-lock becomes virtually useless, where the performance of the bow is little affected.
Brian J. Given, “The Iroquois Wars and Native Firearms,” 10

A New Thesis

In 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, Charles C. Mann offers a cogent summary of what he had learned from reading various secondary accounts of colonization. Mann states:

It is true that European technology dazzled Native Americans on first encounter. But the relative positions of the two sides were closer than commonly believed. Contemporary research suggests that indigenous peoples in New England were not technologically inferior to the British—or, rather, that terms like “superior” and “inferior” do not readily apply to the relationship between Indian and European technology.
Mann, 1491, 63.

The terms inferior and superior do not apply. Indeed, they cloud our judgment. The exchanges that began on Watling Island in 1492 and continued to be initiated again and again for more than three centuries were complex exchanges. Each side found itself attracted to or repulsed by cultural elements and technologies of the Other; each side was transformed through the encounter.