They keep calling me"
NIN - Dead Souls
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"According to this portrayal, those were times of animality and barbaric, uncontrolled procreation, of catastrophe both economic and military, and the undeniable achievements of past civilization were presented as an expression of the strength and determination that permitted people to overcome the benightedness and the cruelty of the period: those achievements, then, came about as it were in spite of the prevailing tendency to live at the cost of others. What once took untold effort, they said, and was attainable only by a few, the road to it bristling with danger and the necessity for sacrifice, compromise - material success purchased only by moral defeat - was now common, easy, and certain.
[...]
afterward, in the natural course of things, came oblivion and indifference; children marveled when they learned of the romantic period of astronautics, and possibly felt even a little fear toward their ancestors, who were as strange to them and as incomprehensible as the ancestors who engaged in wars of plunder and voyages for gold. It was the indifference that appalled me the most, far more than the condemnation -- our life's work had become wrapped in silence, buried, and forgotten."
Stanislaw Lem - Return from the Stars
(cosmonauts return after over a relativistically-dilated century to a forcibly pacifist future)
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"Inside there was only an enormous, transparent block with infinite internal needles in which the light of the sunset was broken up into colored stars. Disconcerted, knowing that the children were waiting for an immediate explanation, José Arcadio Buendía ventured a murmur:
"It’s the largest diamond in the world."
"No" the gypsy countered. "It’s ice."
José Arcadio Buendía, without understanding, stretched out his hand toward the cake, but the giant moved it away."Five reales more to touch it" he said. José Arcadio Buendía paid them and put his hand on the ice and held it there for several minutes as his heart filled with fear and jubilation at the contact with mystery."
Gabriel García Márquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
(fun geographact: Colombia's on the Equator)
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"It was a hard age, and some might consider it a cruel age. Manners were refined, but passions ran unchecked. The most exquisite punctilio was observed; but death by torture was the common lot of most. It was an age in which six out of seven women died in childbirth; in which infant mortality was a shocking 87 per cent: in which the average life-expectancy was no more than 12.3 years; in which the Plague yearly ravaged the central city, carrying away an estimated two-thirds of the population; in which continual religious warfare halved the able-bodied male population every year - to the point where some regiments were forced to use blind men as gunnery officers.
And yet, it could not be considered an unhappy age. Despite difficulties, the population soared to new heights every year, and men aspired to fresh extremes of audacity. If life was uncertain, it was at least interesting. Machinery had not bred individual initiative out of the race as yet. And though there were shocking class differences and feudal privilege reigned supreme, checked only by the dubious power of the king and the baleful presence of the clergy, still it could fairly be called a democratic age and a time of individual opportunity."
Robert Sheckley - Mindswap
(in case you missed the joke, this was from a parody of histerical adventure stories)
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Betimes of yore, itinerant performers might be witnessed wending their way about the countryside, offering the uneducated masses news, trendy songs, brief glimpses of modernity and modern gadgets and the mysteries of the far corners of the world. Then we acquired a postal system, telegraph, radio, television, and teh internets. Fairs, carnivals and circuses persist, but as a performance artist's impression of performance art, acting the role of honored traditions and cozy low-frills socialization complete with forced laughter.
We no longer need big tops and gypsy caravans to bring samples and images of the latest technological marvels; those marvels' manufacturers will gladly spam us with video ads.
We no longer need them to recount Pulcinello's latest witticisms; they're on PBS (and nobody watches it anyway.)
We no longer need them to show us what Indian elephants look like; our neighbours keep a statue of one in their living room.
We can no longer be shocked by their freak shows; we hold presidential elections.
One wonders when the lingering appeal of greasy food, musical fiberglass ponies, clowns on unicycles and the centrifugal vomitorium will at last wear off as well.
One of my previous few posts here touched on Renaissance faires, the new kid on the village green, which increasingly cuts into the already dwindling entertainment market share of previous eras' communal spectacles. Yet they differ, crucially, in that past centuries' faires looked to the future or the wider world, dealt in hope (often false) and mystery and novelty, while the RenFaire mentality obsesses over a simpler, more ignorant and brutal past.
However, living in the past can also entail a desperation for moral superiority, a self-serving conceit toward those who have passed beyond defending themselves. Instead of seeking the wonders out there, somewhere, beyond one's parochial upbringings, cling to the righteousness of denouncing the mote in a famous figure's eye. Every braindead schlub who accuses Napoleon of short man syndrome can feel like having bested Napoleon himself. This sort of sadistic freak show spectator attitude toward history seems to be increasing and not diminishing with historical factoids being vastly more readily available than in previous decades.
In other news, Wikipedia wants you to know that George Washington Was a Slaveowner!!! (dun-dun-duuuUUUNNN!!!)
This was the headline Wikipedia chose to run to egg on the rioters back when they started a couple of months ago, to foment vandalism and violence by legitimizing the opportunistic filth using George Floyd's murder as pretext to assault their neighbours. How's that for a center ring act? In that same spirit, allow me to volunteer the sideshow attraction Cab Calloway Was a Filthy Sexist Pig because he called Minnie a "moocher" and a "frail" and that is how he should be remembered, as a Filthy Sexist Pig, not as the black band leader who broke the musical mold and went platinum half a century before it was even invented.
Fanatics of every stripe will impose their favorite litmus test on others. It's like getting into heaven or hell based on how many frogs you've run over with your car in your life. Not ducks or chipmunks or ants or cats. Just frogs. And stepping on them is fine. Just don't run them over with your car.
But you're not obligated to agree with the fanatics. You can call bullshit on overusing the single-variable frog-squishing metric to judge human worth.
This puts me in an awkward position. I've always despised hero worship as slavish, especially in the case of primarily military figures like Washington, but much like singlemindedly labeling him a father of democracy, the motivation in labeling him a slaveowner is too disingenuous to ignore. There is a world of difference betwen not actively hero-worshipping historic figures, admitting their flaws, and going out of your way to demonize them for an arbitrary sample set of failings. The petty vandals indulging in such revisionism delight to point out that he only agreed to manumit his slaves after his own death. Well, ok, what was the socially accepted time to release one's slaves among others of his generation and upbringing in that society? Might the prevailing answer have been... never? Because I'm pretty sure Georgey boy still placed slightly ahead of the curve. More importantly, the precepts of equality of the government he helped establish, however laughably incomplete or dishonest, did more to skew the balance of human society toward balance than the lives of a thousand other perfectly mundane whip-cracking plantation owners put together. But hey, it's not enough that he was better than others, because he wasn't better enough.
More importantly, the phrase "he was a man of his time" should not even need to be spoken. There are a million details of all our lives which we have not determined, extended phenotypes we inherit as surely as skin color. We remember historic figures not for their commonplace, banal features (did Michelangelo eat bread? with his hands? and shit in a pot?) but for their few actions which rose above commonality. There were a million other Italians who all shat in pots, but they didn't paint Sistine Chapels. There were a million other murderous greedy racist sailors like Christopher Columbus, but they didn't bother finding new lands from which to take captives. They just assaulted their neighbours. But hey, we obviously can't give Shakespeare his due because he was born the wrong sex and the wrong skin color and never wrote plays about animal rights, and Marie Curie's name should be stricken from the history books because when accused of being Jewish, she didn't drop everything to devote her life to combating anti-Semitism.
One thing we should remember about the past: while it glorified and demonized its own past, it also still looked to the future, to the mysteries and wonders of the universe, a feature utterly lacking in the carnival antics of current self-styled "progressives" obsessed with attacking a deformed caricature of history to justify their own bigotry. This is not social reform. This is the mentality of a decaying empire, which has ceased processing new information and set to the final lurid spectacle of cannibalizing itself.
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