As most of you know I consider myself American. More than that – in a joke you won’t get until A Few Good Men comes out unless you’ve read Darkship Thieves about a thousand times – I consider myself A Usaian.
But there is one think in which I must break ranks with y’all – and that’s when we talk about what I’d like to call deep history.
First of all, I’m going to say I don’t know history like ya’ll know history – by which I mean the US in general. I don’t know if you realize this, but we probably have more “history hobbyists” than any other country in the universe. By which I mean someone whose job it is NOT to study history, but who does nonetheless become an expert in a certain time or place. For instance, my plumber is an expert on the attire, food, guns and what I’d call “daily life” of Colorado in civil war times.
I’m terrified of the various history hobbyists around the US. I mean, most of them are rather forgiving, but no matter how much research I do, how well I track things, and how many of the hobbyists I enlist, if I write something set no matter in how obscure a time period, I’ll get fifteen letters saying “that shape pot didn’t exist in the fourteenth century.” Or, “young lady, is this set in DUMAS’ time or the musketeers’ time?” (Actually I do have an answer to that one and it is – it is set in the world of Dumas’ musketeers, which had bleed through. In the case of the vampire musketeers, it’s an alternate.)
For five glorious years when we had money (pre-nine-eleven) I belonged to the history book club and one year I managed to spend something like nine thousand dollars in books. It was a good year. My husband thought I was insane.
This is not normal in other countries. People don’t study history, much less THAT detailed a history, for fun. Professors do, but as we know, they can have fun, but they can’t SHOW it.
So, in that as in so many things the common man in the US is a wonder and compares favorably the creme de la creme of other lands. I take my hat off to you, and I’m both proud and humbled you let me be one of you.
BUT one thing you’re missing and that has two roots: you are missing the sense of how messy history really is, and how persistent.
There are two reasons for this – one of them is that the country is young and for at least half the people (and probably more) a linguistic barrier with the past intervened. That is, in almost every American’s history there is one side where the parents had to learn a new language and could or would not ever fully communicate their legends and stories in English to their offspring. The other part of this is that the country is mobile. Some of these … what I’d call fossilized history are never fully expressed – they pass on because both parents believe them/know them/use them without thought. But here, when a person from one part of the country (or another country [grin]) marries someone from far away, you sort of edge away from your crazier beliefs/expressions/traditions. Many of them don’t live up to the full light of rationality, and when you try to explain them to your spouse, they disappear.
What exactly do I mean? Oh, I mean stuff like the unexamined assumptions built into language. For instance, the local slang word for pig and blond man was the same. It was “Russo” Yep, the Russ Vikings DID raid that portion of the country. Why do you ask?
And then there was the way that “The ancients said” put an end to any argument about how to do things. Or charming proverbs like “He who has a mouth goes to Rome.” (Never figured out if that referred to Catholic Church hierarchy or to ancient Rome.)
When I talked about fossilized faith, it was at that level. How deep does it go? Deep. For instance, on the first of May everyone puts a certain flower in every opening of their house. Why? To keep evil spirits out. If you research (I did) it turns out that the flower was sacred to the Celtic Goddess of Spring.
How deep? Well… Judging from the Tiffany Aching series, Pratchett and I share a fund of the same folk superstitions and culture. And look, yeah, Portugal and the British isles had contact forever, but not that DEEP – not at the level of folk religion/culture. There is, after all, the language barrier. And yet… And yet it’s there, and I suspect goes back to pre-Roman times.
So when people tell me that “human beings are rational” or “they just do things because everyone else does it” they’re ignoring the accumulation of history, the accretion of little meaningless-seeming details that, in their entirety, give form and texture to daily life, and even influence the seemingly-all-rational decisions we make.
The sort of fracture that US culture allows is good in a way. It allows us to move fast, less fettered with meaningless tradition and history. (And a good half of it if not more IS meaningless.) My boys have been known to describe Portugal as a swimmer fettered to a large iron ball. That iron ball is history.
On the other hand, when it comes to understanding human limitations Americans born and bread bred [stupid auto-complete fingers!] can be (not to say are. Some aren’t) curiously lacking. This is good to an extent: to dream the impossible dream and all that. But it also makes people judge the US far more harshly and come up with bright ideas like the US can’t make war JUST to further its national interests, and if it does so, it’s “evil” – because the people saying this don’t realize every nation throughout history did this, and still does, in fact, when it can get away with doing it. It leads to people turning on the US because it’s not perfect – because they don’t understand the essential “brokenness” of humanity and therefore of human history.
In the same way when dealing with other countries or expecting other countries to behave in a certain way. The US can be the kid who sits there going “But that’s not rational!” And of course it’s not.
I don’t know if there’s any way to get that feel for human history and the try-fail of human attempts at betterment without growing up in an old country. Some of you have, obviously, managed it. I know it takes more than the sort of hobbyist history that so many people engage in. I suspect it takes questioning the texts themselves, looking for primary sources, and always thinking a lot.
To those of you who manage it – I am in awe. To those who don’t – try to understand not every country is the US. The US is in many ways uniquely blessed. It doesn’t even come close to being uniquely evil. Learn other countries’ history without blinders and without setting different standards for them. And learn that what is in books is always only half the story.
Real history is a story of trying and failing. Of falling to get up again. Of keeping trying and keeping faith. And sometimes you have to have great patience and work in increments to a goal.
No one is perfect, not even us. Perfection is a goal to aim towards, but it can rarely be achieved.
By the by, guest blogging today at Vampchix and Bite Club
According To Hoyt 
Very good.
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Leaving out those ‘history hobbyists’ who state one particular aspect of history, in general I would say that most Usaians have a much broader ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ type knowledge of history compared to those from other countries. Citizens of a lot of older countries may know more history of their particular area, mainly because they absorb it through osmosis; but the average american has a much broader sense and knowledge of the history of many areas, without however the indepth complete knowledge of any one.
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Um… no, consciously Americans know more history, period. it’s the “feeling” that’s lacking and the idea it’s all in the head instead — and that can’t be helped and isn’t universal, and there’s pros and cons. HOWEVER if I find myself arguing with someone about how History works, it’s ALWAYS inevitably someone who lacks the feeling for history. (Shrug.)
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It seems very odd to think that Americans know… well, any academic subject, sometimes. Especially history. (Especially when I think of some of the “history books” I’ve seen. *shudder*)
Although I will say that I got quite a good history teacher at a Community College, couple years in a row. He was a vet, in a wheelchair, and very good at making stuff interesting. I forget the grades I got, but I liked the classes.
History classes I wish I could audit are Barbara Hambly’s. *WIST*
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Robert had an excellent history teacher in high school. Retired naval officer.AMAZING. Particularly on the subject of WWI.
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In writing my own books, I owe a lot in my own books to local historians, and to reenactors. They’re a fantastic resource. I was never so pleased as when one of them read the Trilogy in MS, looking for errors – and all that he found was a couple of places where I had misspelled some German words.
It’s absolutely essential to know history well – otherwise, it would be rather like living in a cultural sensory-deprivation tank, with no knowlege of how people had striven for a goal or had endured hard times.
Besides … it’s almost always pretty interesting!
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I have a somewhat different take on what caused the missing feel for history, and particularly traditions, in this country.
There has been a conscious effort in this country since the ’60s to ignore anything more than recent history, unless it is used as a club to beat Americans over the head about how evil America is, so that it can be changed, “for the better”. In general, America does not, perhaps, have the extent of ritual observance of old ways and beliefs, but there are many (of which several have been heavily commercialized, of course) which have survived, especially in the less cosmopolitan areas. I grew up in a border area, and saw both sides of this, where the hillbillies of my father’s acquaintance had such, and which were scoffed at by the urbanites just a few dozen miles away.
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I don’t know if there’s any way to get that feel for human history and the try-fail of human attempts at betterment without growing up in an old country.
Oh, that’s easy: go live in an old country for a couple years. Do it “on the economy”, not living on a military base. I moved to Germany the day of Reagan’s Inauguration — not because, it just worked out that way — and lived there, working for the German government. I learned German, lived German. It’s the little things that strike you, after a while. Things like the requirement of Anmeldung, “Application” — you’re required to go to City Hall when you move and register as having moved. Or realizing that you’re eating in a building that was already 300 years old when the Pilgrims arrived, and it’s not a Special Historic Monument, it’s a bar. If your eyes are open, you can cross the Rhine and see that you’re leaving Germania and entering Rome.
I think of this as having a sense of history. Oh, you can see it in the US as well — down in the Springs, you’re in New France; drive south on I-25 until you get to Pueblo, and about the time you get to the Abriendo exit, you’re in New Spain. Start looking around — you are in a city named Pueblo (not very creative, a town named “town”), keep going and you come to El Huerfanito, Trinidad, Ratón and so on. But in Europe, you cross those boundaries going every direction, and at most a couple hundred miles, with differences in language, cultural assumptions and all.
An awful lot of SF doesn’t have that sense of history: there’s an expectation that things will be more or less the same.
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Hmph. I mean “more or less the same culturally” — we tend to put new technology into a recognizable world.
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Many years ago we had the opportunity to take The Daughter across the border to Canada. At the time we were home schooling. I had been looking for some books on Canadian history, and thought it would be a marvelous opportunity to make a purchase.
We went to a bookstore and asked the clerk for help. He was thrilled to have someone ask. He explained that he had been a history major, but had switched it to a minor so he could make a living. He then apologized, saying that no one there just reads history. Taking us back he presented us with the entire history section, all two shelves.
On the other hand, when I was in England there was a great deal of history available. Most of it was related to Great Britain or the peoples with who influenced them and with whom they had dealt. As England had, well, been The Empire Upon Which The Sun Never Set, this meant that they covered just about the whole of the world and the whole of history.
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Hmmm. In my head this is translating to, “In America, by and large, the country is so young and the culture is so thoroughly permeated by the ideas and ideals of the Enlightenment that to you born-and-bred Americans (not to be confused with natives, you see) the very notion that other cultures don’t share many or even any of those beliefs and ideals is, well, foreign.” And wow, does that look dry and stuffy now that I’ve typed it. Is that accurate though?
On a side-note, am I the only one who couldn’t help but think of Gaiman’s American Gods, when reading this post? :)
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No. Part of the issue is that you know a great deal of history, but you know it intellectually — which means you are subjected to fads in how people view history — more so than other countries. BE AWARE of anything that sounds to clean. I wish it were the ideals of the Enlightenment. These days most people I argue history with are imbued with Marxism and don’t even know it.
And… er… I AM dry and stuffy.
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I was lucky to have some amazing history professors way back when I was in college. One – I’m sure he started out as a Marxist, I think that’s almost a requirement for academic historians, but he actually spent some time in Eastern Europe in the days of the iron curtain, saw what socialism really meant and came back cured. That man taught me to worship the Constitution, really showed what it was trying to do and why.
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Okay, thanks-I was thinking that I must have missed something there! I tend to attribute that sort of reflexive credulousness to a lack of critical thinking. Evidently, that association is so strong that my mind completely glossed over the connection between that lack of critical thinking and our relative lack of history as a nation, which in turn led me directly into the weeds. Apologies for being obtuse!
As for the arguing history part, I’ll just say that I definitely sympathize.
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No apologies needed. I think the point might have been occluded by the fact I wrote this while dead on my feet.
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Things like the requirement of Anmeldung, “Application” — you’re required to go to City Hall when you move and register as having moved.
I know a gentleman whose son works abroad. The son and his wife had trouble getting a new (larger) apartment after the birth of their second child because the landlady did not want to give them us as tenants. I gathered that she had to release them and provide recommendations or they could not move. The recommendation part I understood, but I wondered how it must be to live in a place where you had to have the landlord’s permission to leave.
Here is another example of the peculiar aspect of our country. As a citizen you only have to notify the government of moving if you wish to register to vote, have changed states and wish to drive, receive government benefits and wish to continue or if you have committed a crime and are therefore obligated as part of your parole. You have to either want to do something more than change resident, or have done something to forfeit that freedom.
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You ask, in other words, how one acquires the sense that human beings are neither perfect, nor perfectible?
I agree that history is one route — and yes, one must read of more than one time period, both the good times and the bad. Enough to begin to realize that the same tragedies and the same hubris crop us again and again. Enough to begin to recognize that the dream of utopia is nothing new — but that it is, literally, “no place” and that when it comes to human societies, the perfect is the enemy of the good. To begin to realize just how incredibly blessed we are to be living in the present.
But of course, this message, as many others, is to be found in Heinlein. That’s where I first found it. I can’t quote it from memory, but you find the message in Expanded Universe, and in Time Enough for Love. I recall a passage about how humanity’s survival is going to be as much determined by its vices as its virtues.
And yet, accepting that we are not perfect seems to me a required step to take in striving to be better. To accept humanity as is, with all faults, and then to do the best we can.
Heinlein again:
“I believe in — I am proud to belong to — the United States. Despite shortcomings, from lynchings to bad faith in high places, our nation has had the most decent and kindly internal practices and foreign policies to be found anywhere in history.”
“And finally, I believe in my whole race. Yellow, white, black, red, brown –in the honesty, courage, intelligence, durability….and goodness…..of the overwhelming majority of my brothers and sisters everywhere on this planet. I am proud to be a human being. I believe that we have come this far by the skin of our teeth, that we always make it just by the skin of our teeth –but that we will always make it….survive….endure. I believe that this hairless embryo with the aching, oversize brain case and the opposable thumb, this animal barely up from the apes, will endure –will endure longer than his home planet, will spread out to the other planets, to the stars, and beyond, carrying with him his honesty, his insatiable curiosity, his unlimited courage –and his noble essential decency.”
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I agree with you. Heinlein got it, and is invaluable to “getting” it. (You didn’t expect an argument from me, did you?)
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Perhaps the case is that Americans wear our History lightly, while other cultures bear their History as a burden. To be an Egyptian or an Italian is to have a History millenially deep, full of the awareness that your ancestors were once a Great Empire. To be German, or British, or Norse or Russian or Persian is to bear a similar burden as, I expect, would also be true of a dozen or more Turkic, Indian or Asian cultures were I less ignorant of that part of the world. (The Deranged Daughter is Nipponophile and this has provided me glimpses into the Japanese, Korean and SE Asian relationships which bear out my thesis.)
America is also uniquely a vocational nation. Most nations represent an ethnicity, a dominant socio-cultural tribe (although this may be a product of ignorance by outsiders; certainly the Scots, Welsh, Irish, Celts, Picts, Saxons, Angles and other disparate elements of Great Britain stand in challenge to that argument.) There is a deep commingled cultural past shaping their view of The World which Americans do lack. Americans expect their neighbors will have different habits of thought and behaviour; it is one reason for the deeply held and widely shared disdain for monoculture communities (aka, suburbs.) Our ancestors (well, really, we don’t do ancestors, do we? Call them progenitors) all adapted to the culture they found here, eager to be “American” whatever that meant.
So Americans study History fascinatedly because it is alien to our essence, while other cultures avoid it because their’s is already over-burdensome?
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[pendant hat on] The phrase is normally “born and bred”, as in the past tense of “breed”. Homonyms trip lots of people up, native speakers included. ;) It makes a lot more sense, but probably isn’t nearly as fun. [/pendant hat off]
You’re right. We don’t have perspective. It’s amazing to see ancient buildings that are TWO centuries old. And then realize…
I’ve got a couple of anecdotes that may contribute to the conversation.
In my native Idaho, there were three distinct subcultures that got on well together. (Well, not counting the Indian tribes, which would require more pixels than I really want to spend.)
The general culture was largely shaped by the aftermath of the American Civil War. There were a lot of Confederates who weren’t covered under the general amnesty (especially from the Missouri area), who refused to “swallow the dog” (take a loyalty oath), or were just fleeing some of the horrors of Reconstruction. There were also a lot of Union “bummers” who’d returned to their homes only to find there was no longer anything there for them. We were having a Gold Rush, and everybody came. (From this come some really interesting quirks, such as it being considered extremely rude to ask about anyone else’s past.)
The second subculture were Mormons up from Utah. They were actually here before the population boom. (And had recently been at war with the federal government, themselves.)
Both these subcultures have an institutional memory of territorial governors (appointed by the federal government) having a habit of absconding with the Treasury. Not to mention one declaring martial law, and forcing silver miners to work at gunpoint.
The third subculture was a massive (comparatively) population influx of Basque at the beginning of 20th century. Being from that part of the world yourself, I won’t insult your intellegence by expounding much. Suffice to say that they’re a bit independent, and a mite distrustful of distant governments.
This mishmash was the environment I grew up in. But this distinctive culture is dead. Between economic refugees from California, real refugees (especially from Bosnia), and a massive influx from Latin America (many of questionable legality), it’s doubtful that “native” Idahoans constitute even a simple majority of the state’s population. What will coelese next (if it ever does) is anybody’s guess. But right now, we’re experiencing a very unpleasant societal breakdown. (And the whole “meth epidemic” thing isn’t helping. It’s more a symptom than a cause, but it’s certainly making things harder than they have to be.)
Gah, my stream-of-consiousness got away from me. I’ll keep the next one shorter, promise.
During the ’90s, the USGS under orders from President Clinton decided to rename many of the places within our country. The instruction was a well-meaning attempt to avoid giving offense to minorities. But there were stories behind every name. Those stories are now disassociated with where they occured, and are quickly being lost forever. (Of course bureacracies being what they are, they took the mandate farther than they had any justification to. I seriously doubt anybody ever took offense at Warbonnet Peak or Helen and Dee Summit.)
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“pedant”
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I was imaging something like the Aussie hat with the corks, only with jewels.
;-)
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[grin] “Karma”
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Charlie’s law: Any blog post pointing out a copyediting error will have at least one error, equally egregious.
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Drak’s addition to Charlie’s Law: The “Holier Than Thou” the poster is, the more errors there will be in his post pointing out the other person’s error.
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The goddess of retribution got him. This is why I keep her on payroll. :)
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Dear Luke
If there’s one thing that I utterly abhor about being known as a naturalized American, it is that patronizing “even native speakers.” Sir, I used to TEACH English. I know the difference between someone being raised and a yeasty creation of water and flour. Just because my fingers have an ill-bred habit of auto-completing words on the keyboard, and because I type these either early morning or late at night, I am no more ignorant of the difference than it was ignorance that caused you to adorn yourself in a hat with dangling corks, in CACS’s imagination.
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My apologies.
No offense or condescension was intended.
I wish I could use the written word with the effectiveness you regularly employ. I’m working on it. I may eventually get there. (But even then, I’ll most likely still inadvertently piss people off on the internet.)
I’ve heard and seen intelligent, literate people botching colloquialisms and homonyms my entire life. There’s no shame in it. Which hasn’t stopped foreign friends and acquaintances from being terribly self-conscious when they’ve done so. It is from this experience that I invoked the phrase. I am deeply sorry that it came across as insulting.
On the bright side, my new hat is rather fetching. I think I shall enjoy it.
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Sorry, if you knew how many times I’ve heard that. Or how many times people try to correct me on elementary grammar. OR tell me “In the states we do this this way” when in fact I’m being my normal ditsy self and it has nothing with my lack of knowledge of language or culture. (The US is the only culture I know. I was never an adult in Portugal. I was a kid and then a college student. Being an adult is DIFFERENT and I learned that in the US) Sorry if I hit with unwarranted force and went Regency on you — like medieval with fewer lice (be glad for that) — but you truly have no idea. It’s like hearing the same pun about your name over and over again. (Hoyty-Toyty, why?) So… Nice hat. Cute corks. No flies on YOU!
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I was never an adult in Portugal.
Dear God, please give me the strength to resist this straight line. Yours truly, Charlie.
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Sigh. Is this where I point out you’re a bad person?
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Since you KNOW my surname you know a primary reason I eschew it where ground rules allow, but in response to the near inevitable inquiry of “Where’s Delilah” the answer is “in an unmarked grave; I could tell you where but then I’d have to kill you. Too.”
OTOH, in High School I made the acquaintance of a lad named Jimmy Olsen. Kind of precludes self pity over name jests.
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I knew a guy named Jim Jones. He went by his middle name.
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Sigh – I pity anybody named George Zimmerman THAT’s quite enough down THAT line.
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Sigh – I pity anybody named George Zimmerman. And THAT’s quite enough down THAT line.
Sigh again, computer was bouncing around. Hopefully it will settle soon.
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In Texas, a millionaire with the last name of Hogg named his daughter Ima, because he’d been teased all his life and he wanted to give his daughter a name that was the final joke – what can you say after you hear it? Which means there really is an Ima Hogg foundation.
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Jet engine (and car radio) designer Bill Lear named his daughter Chanda (certainly an inducement for her to marry the first acceptable mate) and, in college I met a girl, name of Ann whose surname was Chovee. Parents who inflict such names on their offspring are displaying remarkable lack of foresight.
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awww man! I was too busy dealing with political nitwits all day and Charlie beat me too it! Bad mayor! Bad!
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We don’t have perspective. It’s amazing to see ancient buildings that are TWO centuries old. And then realize…
I grew up in Philadelphia and its environs with still occupied houses dating back to the 1600s. A rare thing in this country, I know. When I visited Albuquerque and Santa Fe with The Daughter I saw much that was older and still in use. But none of that was quite the same as simply walking around London, or visiting the area around Mt. Fuji in Japan.
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You should have said your from southern Idaho, being in northern Idaho myself I see everything your saying but at a remove. Mormons, Basques, and Mexicans are all nonexistent up here. The mormons didn’t migrate up this far, the Basques moved to sheep country(read southern open range land, not heavily timbered country) and the Mexicans whether legal or illegal tend to move to farm country where there is a need for unskilled farm labor (again not timber country). We have had an influx of people from California, Washington, and Oregon the last 15 years. I myself moved from Washington about 10 years ago. But unlike the Californians that I had seen moving to Washington, and some of those moving to southern Idaho, what northern Idaho got was those much like the civil war veterans you mentioned. People who were unhappy with the direction their states had went, and were unwilling to let others tell them how to live their lives, which is starting to create the seperation between northern and southern Idaho, although so far it is not nearly as severe a seperation as say between Eastern and Western Washington.
I went off on a tangent and now I’ve forgotten what my original point was when I started this reply, so if it makes no sense I apologize.
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So I’m a history nut, on the dabbling end, and I’ve never lived in the deep history countries.
I do have somewhat of a sense of deep history, I think.
Where did it come from? I started to learn about human evil in pre-school and daycare. From there, looking at the adult world, history, and prehistory is just an extension.
I’d also like to argue that America’s apparent lack of deep history is itself deep history in a way. What defines it? Partly, not wanting to be bothered by the rest of the world, and never having faced a serious military threat from outside that was not beaten. This works for good and for ill. Our ahistorically low internal political bloodletting may be tied to the sense of security. On the other hand, you don’t need to even consider the possibility that differences in thinking exist, if they don’t matter because they can never be a threat.
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Our ahistorically low internal political bloodletting may be tied to the sense of security.
Having stood at the ‘High Water Mark’ at Gettysburg on more than one occasion and on the hill overlooking the site of the battle/massacre of Washita River, I might call this statement into question. But, as a student of history in a family of history majors, I know that however tragic and bloody parts of our history have been we been very fortunate when you compare it to most of the rest of the world.
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Like I said, relatively blood free. We are still humans after all. I would no more expect a society free of war and murder than I would one free of sex outside marriage, for a fairly restrictive definition of marriage.
However, traditionally our Presidential elections have been low enough stakes that the losing candidate has not felt the need to kick off a civil war. What outright civil wars we have had have turned out somewhat well for the losing side. For the Revolutionary war, quite a lot of Tories were not killed. Likewise for the Civil War, quite a lot of Confederates were left alive and in the same area they had been in prior to the war. (If it had happened along more normal lines for a Civil War, I would not be alive.) Yes, I am cleaning things up quite a bit here, but it is not the place for me to enjoy rambling on my favorite subjects, one of which is the fallout of the American Civil War.
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I agree – I definitely think my hunger for history comes from not having any around me growing up. I don’t even know much of my own family history – we moved many states away from my extended family when I was young, in the days before the internet and when long distance calls were expensive. Even my ancestors moved all over the US – one great grandfather was born in Virginia in the 1830s and died in the 1920s in Texas, not unusual for the 1800s in the US. I have no family legends more than a few generations old, and very few of those. And no understanding of the history of any place, because no one stayed where they were born.
It’s the Pratchett line – our stories tell us who we are. We have a trade-off here in the US, in that we can choose our stories, but yeah, we don’t have that Deep understanding.
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“And learn that what is in books is always only half the story.”
As much as that, eh? *heh*
I once had a Middle Eastern Archeology prof who tried to convey much what you approach here. What little success he had with me was the result of his own “boots on the ground” experiences on digs and in the Middle Eastern cultures that grew out of the history and pre-history of the regions he researched. As time has gone on (and on and on… :-)) since those classes, I’ve tried as much as possible to put myself in the shoes of whatever source document writer I’ve read: at least imagining the food, clothing, daily activities, etc., as well as just the bare accounts. (It helps a–very–little sometimes that I have, for example, eaten “stone ground bread” that includes both stones–or at least some grit–and “fresh ground” *heh*, baked in a wood-fired oven, drunk untreated water, crudely-brewed “beers” and otherwise “lived rough” from time to time in various geographical and climate settings: I can at least try to imagine an other than 21st Century physical setting. But of course that’s just one aspect of _trying_ to put oneself in a distant historical setting… )
I know I cannot actually see and hear and taste reality in some of the ways that people in different times and climes did, but if I didn’t at least make an attempt to do so when reading an historical account, I’d feel that I’d cheated myself.
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I’d differentiate American’s sense of history as intellectual vs. emotional. And you are right, we don’t “get it” but that’s the price for being free of the historical chains. I know not to mention the War or my German ancestors in England, or assume the German sounding person is German (yep, Dutch, major social faux-pas avoided ) but it is the same kind of understanding a color-blind person has that “red” and “green” are not imaginary qualities to the nice officer that pulled them over to chat. Still can’t see them.
But, that’s a plus in some situations. In Bosnia, *all* the kids knew the one safe place to play was … right around the American bases, because the GIs did not care what group you belonged to and would prevent anyone from hurting them. There was a Pacific Island nation that advertised for an American judge because they were still very tribal in culture and they *couldn’t* pick a judge from their own people–he’d have a tribal affiliation and would be expected to favor his own kind. The American had no tribal affiliation and could be counted on to be impartial. (True, he did need the quickie course on why a man’s canoe was considered a part of his person in their legal system, but that’s just a few Powerpoints, ya know?)
We don’t carry our ethnicity around as much, at least most of us don’t, and that frees us to try things our ancestors may not have done but are still cool. I wield a mean set of chopsticks even though my only genetic connection to Asia is via the Land Bridge several thousand years ago. Which is how Americans that just happened to have been born somewhere else know what they are–they keep asking “well, why CAN’T I do this thing our ancestors never did? It looks cool!” (And then there’s the ceremonial expulsion from the village with torchlight parade, etc.)
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Excellent, Sarah! Wow, have I had similar exchanges with people who *think* they know American history (hey, their socialist/marxist teachers and professors gave them As for regurgitation) but who have no clue what a “primary source” is and ask if has something to do with the election process. The amount of … guff … that people willingly allow their kids to be spoon-fed is nauseating. And the idea that countries never interacted until, oh, the Age of Exploration is just *laughable* – or it would be, if it wasn’t so tragic! Yes, I’m a Usaian! :-)
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The amount of … guff … that people willingly allow their kids to be spoon-fed is nauseating.
Not so sure it is ‘willingly’ allow. This country does suffer from what our family refers to as the cult of expertise. I expect that few adults in two income families spend a great deal of time reading over the text books that their children are receive. Most parents simply trust what they regard as professionally determined and developed scope and sequences. When they are uncomfortable with what they hear or see of their children’s school work they do not feel they are qualified to challenge. If they do try to make a challenge they are met by an amazingly well developed bureaucracy.
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The “amazingly well developed bureaucracy” may even be equipped to handily screw your kid if he decides to ‘challenge’ / test out of a class because he’s heard that it’s being taught badly.
The SOP for the education bureaucracy here is to not even answer inquiries regarding how to do this. Never mind that the school district’s own rules require challenge tests to be made available if a student wants to skip a class whose material he already knows.
I got out of English only by taking both English-subject AP tests the same day and then (after several months’ worth of emails had gone unnoticed) taking the issue straight to the school board at a public meeting. An acquaintance of mine was aiming to test out of the entirety of her senior year (she’s smart and knew she wasn’t learning much at that point) and she got the same runaround. Eventually she found out the date, time, and location for such tests to be administered, showed up there, took the tests, aced them, and then went to the school district with the forms in hand.
… I’ll stop there, I think. Suffice it to say that I think California’s education system is thoroughly self-serving and not very useful for the taxpayer money spent.
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California is not alone. The local school system OUTRIGHT lied to us and told us there was a law that meant kids couldn’t be advanced. Something about keeping age groups together. They gave us the number and everything. So our older son who went in at five reading and functioning and above 4th grade level was not allowed to test out and was bored insane through seventh grade. By which time he’d learned more and the school told us “Frankly we’re not teaching him anything” but still wouldn’t let us advance him.
THEN I had to bring his brother home in sixth grade, and when I tried to enroll him back in school after a year of homeschooling, he tested at 9th grade level. The independent testing service we used said “Just enroll him in 9th.” When I said “but this law…” They looked at me like I was crazy and said “There is no such law.”
IF we hadn’t then been strangers to the place, we’d have known better because 11 year olds make it to college. As is, both the kids learned school was a place to be bored in.
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It struck me after my prior comment that the reason so many common Americans know History in such depth is two-fold.
One, we can, reasonably, expect to comprehend the breadth of American history. 236 years since the Declaration, 520 years since Columbus just isn’t that much compared to learning the Kings & Queens of Great Britain since Boadicea. In America the Hatfields & McCoys are amusing legend, in Bosnia (and most the rest of the world) they are amateurs.
Two, for Americans, History is entertainment. Where else can that be said?
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regarding the criticism of America, a quote that I don’t know the source of sums it up
“perfect is the enemy of good enough”
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(grin) Let’s stir. I admire the history side. So when are you blokes going to dabble in… geography? (Australians, for the record, can be as bad) Geography outside America (or Australia). Is it just badly taught or is there a sort mental block about for example Zimbabwe and South Africa being the equivalents of the US and Mexico… and not the same place?
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Badly taught, mostly as a result of very few giving a d*n (I will freely admit that that’s a character flaw). But if you want to abash me about it, introduce me to a European who doesn’t think Miami is a day trip from New York.
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LOL. Fires in California and I get a phone call from my parents. NO, seriously. My nephews were puzzled we weren’t taking them to either CA or NYC :-P
As for Geography, now it’s used as a vehicle for anti-colonialism. NOTHING to do with actually land or its shapes.
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Yeah. Germans are always astounded when I point out to them that Denver to New York City is farther than London to Moscow.
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There is a Tom Stoppard 1-act play employing the average Brit’s comprehension of the United States breadth, New-found Land, typically performed as entr’acte of the play Dirty Linen. Typical Stoppard verbal tour de force.
But the simple fact is that, like most people throughout history, Americans have little interest in the geography beyond their immediate environs because a) human memory tends to eliminate data not used on an almost daily basis and b) it just doesn’t matter. It isn’t so much that Americans are unusually bad at geography, it is just that Americans get embarrassed about it.
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Americans have a terrible understanding of their own geography.
A New Yorker thought it was clever to say, ‘if you believe that I have some excellent swamp land in Oklahoma to sell you.’ Avid researcher when I travel, I pulled my copy of The Smithsonian Guides To Natural America – The South Central States. Not only is there swamp land in Oklahoma, there is also the largest inland salt marsh in the country.
On another occasion I was told by someone who has never lived outside of a densely populated metropolitan area, that all that empty non-park land I saw in the panhandle of Oklahoma was simply waiting for the shopping mall to be built.
I have also been asked by people who learn I am originally from Philadelphia seriously ask if I knew someone from Pittsburgh.
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My father told me about some New Yorkers visiting the west Texas oilfields on business. The NYers had been exceedingly rude and arrogant, so when they said they wanted to drive to Dallas for the weekend, the locals just sent them on their way and didn’t tell them it would take all weekend to get there.
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I live in Portland, Oregon — whenever I complain about something not being in the area, inevitably some non-Pacific-Northwesterner will say “Well, why don’t you just* go up to Seattle [WA]?”.
I will now pause so the reader can go to Google Maps, and find out exactly how far apart Portland, OR and Seattle, WA. actually are….
[*: Side note: Whenever someone “has an idea” containing either or both of the words “just”, and/or “simply”, be prepared to listen to the stupidest statement one has ever heard. Or just punch the speaker in the mouth, and be done with it….]
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Geography is not just badly taught in American schools–if at all–although that is a part of the equation. No, I think there’s a growing dearth of imagination in hyper-entertained Americans who are not just overly-entertained but more and more passively entertained by fantastical mush. One of the absolute turnoffs for me is to see a promo for any sort of entertainment that includes the phrase, “based on a true story,” because that almost certainly means “fictionalized as to time, place, characters and circumstances to the point that it bears absolutely no relationship to reality beyond a loose connection to some person(s)’s name(s).”
Few (in Amusement Central) care if the geography makes sense at all, since the characters and story lines in much of popular entertainment rarely do?
And so, when maps (and other information) attempting to describe what actually is are presented (often poorly and as often with gross inaccuracies) in classes (if they are at all), students simply, more and more, cannot grasp what’s in front of them.
Note: yeh, I know it’s probably not quite that bleak, but after teaching in pubschools (A.K.A., “prisons for kids”) and working with college students, I’d say it’s not all that far off the mark. Heck, forget geography. If the data in the most recent National Adult Literacy Survey (2005, IIRC) is to be believed, almost 70% of recent (at that time) college grads couldn’t pour [liquid] out of a boot if they had to read directions printed on the heel. Not only could they not understand the words, but they’d simply not even think to READ directions… (And yes, the NALS data may have presented a bleaker picture than what is actually on the ground, although you’d never even know what the data was to begin with given the spin the Department of [Mis]Education put on it.)
/rant off. :-)
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I BELIEVE this about college students. Most of the kids my kids’ age get their parents to do their college work for them. WHAT? My kids got told that they would be literate. They WOULD be able to read a scientific article AND/OR a novel. They would write a competently logical essay on the subject afterward. The alternative was mommy in full mood. They learned. (They also learned a variety of euphonious Portuguese swear words which the eldest at least deploys with verve and aplomb.)
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They also learned a variety of euphonious Portuguese swear words which the eldest at least deploys with verve and aplomb.
Oooh, oooh! I’ll swap you some Hungarian swearing for Portuguese!
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I could NEVER learn Geography and I came from a country which, in the globe my dad used, was the size of the tip of his little nail. I have 0 visual memory. And then there came this computer game. No, not Carmen San Diego, which at the time — imho — was targeted for morons. It was called, something that involved dodos, sealing wax and Bushbucks (I THINK) and you competed with a Frenchman in the easy level, plotting flights all over the world to get characteristic objects from various countries. The clues you got went something like “This is the capital of the country East of France and … Within two years I was an absolute expert in Geography (and weird objects found in foreign capitals.) UNFORTUNATELY this was before the end of the cold war rearranged the map, the game never adapted and is now in freeware and painfully out of date. Sigh. So not available for my kids, one of whom has the same (lack of) visual memory.
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People in the US don’t seem to want to bother too much about other countries. Crazy for a country that has troops in over a hundred others, but we’re the world’s stupidest imperialists.
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No. We’re the world’s WORST imperialists — all we want to do is come home. Actually, Ori, until very recently, the rest of the world was pretty much irrelevant to the US from the POV of reaching out and physically touching us. Also, for the record, they don’t GET us. So we get tired of explaining.
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And in actual fact we aren’t imperialists, and except for a brief period around the turn of the last century we never have been.
We invented a system that works, and that can be extended to everyone without cost to us — in fact, both we and the new adopter profit. Since then we’ve been trying (and mostly failing) to teach it. Our occasional interventions amount to “no dammit put the red jack on the black queen, sheesh”.
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Ric, that’s what I was trying to point out to Ori. Imperialists STAY. (Sorry if I was too subtle. Blame it on Dave Freer. It’s HIS joke. I just stole it.)
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But we do stay. We have large military presence in Germany, Japan, Korea, and quite a few other places. We just don’t tax the locals to pay the cost of protecting them.
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Does anyone remember the fit Germany threw when we made plans to leave? Seems that they really like all that money we spend there.
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Um. I take the blame for that one. I’ve observed rather frequently when faced with “American Imperialism” shrieks, that if Americans are imperialists they surely are failures at it. Successful (ergo the best) imperialists conquer territory which they add to their empire, and send their sons and daughters out there to live in what is part of the empire. Americans as the world’s worst (least effective) imperialists, don’t add vast swathes of territory – which they could, easily, and their sons and daughters rather than claiming the new land for the empire… want to go back to US.
It’s a compliment, actually. Means when US folk are out there, conquest is not why they are.
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There’s a good book about it, “Empires of Trust”, which compares the US to Rome and claims both are polities that were driven into empire mode. May I buy you a copy as a gift, and if so do you use Kindle or Nook?
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Ori, apologies for the delay in replying. It’s very kind of you. Seriously, unless it is direct research (or simple relaxation pleasure) I won’t be reading anything for a while. I’m so far behind it’s not funny. There are a couple of intrinsic differences between the Roman Empire and the pax Americana (for want of better term). The first and most obvious is best gleamed from reading Roman attitudes in their writing – admittedly, this is a self-selcted elite writing, but we can gather that the concept of being an empire and pride in the same was considerable in the minds of the people. It isn’t now.
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But, but, but don’t we get at least some credit for the expansion and settling that occurred between the landings and the current borders?
I’ve got four or so possibilities why we might not be doing it any more:
a) We’ve Changed too much. (Or maybe we haven’t the immigrant supply to boost our growth rate enough to grab any more.)
b) What we already have is more than enough for our current projects.
c) The other powers with territory are too weak. None of them yet have the combination of endurance and obnoxiousness to come over the seas to us, and make us go over seas and stay to deal with them.
d) The other powers are too strong. Back in the day, a lot of the expansion may have been partly because the Feds couldn’t have stopped it even if they wanted to. Nowadays, most of the possibilities are beyond the efforts of forward thinking private citizens, and would need some effort on the part of the Federal government. This is not in the interests of the Federal government, as keeping the other powers around helps justify the size of the government.
Perhaps enough prolonged stupidity could erode America’s advantage over Canada or Mexico enough for C to no longer apply.
Or maybe technology might decrease the cost and increase the speed, capacity and range of transport enough that C or D no longer applies.
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The westward expansion happened when the economy was agrarian, and land was a major source of wealth.
These days land isn’t so valuable. A significant portion of thearable US either isn’t cultivated, or isn’t cultivated nearly as intensively as it could be. When land isn’t a limiting factor, why bother to conquer more of it?
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And YES on the interventions. And part of it is that gulf in history. In Portugal I’ve been solemnly assured that all land belongs to the state. They just let individuals use it. I don’t know if that’s popular interpretation or real law. (Don’t care. It’s gross.) BUT it’s real in people’s minds. (And no, don’t get me started on eminent domain. It’s too early in the morning to drink. But at least people here still resist the idea somewhat.) I won’t tell you how ODD all the grumbles about taxes in American books seemed to me when I was a young adult. Then I came here. Less than ten years later I wore a button that read “Taxation is theft.” Eh.
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In fact, that’s the (pre)historical basis of property, which originated as Viking-equivalents sharing the swag with their lieutenants. If your neighbors won’t help you defend your property, you don’t have any; no individual is capable — and an association of neighbors for mutual defense is a “State”. This is where I part company with the capital-L Libertarians. Their insistence on Property as a Right turns them into negative Communists, and one polarity will kill you as quickly as the other.
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Our cultures, our Deep Histories, determine what we CAN think. Americans have the peculiar notion that government is the agent of the people rather than the people being the property of the government.
As to America’s history of Imperialism, well … two words. United Fruit.
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Well, we did have such a “peculiar notion”. It seems to be evaporating pretty quickly.
As for United Fruit — “purity” doesn’t exist above the subatomic level. UF was a product of the same “all the cool kids are doing it” impulse that gave us that wonderful and valuable prize, Puerto Rico. Even there, I will point out that it returned more wealth to the individuals it “oppressed” than the succession of Duck Soup republics that replaced it.
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Americans have the peculiar notion that government is the agent of the people rather than the people being the property of the government.
It is well recognized in learning American History (well, where the information hasn’t been corrupted) that this is a radical concept. It just happens to be that the Founders considered that this was the PROPER function of Government, rather than what most places have done in the past, which has essentially been for one group to build up a power base of people who agree to do what one person says, then for that group to extend their power by forcing their will on everyone else as far as they can reach.
Based on their experiences at the time, the Founders said something to the effect of, “You know, the way everyone else does things sucks royally. Let’s look at what anyone else did which made things the best that they could, then use that as a basis for making something better.” Unfortunately, due to human nature, we have been backsliding into the older forms, and need a real house-cleaning, if enough people can be woken up.
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Government, by its nature, tends to attract and accrue the sort of people disinclined to be public servants and most inclined to abuse their power. The Founders anticipated this and took steps to prevent it … and, the nature of Man being what it is, those preventative measures tended to make the people more complacent and less vigilant regarding their liberties.
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Having been subject to eminent domain: There is not enough coffee.
The Daughter (who was not yet a teen) informed the person from the university who had come to speak with us after we had lodged an official protest to their bid, that a baseball stadium was a foolish use of limited state funds when the ceilings in the science building were falling down on student’s heads. We held our breath waiting for the reaction. The person agreed with The Daughter, and then explained that the legislature was at fault. What a lesson she got that day!
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We don’t want to be imperialists. We released Germany and Japan, but kept such rich prizes as The US Virgin Islands and Guam.
However, that doesn’t mean we aren’t an empire. We have troops in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. Our navy can blockade most ports in the world. The fact that most of our troops are on allied soil doesn’t mean that much – the Roman Republic also had allies rather than provinces for part of its history.
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The United States has inherited the British Empire’s role of maintaining freedom of the high seas and security of trade. It is to our benefit, surely, but less so than charging fees for all who also benefit (transport taxes, tariffs, what have you.)
Certain Brit historians (Njall Ferguson comes to mind, but memory is vague) have argued that, like it or not the USA IS an Empire and demmed well needs to start behaving like one before somebody truly Imperial shoves us aside and lords itself about.
I am not sure I agree — I think the premise is right but that the willingness to do that sort of nasty job repulses most Americans and therefore will never be pursued properly. And it really is not the sort of task to be taken on half-heartedly, is it?
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At the end of WWII, the Japanese were getting ready to fight to the last Japanese (not the last soldier – the last Japanese). The US was also getting ready to fight to the last Japanese.
I suspect that at some point somebody would push us to where we would be willing to do the nasty jobs it takes to keep an empire running, or at least outsource them to sepoy troops of some kind. But it might take weapons of mass destruction used against US cities.
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I think it isn’t killing that would be the really dirty objectionable part for us. Funding might be a problem, but isn’t the core of it for me either.
If we had a real empire, by the Constitution, it would be run by the Federal government. Unless we did something repulsive, vile, and unforgivable like giving the rest of the world a say in our elections, or like letting part of the government out from under the hand of the people, the mechanism for maintaining and managing the subject populations would have little feedback from them, and much from the fickleness of the public. It isn’t like there would ever be certainty of more than four years without a hen-witted incompetent madman running things. Even if we suppressed whatever rebellions ensued, sooner or later some fool would mess that up at the same time they left the Navy (maybe similarly the Air Force) in places where a large enough rebellion would capture or suppress it.
We simply do not want the political work it would take, inside the United States, to keep something like that from exploding in our faces. We also want to keep our personal space as a nation.
Large rich populations are too much like work. Small, thinly inhabited bits are much more usable for basing and strategic purposes.
I think the BIA is probably the closest we’ve came to a workable model for dealing with subject peoples and that has a number of flaws:
a) It’s been a bit toothless for years
b) wouldn’t really do what we would want
c) would be a pain to fund on any great scale
d) would be difficult to find the settlers to work in ‘partnership’ with it
e) is probably much worse than we are really interested in inflicting on people without the motivation of strong institutional memories of the Indian wars
f) might annoy the Boy Scouts to have a Bureau of Subject Affairs
Salafi Necandi Sunt
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The Bureau of Indian Affairs is the Muppet Baby Scooter or Aqua-man of government! Prior to gambling those tribes which have either not been subject to it, or have freed themselves from it are the ones that have done best.
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CACS — I’m having trouble imagining Aqua Man being a danger.
And yes, absolutely.
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I guess you would have to take that up the issue of Aqua Man with Raj Koothrappali. ;-)
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You’re thinking of it as being a benefit rather than a curse in purpose.
Dying of drunkenness on a reservation on marginal land tends to interfere with being able to build a thriving society able to fund and equip a sizable military. Having your kids taken away and educated to another’s standard interferes with your ability to integrate them with your existing society, to train them in traditional skill sets like warrioring, and to get them to invest in your vision of the future. As a probably unintended effect, folks that are dysfunctional in your society are likely to be dysfunctional in any army you try to raise. While cruel and destructive, it seems to have been, in partnership with the Army and settlers, so effective at curtailing Indian raids that American society forgot them to the point of feeling guilt over raid management techniques.
The BIA pretty much did itself out of business as an agent of harm, and reinvented itself, poorly in my opinion, as a purely helpful agency.
I think it is different now, and this is why I call it weakened and toothless. The folks running it these days have the wrong mindset for Imperial work, and there isn’t the recourse to lethal military force that there was during and immediately after the Indian wars.
It being a horrific way to manage people, requiring killing resisters to implement in the first place, would be the whole point of using it as a model for America implementing Imperialism overseas.
Maybe I’m stupid, and too slow to see the advantages of conquering a people intact and subjecting them in a non-destructive way over outright killing them, or over leaving them alone so long as they trade, and aren’t too much of a pain.
Maybe you have a really good reason for planning to carry out imperialism in circumstances where we would want the other population to do better under our control than they would on their own? Because, to me, that sounds like creating a large indigestible chunk of second class citizens, which would be a huge violation of equal protection.
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Maybe you have a really good reason for planning to carry out imperialism in circumstances where we would want the other population to do better under our control than they would on their own? Because, to me, that sounds like creating a large indigestible chunk of second class citizens, which would be a huge violation of equal protection.
I have no desire whatsoever to conquer anyone, or to have the nation in which I live to go about conquering anyone. I am more maniacal than that. Where is the long run profit? (I don’t just mean monetary.)
I do not wish to replicate what I have seen on the Reservations in the Southwest. The BIA has and continues to waste resources, the most valuable being human capitol. The manner in which it ‘helps’ today does little to change things, for like welfare, it creates dependence, prolonging marginal living and is a drain on the economy. (I cannot help but think that those who institute such systems of people management are also destroying themselves…no matter that they think they are doing good.)
One of the primary reasons for the American Revolution was a growing perception that we were relegated to a permanent second class citizens of the British Empire. So I see creating anything of like status as akin to shooting oneself in the foot.
But I do suggest you consider the history of the great wave of immigration that came ashore in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It was suggest then that the nation could not absorb all these people. Admittedly, this is not the same as gaining population through conquest. These people choose to come and had incentive to become ‘Americans’.
If you must be silly and go about conquering the world: As to the conquered doing better under control, why not? Is this somehow against the rules? Just be careful about what is viewed as better, for it could simply be some idiosyncratic preference in clothes…
And if I could I would include the words to Uncle Harry from Noel Coward’s musical Pacific 1860.
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Aquaman isn’t dangerous because outside of the hands of a dedicated Aquaman writer, he tends to default to being a regular person. In a Super Hero setting, regular people cannot be very dangerous, as otherwise it undermines the idea that the special gimmicks are worth much, in comparison. A lot of Super Hero settings sell themselves on the notion that the gimmicks are of great significance, but that the place is otherwise normal, something to relate to.
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The University of North Carolina at Chapel released a report on a study of the history and geography text books available in the USA a few years ago. My favorite erroneous find was the book that placed the equator just north of Brownsville, TX.
The Daughter went to Montessori for her first couple of years of schooling. They had excellent map manipulatives and other such learning materials. By the time she was five she had a better understanding of geography at five than most adults I know. (She also developed an interest in the language of heraldry because of the flags…)
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My bad: UNC- Chapel Hill
and arg on the repetition of phrase …
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“I do not wish to replicate what I have seen on the Reservations in the Southwest. The BIA has and continues to waste resources, the most valuable being human capitol. The manner in which it ‘helps’ today does little to change things, for like welfare, it creates dependence, prolonging marginal living and is a drain on the economy. (I cannot help but think that those who institute such systems of people management are also destroying themselves…no matter that they think they are doing good.)”
I agree it creates dependence, and is a drain on the economy, but I would argue about prolonging marginal living. I am not sure if all Indians regardless of tribe recieve the same monthly stipend from the government or not. The local tribal members however, recieve more income monthly than I do working for a living, and theirs is all tax free. Add in the governmental aid that they recieve, free education (the rest of us pay for our childrens education through property taxes), special rights and priviliges unavailable to the rest of us (ie hunting and fishing rights on and off the reservation) free medical care, and many other ‘perks’ I would say they definitly don’t just recieve a marginal living. If their living is marginal I am curious as how you would describe mine when I make half to two-thirds as much as they do annually (before taxes, considerably less than that after taxes) and recieve none of the rights or priviliges reserved for tribal members.
By the way I don’t consider myself living marginally, I made a choice to work less and live on a lower income in exchange for more time to do what I really want to do. I just have a problem with someone else who recieves considerably more for NO outlay being described in such a fashion.
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Who is bearcat Galt? :-P
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Admittedly my experience with the Southwest is over a dozen years and counting old. What I saw was at the beginning of the casino era. At that time the Navaho were not living well.
Here in NC, we have an unusual situation, as the eastern band of Cherokee were never on a reservation, but on a private set aside (interesting history there). After some wrangling with the state, the Cherokee put in a casino on the Qualla Boundry. The money has been and is being invested in quality schools, health care, etc. But that is not tax dollars at work.
Yes, there are a number of ‘privileges’ granted to the residents on reservations, but that is part of the bargain made when the treaties of removal were signed. Contracts made by our government, with their governing bodies, taking rights to prior properties and liberties in exchange for what they now have — and not always negotiated on good faith on the governments part.
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My only experience with the Navajo was driving through there reservation around the time you are were there, all that I really remember about it is that it seemed much cleaner than the reservations that I was used to, and that there was a single wide trailer with a drive through window just outside the reservation every place the highways entered or left the reservation. These were liquour stores, and it was the first of the month when I first drove through there, and the lines at the drive throughs stretched back the road quite a ways.
The observations I made were mainly about the Indians and reservations here in Northern Idaho, and on the coast where I grew up. I am not argueing that the Indians are living well, because generally I agree with you that they aren’t. The point that I was attempting to make was that the fact they are not living well is not because they are being provided with marginal income but because they squander the income and abuse the priviliges and rights that they recieved in the treaties. The same arguement could be made for welfare reciepents, many who recieve a greater net income than a fair percentage of working class Americans.
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Life on the Rez strikes me as pretty debilitating however large one’s stipend. I expect it is the inability to own property privately and the discouragement of entrepreneurship that creates the squalor and drug abuse problems.
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Careful, RES. You’re treading awfully close to the Marxist postulate that everything derives from economic causes.
I got this from a drunken Jicarilla Apache almost forty years ago: the reason Indian society is weak and the reservations are shitholes is that there are no adults there. He was referring to the common requirement in virtually all “Indian” societies that to be accepted as a grownup, the candidate had to kill an enemy. (And if there were no enemies they had to create one, possibly by killing a member of a heretofore non- belligerent tribe. Some more “peaceful” tribes would accept a sufficiently humiliating practical joke in lieu of killing, on the ground that that was worse — the victim had to live with the result.)
Since the White Man would neither allow them contact with other tribes nor permit the custom to be implemented against the larger population, the Indian tribes had no adults who could be regarded as leaders, and therefore couldn’t accept leadership in the matter of modifying their customs to accommodate the new system. Furthermore, the system of support and stipends made all the people on The Rez dependents, effectively children. As children they were free to act childishly, and they did and do.
I
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Eh – not everything derives from economic causes, but economics influences almost everything. Multiple factors are generally involved and personal mileage may vary. Loathe though i am to accept broad assertions across complex socio-cultural adaptation (claim re: virtually all “Indian” societies) the claim certainly suggests that if our military is not recruiting for elite units from the Amerindian tribes by playing up that exact point (Join the Marines, Kill an Enemy, Be a Man) then we’re looking at criminal negligence.
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I thought exactly the same re: military.
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Doesn’t work, for cultural reasons difficult to describe in a short post, both from the “Indian” and US military points of view.
I will point out that I was passing on an opinion expressed to me by someone else, and which I don’t fully agree with; I will also add what I didn’t before, which is that the individual expressing the opinion was a veteran of the early part of the Viet Nam war, when it was mostly a matter of “advisors” and special forces.
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hmm. But the same pattern is repeated with Australian Aboriginals, who are the beneficiaries of considerably better ‘support’ than the average out of work Australian. I do think that this may touch on the answer, which IMO is that humans from who the self-pride is stripped don’t do very well unless they re-establish it. I don’t believe welfare payments or special treatment are going to work for that. The answer is likely to be a complex one, but you have to reward people (with real respect, not pc-‘respect’) for showing themselves as having that self pride.
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The same arguement could be made for welfare reciepents, many who recieve a greater net income than a fair percentage of working class Americans.
Agreed. I fear there is something soul-sucking about being on the dole. As it is presently administered, however well intentioned, I don’t get the feeling it works as a ‘a hand up’, so much as a ‘to keep you in your place.’
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I do dabble in Geography. I just have very odd levels of skill at it. My local Geography is very poor. I’ve lived in the same place for near twenty years or so, and I do not know it anywhere near as well as I should, being especially bad at place names. State geography is likewise poor. National, well, despite having been born there, I tend to think of west of the Rockies and east of the Appalachians as being mostly leftist coastal cities. (I’m not particularly fond of my birth state.)
Partly this is because I have less interest and ability to travel than my cohort, and this means I have less memories of different trips to work with.
World Geography is probably something I’m good at, for an American. However, this is more a combination of having tried to memorize the names of all Nations, historical studies, and various other bits than anything really comprehensive and detailed. Recently I was fairly stumped trying to find a likely place for an oilfield that is north of South Africa on the west coast, because I haven’t been keeping track of governments and conflicts.
World Geography is not a very salable skill, at least not for me. I can see why people would neglect it, if they weren’t insatiably curious or needing to be better informed on foreign policy for voting purposes. (When I was really young, I got the idea somewhere that there were things a Citizen had a duty to study.)
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Second-generation military brat (from both sides of the family, no less). Dad’s something of a Civil War buff. Mom off and on studies WWII and my father’s side of the family’s genealogy. Spent my formative years in Germany with trips around various parts of Europe, particularly castles. Was actually in Germany when the Berlin Wall was brought down and there was a cottage industry on the military base I grew up in where kids would sell or trade concrete with spraypaint on them saying that it was from the Wall (most likely never was). Make international trips myself (by myself though I meet up with friends wherever I go) every few years.
Hard not to have a sense of history or greater perspective on international cultures in that sort of background. Especially when it’s maintained through studying the histories and cultures of other places and socializing with those who are “English-accessible”.
Travel also gives me a better understanding of the “scope” of geography, though I’m still pretty hit or miss with names of places.
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When I was in the AF and stationed at RAF Chicksands, one of the buildings was the “Chicksands Priory.” That one building, right there on base and still in use (although not as a priory) was twice as old as the US.
There were pubs both in Bedford and in Hitchin (the two nearest “towns” of any size at that time) older than the United States. People (not me–I didn’t, and don’t, drink) went to them for a drink.
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