To kick off the new year, I’m doing something a little different.  For the next couple of weeks, I’ll be tweeting a history — posting a new piece each day.  At the end, I’ll put it all together here on the blog.  In the meantime, you can follow it on Twitter, if you use that, or by viewing the tweets on the side widget on the blog home page.  Either way, I hope you enjoy the experiment.

m[-_-]

I’ve compiled some older entries together and published them as e-pamphs for the Kindle through Amazon.  Both are part of my “American Conspiracy Series” on how our historiography functions as propaganda (especially in public schools).  One is on patriotism and the myths of the Founding Fathers, and the other is about the development of capitalism in the US.  The essays are irreverent, sarcastic, and fun (but pointed).  It was a neat little project putting them together in a digital pamphlet.

Also, then, I now have a “Store” page — with links to the e-pamphs on Amazon for the curious.

m[-_-]

(Part III — There’ll Be No Pelters Here)

Here’s the thing that no one wants to say out loud about Occupiers taking to the streets: it is the unspoken threat that they will turn violent that makes people take careful note of them. That hint of danger from groups loose in our cities — it’s ominous; it’s disturbing; it invites resolution. The innate urge to protect oneself and one’s own immediately reacts to crowds of the vocal and disaffected on the prowl. You prepare for danger and move to eliminate any hint of a threat. Hence, you cannot ignore the protesters in the streets.

This sense is significantly amplified in a society built around the sanctity of property.  In a place where it is considered completely legitimate to take a life to protect your flat screen TV or expensive jewelry, any disorder is immediately perceived as a threat to (sacred) stuff.  Oh, my God!  They broke a window.  Can it get worse?  They spray painted graffiti on a statue of Robert E. Lee.  The indignities!  You know, the world will end if anything with a value greater than $500.00 is destroyed.  That’s felony protesting there.  In the greatest turn of irony ever, conservative pundits online are in a tizzy because some protesters set fire to their own stuff.  Where will it end if they don’t even have regard for their personal property?!

(As an aside, this is part of the reason that the government cracked down on Native American practices — the potlatch and fire ceremony — in the 19th century.  As rejections of wealth and materialism, these acts conflicted with capitalism, and they, therefore, had to be stopped.)

Do you know who can least afford to have their property damaged?  Psst, it’s not the one percenters.  Burning your own shit is a powerful statement when you’re unemployed or living paycheck to paycheck.  It’s economic immolation.  Like the hunger strike, it’s an act of sacrifice that pricks the conscience.  Of course, it’s actually more alarming to many that it’s a rejection of commercialism and materialism, otherwise known as the American way.  There is perhaps no greater sin against consumerism.

So, these hooligans are on the loose, lacking any regard for the value of things — theirs or others’ — or the propriety of compliant behavior.  They say they renounce violence, and some of them have even tried to prevent it.  That threat, though, it haunts conservatives (even if they see that the system does unfairly favor the rich) — because they think the bell tolls for them.  Really, it serves the movement best that this unspoken fear does linger.  Truthfully, the monumental changes wrought by the Progressives in the early 20th century were driven by their fear of growing masses of disaffected poor people, who fought back and caused substantial unrest standing up for themselves.  The law didn’t help them.  They couldn’t turn to the government.  So, they filled the streets, sometimes exercising their 2nd amendment right to bear arms.  There was violence, and though we are removed in time from this now, the past lingers. We could return there again.  Great recessions and depressions have driven Americans to violent acts many times before.  It is possible — even with the domesticated citizenry of today — that this spirit reawaken and  we experience a return to the way it was.  The regulatory state and welfare society diffused unrest in the past, but it fails us today.

It could be that the peace of the post-World War II age was an anomaly and we have passed that historical moment. Perhaps we are now at a turning point, transitioning to a new paradigm.  At this juncture, we do not know.  There lies the incentive for the establishment to do as it did in the 20th century:  institute reforms that ameliorate the worst of the effects of systemic inequities on the middle and working classes.  The people were not in the street when the disparities were not so great.  The wealthy elite has forgotten past lessons and gotten too greedy.  It needs to return (at least some) power to the people to preserve the system.  Otherwise, it may be that restraint gives way as the squeeze continues. Desperation fuels violence  – and revolution.  Perhaps, it will come to that.

m[-_-]

fucking cancer

If a sign of wisdom is knowing how little you know, lately I’ve been positively sage.  My efforts to use my lectures to subvert our textbook feel ineffective.  The book is about nation-building.  In the mundane tradition of textbooks, it focuses on politics and “major” national (read: socio-economic) events.  I am trying my best to do brave battle here.  I am morally and philosophically opposed to using politics to write synthetic history (putting the American experience(s) together using politics as a framework).  And, I damn sure don’t want to focus on happenings in New York and Boston to tell our nation‘s story.  My theme this semester cuts counter to the traditional history, so my lectures must needs diverge from the text.  In writing them, I have been frustrated by all that I don’t know.  I lack substantial detailed knowledge — outside my particular areas of specialization — to build the narrative I want to tell.

Again, I find myself cursing my education.  Why couldn’t my studies have been more broad?  Why was it insufficient to give me detailed knowledge?  What am I supposed to do with the generalizations and grand interpretations I learned?  What good does it do me to talk about the rise of industrialization when I can’t give specific examples from particular times and places?  Damn social science and the profession’s need to discover immutable laws and Truth!  The historiography is so big and so small.  Historians have dedicated themselves to the impossible task of knowing like God and are doing a poor job of knowing like human beings in the meantime.  The whole damn thing’s a tower of Babel.

I was trained as a professional:  to generalize about national events.  I want to be able to connect Tulsa with Toledo, Tacoma, and Tupelo, but I lack the information specific to these places to tie them together.  I really couldn’t tell you how commercial culture was the same and different for each.  I know the 1910′s were fraught with race riots;  I can’t tell you ten places where they occurred and what happened at each.  I know the Great Depression was a catastrophic national economic event;  I can’t tell you if it felt the same or different in Arizona and Arkansas.  I was taught generalizations and I learned so few details.

So, now I am teaching myself the things I wanted to learn — I am giving myself the education I ought to have had.  I am trying to break the cycle.  I don’t want my students to be in the same boat as I am.  But, there is so much I don’t know.  How can I teach them?  I have a full-time job.  Where can I find enough time for research and how do you study history without reading the generalized monographs of professional historians (that got me where I am in the first place)?  I can only do so much work in primary sources with my temporal and logistical constraints.  This is why you specialize.  It’s a life’s work to have depth of knowledge in one field.  I want to know it all.

Our text largely ignores religion.  It overlooks medical developments and architecture.  It hardly mentions the police.  There’s so much left out and I want to find a way to put it back in.  My education was wholly inadequate for the task.  I feel like an educated ignoramus.  I am adrift in all that I don’t know, and it’s entirely the fault of the multitude of dunces that taught me.

m[-_-]

I’m not even going to pretend to stick to history this week.  The election was too big — the moment too important.

Obama’s victory in the electoral college was overwhelming.  Of course, Oklahoma went for McCain.  The fact that the national popular vote favored Obama will not convince conservative Oklahomans that they were wrong or sway them to heed popular wisdom.  They will entrench in their self-righteousness and bigotry.  They will take solace in their Bibles.  Like George Bush, they do not question their interpretations — everyone else be damned.

Not a single county in the state went for Obama, but the numbers were interesting just the same.  We don’t hear much about the Native American vote, but that segment of the population here must have been very eager for change.  The county with the highest percentage for Obama (44%) was Cherokee County, seat of government for the Cherokee Nation.  The county with the second highest number was Muskogee County (42%) — right next door to Cherokee County and covering parts of both the Cherokee and Muskogee (Creek) Nations.  Neighboring counties Okmulgee (capitol of the Muskogee Nation since 1867) and McIntosh returned forty-one and forty percent for Obama respectively.  They also have large populations of Native Americans and blacks.  These are rural counties — but racially diverse.

At the other end of the spectrum, Beaver County had the lowest vote for Obama:  eleven percent.  Cimarron County was next at twelve percent.  Interestingly, both of these counties are in the Panhandle.  They have low population densities generally, are extremely rural, and have mostly white residents.  In the 2000 census (the last official one), there were seventeen blacks and seventy-three American Indians in Beaver County — compared to 5,430 whites.  There were eighteen blacks and thirty-two American Indians in Cimarron County, and 2, 700 whites.  I believe a lack of familiarity with persons of other races and prejudice contributed to the votes in these counties.

In general, the eastern half of Oklahoma had higher support for Obama — in the thirties and forties percentage-wise.  The western half of the state polled in the teens and twenties.  The exception to this was Comanche County in the southwest.  Comanche is home to Fort Sill — an army base with a varied racial and ethnic population and site of a scandal this past summer when wounded veterans were relocated there from Walter Reed Hospital and stuck in quarters filled with mold.  (The soldiers’ civilian advocate was fired when he blew the whistle to the newspapers.)  I believe those factors influenced the vote in Comanche.

Recently, a transplant from California was lamenting to me about how conservative Oklahoma City is.  While that’s true compared to other state capitols, the voting percentages show a more liberal bent there (42% for Obama) than in Tulsa (38%), the other major city in the state (which interestingly voted less favorably for Obama than rural McIntosh County to the southeast).  You cannot claim that the capitol is a seat of conservatism for the state then.

Interestingly, four counties voted Democratic in the race for U.S. senator.  The Republican incumbent handily won re-election with the support of the other counties, but it is significant that four counties bucked the Republican trend.  Those counties again were Okmulgee, McIntosh, Muskogee, and Cherokee — those that polled highest for Obama.  It is interesting that Obama did not take the majority in those counties when the Democratic challenger for the U.S. Senate did.

The fact that most of the eastern half of the state (which is more populous than the western half) voted for Obama 30-40 percent when his campaign wrote off Oklahoma says something.  I believe it was possible for him to take Oklahoma had there been a better presence here.  The local campaign was woefully unorganized and actually turned away volunteers.  A more substantially run grass-roots campaign here could have led to a striking shift in the heart of conservative country.  Better leadership could’ve made the eleven to twenty-one percentage point difference in the vote to squeak out a win, and cooperation with energized Native American voters may have been the missing ingredient.  Failure to tap into a disaffected Hispanic vote was also a grave error.  It still would’ve been a tough campaign — even with these supporters — and, apparently, the local Democrats weren’t up to the fight.  I don’t blame the national for reserving financial resources for states with more electoral votes, but such a shameful showing from home-grown Democrats is inexcusable.  Next time, Obama should recruit Native American organizers to manage the state campaign and forget the white yellow-dogs.

m[-_-]

The best part of being a historian is that you get to meet all kinds of interesting people.  Some of them are really funny.  I often find them more amusing than people alive today.  Unfortunately, they’re dead.  The conversation is a little one-sided then.

My two favorite editorialists are Will Rogers and Finley Peter Dunne.  No one quips like that today.  Rogers said voters would support Prohibition as long as they could stagger (drunk) to the polls.  That’s good stuff.  Dunne, who wrote using the persona of an Irish bartender, could skewer the Supreme Court like no one else I’ve ever read.  Of the crusade against vice, Dunne said:  “Th’ polis becomes active an’ whin th’ polis is active tis a good time f’r dacint men to wear marredge certy-ficates outside their coats,” and be ready “to bail out their wives whin they’re arrested f’r shoppin’ afther four o’clock.”  Both Rogers and Dunne had folksy deliveries and were superlative humorists.  I like reading them just because they make me laugh.  I find them entertaining — every much as or more than most “humorists” today.  I often wish that editorialists these days were that funny.  The opinion page nowadays is so serious.  We used to have a sense of humor about politicians.  I think we’ve lost a lot of that.  It’s a sin now to have an anti-authoritarian bent — particularly if it’s flagrantly, humorously disrespectful.  I wish someone would poke fun of the contemporary illegal alien crackdown the way Dunne made fun of the crusade against vice in the early 20th century.  Really, it screams for a good lampooning.

Americans today often consider themselves more sophisticated than their ancestors.  This is bunk and a sign of the ignorance that marks ahistorical thinking.  If you spend some time with old humorists, you quickly learn that their critiques were intelligent, insightful, and irreverent.  These writers held no illusions about politicians as noble statesmen.  Corruption was rampant in the 1920′s and these critics had a heyday with that.  They didn’t get up on some moral soapbox and decry conditions in solemn plaintive tones.  Instead, they attacked with sarcasm and biting satire.  These were excellent critiques, but they were downright entertaining too.

Lately, I’ve been subjected to editorials endlessly sermonizing on the importance of this year’s election.  It’s the most significant election in American history some of them claim.  The stakes are high:  the survival of our country depends on it.  Blah, blah, blah.  What crap – and I say this as a great fan of hyperbole.  If exaggeration isn’t funny, though, it’s just ridiculous rigmarole.  I’ve started rolling my eyes a lot and pining for some good old fashioned, laugh out loud critical satire.

This is the entertainment value of history.  It’s not just educational.  It’s also amusing fun.  Some of our ancestors were pretty funny, and being a historian, I get to spend a lot of time with them.  You can call it research, but it’s also pleasure.  They may be dead, but they crack me up.

m[-_-]