The Heroic Anglo Narrative – A Metahistory

Title: Forget The Alamo

Rating: 5 Stars

I know that many people have problems with histories such as these. People, especially those of a traditional / conservative slant, like their stories simple. The story of the Alamo is about as simple as it can get. A couple of hundred white soldiers willingly (and yes, manfully) sacrifice their lives fighting a hopeless battle against a dark skinned tyrannical dictator so that, ultimately, freedom will triumph. It’s the story that they were taught as children and saw in movies. Any challenge to that narrative seems to be an attack on their values or their way of life.

I find the conventional narrative to be overly simplistic. I like understanding the underlying motives that drives men to sacrifice themselves. I like understanding the characters of the men and women that I read about. I understand that history is actually quite malleable. History is not a set of tablets written by the finger of God on Mt Sinai. In fact, historians have their own motivations for writing and oftentimes those motivations are relevant as well. 

Unspooling all of that is what the authors do in Forget The Alamo. In Forget The Alamo, the first half of the book is focused on the battle itself. I’ve written about that in a previous post. 

The second half of the book is what I call the meta-history of the Alamo. How did we get from this little known, relatively unimportant battle that was fought in 1836 over slavery to where we are now, the Thermopylae of American history fought by immaculate heroes for the cause of freedom?

That is a fascinating story. I mentioned it in the last post, but at the time, no one really cared about the Alamo. Sure, Sam Houston used it as a rallying cry in his successful attack at San Jacinto. After that, it was pretty much crickets. In the ensuing decades, there were many histories written about Texas. In each of them, the Alamo barely merited a mention.

It wasn’t until the late 1890s, some sixty years after the Alamo, that people got interested. Interestingly enough it was two women. Even more interesting, one of the women was Hispanic. Little known today, but Hispanic Mexicans actually played a significant role in the Texas Revolution (known as Tejanos as opposed to the white Texians). They were hoping to create a loose federation with Mexico, but once the revolution started, one of the Tejanos, Lorenzo de Zavala, actually wrote part of the Texan constitution. His descendant, Adina De Zavala, was the Hispanic woman trying to resurrect the Alamo.

The white women was Clara Driscoll. At first De Zavala and Driscoll collaborated. However, at a crucial moment, Driscoll pushed De Zavala out. From there, her organization, the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, set the narrative. Gone were the Hispanic elements. It was all white people, all the time. During this same time, there were historians in Texas that were writing very Anglo-centric narratives. In fact, by the time that the 1930s rolled around, there weren’t really any real historians working on the Alamo. It was considered to be an uninteresting field to focus on.

In 1915, DW Griffiths, most infamous for the silent film Birth of a Nation, never one to miss a chance to be racist, wrote and directed the Martyrs of the Alamo. Not shocking anyone, Mexicans were portrayed as drunks while white people were virtuous and heroic. 

Starting in the mid 1920s, a newspaper printed a comic strip about Texas history called Texas History Movies. They pushed the Heroic Anglo narrative in a simplistic and racist manner. The strips only ran two years but proved to be so popular that a published copy of them were sent to all Texas school children for the next thirty years.

In the 1950s, all of this entered the mainstream. Walt Disney, looking to create a hagiographic history that all Americans (OK, white Americans) could get behind, stumbled upon Davy Crockett. With a movie and a television series, the actor Fess Parker became a hero and all of the little kids started wearing wearing coonskin caps. In 1960, John Wayne, never willing to miss a chance to look heroic, took on the same role in the film The Alamo.

During all of this time, no serious Alamo historical research was being done. That finally began to change. In the 1990s, a mere 160 or so years after the battle, serious historians using modern historical techniques began to publish non-traditional histories. Facts like Jim Bowie was a slave trader, that Hispanics had an important role to play in early Texan history, that the battle really wasn’t all that consequential, that the freedom loving Texas Republic was actually a slavocracy that constitutionally outlawed emancipation, allowed no free blacks to live within in its borders, and forbade Tejano men from mingling with Anglo women all started coming out.

Of course, this set the traditionalists off. Thirty years later, the battle still rages. The Alamo was supposed to have a state of the art update to get even more tourists to come to it. Despite all of the dollar signs that that would seem to involve, it can’t get off the ground because no one can agree on what its main purpose should be.

In all of this, not one, not two, but three British rockers enter the picture. First of all, let’s not forget about Ozzie Osbourne and all of the trouble that he got in for drunkenly urinating on the Alamo Cenotaph. Even more interesting is a young rocker named Davie Jones. Not wanting to be confused with Davy Jones from The Monkees, he changed his name to one of the heroes of the Alamo. Some of you might have heard of David Bowie.

And finally, most bizarre of all, is Phil Collins. Apparently, growing up, he became enamored with the Davy Crockett television show. Decades later, in the 2000s, he shows up at the Alamo. His career has passed its peak and he appeared to be somewhat aimless. He wandered into a historical manuscript store and became fascinated, not with just historical documents, but with all things Alamo. He then spent the next decade or so spending millions of dollars buying up ever Alamo artifact that he could find, including but not limited to Jim Bowie’s actual knife and Davy Crockett’s powder pouch.

In his later years, it’s his desire to donate his entire collection that inspired the entire Alamo modernization project. It’s anticipated, that, once finished (fingers crossed!), his collection will serve as the centerpiece of the museum.

There’s only one problem. Once people realized that there was a buyer with big bucks in the market for Alamo artifacts, the number of said artifacts mysteriously dramatically increased. The provenance of many of his pieces are, at best, shaky (one such provenance includes, as proof, the psychic impression of overwhelming sadness associated with a knife).

Having now undergone serious historical scrutiny and analysis and seeing how shaky the entire foundation of the Alamo Heroic Anglo Narrative is, how wonderful and appropriate would it be for the central exhibit of the cornerstone museum to be full of fraudulent objects? 

 

Not John Wayne’s Alamo

Like most Americans, especially those of us a bit advanced in our years, I have a pretty firm understanding of what happened at the Alamo.

The noble, peaceful Texians are being oppressed by the tyrannical dictator Santa Ana. Forced to fight for their freedom, they take up arms. Standing between the invading Mexican army and the still forming Texian army led by the great statesman, Sam Houston, a couple of hundred brave Texians decide to make a stand at the Alamo. There, taking over for the ailing yet heroic Jim Bowie, the dashing William Travis gives a fine speech asking them to die for Texas. He dramatically draws a line in the sand and asks all that are willing to die with him to step over the line. All but one does. That man is allowed to leave. Davy Crockett, hearing of the fight and eager to strike a blow against tyranny, shows up and stays to fight.

After a couple week siege, the treacherous Mexicans attack in the middle of the night. Though hopelessly outnumbered, the Texians fight valiantly. Everyone stands their ground. Although all of the Texians are killed, the Mexican army pays a heavy price. One of the biggest heroes of all is Crockett. Running out of ammunition, he wields his gun like a club. When he finally falls, he is surrounded on all sides by dead Mexicans. 

Although the Alamo falls, their sacrifice saves the Texian army. This respite gives Houston the time to organize his army and they later catch Santa Ana’s army unawares at San Jacinto. The Mexican army is virtually destroyed and Santa Ana is captured. This battle secures the future Republic of Texas.

From that day onward, all Americans look to the Alamo as one of our great moments.

OK, how much of that is actually true? Well, I’ve been reading a history book called Forget the Alamo. It’s been very enlightening. 

All Texians did die at the Alamo.  Houston did use the death of those Texians to inspire his army to attack the Mexican army at San Jacinto with no mercy. Santa Ana was captured. The negotiations leading to his release did lead to the founding of the Republic of Texas.

Let’s talk about the rest.

First of all, the peaceful Texians weren’t all that peaceful. They were working land grants growing cotton. In the 1800s, if you were growing cotton, you had slaves. Growing it any other way was unthinkable. Recently, Mexico had achieved independence from Spain. The Mexican government was built on a liberal philosophy. They found slavery abhorrent and wished to outlaw it in the country.

The Texians saw this as a threat to their livelihood and protested vigorously. Santa Ana, who had become dictator of Mexico, made significant concessions to the Texians to allow them to keep slaves, but still it was not enough for them. So yes, the Texas Revolution that resulted in the Republic of Texas was started because of slavery.

How crucial was the Alamo? The Alamo was generally considered to be undefendable, especially by such a small group of soldiers. It held no practical value. Sam Houston ordered it to be evacuated and destroyed. Bowie refused to leave. There were reports of a large Mexican army moving towards them. The reports were discarded or disbelieved. When the Mexican army finally made their appearance, the Texians were trapped. Travis began writing increasingly frantic, grandiloquent notes begging for men and supplies. 

How about our heroes?

Well, Bowie was a slave trader that engaged in land fraud at a huge level. He moved to Texas to start over, if not actually to escape a hangman’s noose.

Travis, bankrupt and ruined in Alabama, also escaped to Texas for a new start. He promised to send money to his young wife and two children. He never did. He also kept a sex diary. In it, he recorded his liaisons as well as mercury treatments, which is typically treatment for venereal disease. One side effect of this treatment is excitable fits of madness, which seems kind of on point for his behavior. There is absolutely no first hand accounts of Travis drawing a line in the sand with his sword.

Davy Crockett was the equivalent of a nineteenth century Kardashian. Famous for being famous and at one point thought of as a possible successor to Andrew Jackson, he was now also down on his luck. He was looking to start over in Texas. Hoping for independence, he was hoping for high office.

How about the battle itself? The battle, once started, lasted all of one hour. Travis was killed by a shot to the forehead within the first minutes of battle. Bowie, who had become seriously ill, was probably killed in his bed. He might not even have been conscious. After initial confusion at one of the walls, the Mexican army quickly gained access. They turned the Texian cannons around and fired directly into the barracks where the surviving Texians were holed up. Several groups, not willing to stand and fight, ran out of the Alamo and headed either for the river or for woods. The Mexican cavalry was laying in wait for them and ran them all down.  It’s not absolutely clear, but there are seven first hand reports from Mexican soldiers that Crockett actually surrendered. All survivors were executed, which considering the revenge that the Texians laid upon the Mexican army at San Jacinto, probably wasn’t the best strategy. 

Sam Houston doesn’t start off looking great here either. He also ignored reports of a marching Mexican army and refused to believe that it was besieging the Alamo. Once he got definitive news that it fell with no survivors, he promptly went into disaster control mode. He turned the lemon into lemonade by turning the Alamo debacle into a call for bloodthirsty vengeance. It worked. At San Jacinto, Mexican soldiers were annihilated, regardless of whether or not they tried to surrender. 

Oh yeah, remember the Alamo? Well, it turns out that the US pretty much forgot the Alamo for decades. In the histories immediately following the establishment of the Republic of Texas, the Alamo was considered to be pretty much a footnote. There was no annual commemoration. Major parts of the Alamo were leveled. The Long Barracks, site of the infamous last stand, became something like a grocery store. Bats and mice were the only things in the Alamo church. It wasn’t until the early 1900s, some seventy years later or so, that people tried to make the Alamo a thing.

When I write my thoughts on the book Forget the Alamo, I’ll probably touch on how we got from this little known, inconsequential, forgotten battle to it being this vital battle, our Thermopylae, exemplifying all of the greatness of America.

Isn’t history fascinating?

A Fistful Of Unauthorized Remake

Title: A Fistful Of Dollars

Rating: 3 Stars

I get why A Fistful of Dollars is considered to be a classic film. It certainly blows up the conventional Western genre. There is no one wearing white hats in this film. The characters are dirty, thieving, and at best, amoral. Even the character played by Clint Eastwood, The Man With No Name (although interestingly enough he is called Joe, so he’s actually The Man With No Name That People Call Joe) isn’t exactly a great guy. Yes, he cleans up the town, but in so doing pretty much aids and abets in destroying it. I’m not even sure what his motivation is. Yes, he helps the young family escape from the clutches of the town gangs, but he seems to be doing it primarily for his own amusement.

Especially compared to the sanitary Westerns, the violence is both more explicit as well as over the top. Hollywood had a standard of never having the gunman shooting the victim in the same shot (the gun shot victim was always a reaction shot). Here, the camera is behind the gunman so you see him raise his gun, shoot the victim, and see the victim die.

In one scene, one gang sets fire to the house of the other gang. As the members stagger out, they are immediately killed as the gunmen laugh. Some try to beg for mercy to no avail. The last one to emerge is the matriarch. As she’s mourning over her dead husband and son, she is shot dead. In another scene, Mexican soldiers meet to trade gold for guns with American soldiers. The American soldiers are actually one of the gangs in disguise. They whip out a Gatling gun and shoot down all of the soldiers. This must be the highest body count in a Western until The Wild Bunch comes along a couple of years later.

The so-called Dollars trilogy, although initially panned as being graphic, gruesome, vulgar, and cheap, proved to be an inspiration to others. You can draw a pretty straight line from this film to The Wild Bunch, the much more graphic anti-Western film directed by Sam Peckinpah. Even later, Clint Eastwood takes what he’s learned and moves the revisionist Western even further with Unforgiven.

Why the three stars? Well, first of all, although Sergio Leone makes due with what he can, it was a low budget film and it shows. The dialog was added later. The dubbing is pretty amateurish. The acting is, to put it charitably, primitive. Leone joked that Eastwood had two faces: hat and no hat.

And then there’s the plot. A nameless gunslinger heads into town. He becomes friends with a saloon keeper and his neighbor the coffin maker. He sees two gangs that are fighting in the town for dominance while the town residents cower in fear. One gang is led by a man, his wife, and their somewhat useless son. The other is led by a ruthless man. He is holding a woman as his hostage captor over her husband’s bogus gambling debt. The gunslinger alternately pretends to side with one gang or the other. He secretly does things that sets the gang members against each other. He finds where the woman is being held, kills all of her guards, reunites the woman, husband, and child and sends them off to safety. One of the gangs get the upper hands and essentially destroys the other gang. The gunslinger’s treachery is discovered by the victorious gang. He is captured, beaten, and tortured. He escapes and leaves town in a coffin to avoid capture. Once he gets his strength back, he comes back and takes down the victorious gang. The town, now free of strife, can live peacefully. His work done, the gunslinger leaves town permanently.

This sounds like a fairly complicated, original plot, right? Well, except for the fact that it also happens to be the exact same plot as Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, made three years earlier in 1961. In the above paragraph, substitute the word gunslinger with ronin and it is exactly the plot of Yojimbo. There are stories that, during fight scenes, Leone watched Yojimbo as he was filming them.

Unfortunately, Leone somehow neglected to credit Yojimbo. This led the Japanese production company to sue Leone.

It’s interesting that one of the defenses of this film was that Yojimbo itself was based upon the Hammett classic Red Harvest. To the extent that you have a nameless man (in this case a Continental operative) coming into a town with two rival gangs and then he cleans up the town by sicking the two gangs onto each other, that’s true. However, there are many plot details in Yojimbo that makes it distinct from Red Harvest.

Ultimately, it all kinda worked out. Kurosawa got something like 10 to 15 percent of the profits from the film when it was screened in Japan and Korea. He ended up making more money than he did originally with Yojimbo.

Still, it was kind of a scummy thing to do and it tarnishes the film a bit.

No Punching Hitler Here

Title: The Suicide Squad

Rating: 4 Stars

The Suicide Squad is the Deadpool of the DC comic universe. Full of dark humor and extreme violence, it is not in any way shape or form child friendly. I’d seen the 2016 film Suicide Squad. It had a darker, more nihilist point of view than The Avengers Marvel films, so I did enjoy it more than those franchise films. I also was intrigued by the fact that this film was written and directed by James Gunn, most famed for the Guardian of the Galaxy films. 

I’m not even sure if I should really go into the plot. Just as in the 2016 film, a group of malcontent prisoners with various unusual abilities are recruited to go on a suicide mission. Explosives are implanted in their head and they will be killed if they attempt to escape while on the mission. In the primary group is Bloodsport, a mercenary with an unusual set of weapons; Peacemaker, a Captain America type hero that happens to be a ruthless killer; Polka-Dot Man, who, yes, shoots polka-dots with lethal effect; Ratcatcher 2 (daughter of Ratcatcher), who can control legions of rats; and King Shark, a very hungry land-based shark sporting a dad-bod. Not originally part of this group but joining later is Harley Quinn.

Their mission is to infiltrate the island nation Corto Malta and to destroy the Nazi-created Project Starfish that is now seen as an existential threat to the world. Will they save the world? Will they earn their freedom?

I swear that it’s a coincidence, but just last week I watched (but did not have time to write about) what I believe to the patient zero of such films, the 1967 film The Dirty Dozen. I found it interesting that the patterns that were set forth in that film are still carrying forward over fifty years later. You have the tough, no nonsense commander overseeing the malcontents. Each member of the squad is sardonic and, other than the commander, disrespectful of authority. Over time, they bond together as a unit and, in some cases, some of these hardened criminals will sacrifice themselves for the squad.

I found the 2021 version much better than the 2016 film. It still has the same dark humor as the original. Although it’s been some time since I’ve seen the 2016 film, the banter in the 2021 seems fresher and more clever. 

What sets the 2021 film apart is the fact that it does try to be more than just the typical trope of the suicide squad attempting the impossible to earn their freedom.

It makes statements about not only the superhero genre but about the US itself. In fact, if you think about it, there’s not much space separating the superhero genre from what Americans believe about their country. It’s no surprise that one of the all time great images of Captain America is him punching Hitler. Just as with superheros, Americans want to think that we’re always on the side of right. To defeat what we see as evil, we are willing to travel anywhere in the world and to take any steps necessary. What we sometimes lose sight of is that evil is not always clear cut, that not everyone wants us in their part of the world, and that our actions can have collateral damage. 

You see that in the film. There’s a sequence where an American soldier has been captured and is being held by enemy forces. The team is ordered to go in, rescue the soldier, and terminate all enemy soldiers with ‘extreme prejudice’. They do so, only to discover the soldier sipping tea with the enemy soldier leader. It turns out that they actually weren’t enemy soldiers at all but were revolutionaries trying to overthrow the dictatorship. This is the kind of intelligence failure that happens in the real world that is never reflected in a superhero film. 

The character Peacemaker also shows the dark side of American imperialism. His single minded goal is to pursue peace, regardless of the effects. At one point, he says something along of the lines of he will work for peace even if he has to kill everyone to get it. This is the kind of thinking that sometimes sets in with the military. In WWII, after a battle in the French town of Saint-Lo that destroyed some 95% of it, an American soldier commented, “We sure liberated the hell out of this place”. 

Following in this vein, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Project Starfish itself has origins with the US. If you have even passing familiarity with US history, you know that we have a history of funding overseas adventures that comes back to bite us. You don’t have to look too much past our clandestine funding of the mujaheddin in Afghanistan during the 1980s and our decades long support of Saddam Hussein. The fact that the American government then tries to cover up their involvement is par for the course as well.

The fight scenes at the climax of the film also bring a sense of reality. Usually in films such as The Avengers, you see a city (usually New York City) getting destroyed in a violent clash between the superheroes and whatever world threatening monster they’re fighting. It’s all done in extravagant yet somehow sterile CGI. Here you see it as well, but more than just buildings are being destroyed, you see real people dying that are just going about their normal lives. A city destroyed is not a sanitary bloodless event.

Regarding the climax fight, I won’t spoil it since it’s so new, but fair to say that it is not the superheroes that actually save the day. I found that to be an interesting choice as well.

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a deep film. This isn’t someone playing chess with death like Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. However, I really like the fact that they didn’t just check the ensemble superhero boxes, call it good, and wait for the billion dollar box office to accumulate. This film had interesting things to say about the US, the power that we have, how we occasionally misuse it, and the effects that it has on the world. 

Revenge Ghost Story History Of The Troubles

Title: The Ghosts of Belfast

Rating: 5 Stars

Gerry Fegan is a hard man. Living during the worse of the Troubles when the Irish were at war with each other and the British, he became a stone cold murderer for the IRA. He ended up murdering twelve people. Caught and convicted, he did twelve years in The Maze, the infamous prison used to house IRA prisoners. Paroled as a result of the Good Friday agreement that brought peace, he has now been out of prison for seven years. His reputation is so fierce that even to his old IRA brethren he is equal parts respected and feared.

Fegan is also deeply troubled. Consumed with guilt, the ghosts of the twelve that he murdered follow him around in the shadows. Usually they just quietly follow him. However, whenever he tries to sleep, they start screaming. Desperate to get rid of them, he drinks himself into oblivion every night. He’s even taken to talking to them. His old comrades now keep an even wider berth from him as they think him insane.

One night Fegan meets up with one of his old comrades, Michael McKenna. Now a respected politician, he conceals a dark past. One of Fegan’s murders was the result of McKenna’s brutal torture of a very young man that McKenna falsely accused of being an informant. When the young man’s ghost sees McKenna, he walks up to him and points his fingers like a gun at McKenna’s head. Fegan, understanding that the ghost wants his vengeance, executes McKenna. The young ghost then leaves. Fegan now understands that if he wants to purge himself of all of the ghosts, he must execute the person that each of the ghosts holds responsible for their murder.

From this plot device, we see the dark underbelly of The Troubles. Among the people that Fegan must execute includes (as just described) the man that falsely accused a boy of being a tout, a man that specialized in the torture of captured combatants, a priest that used his position to sanctify the struggle, a policeman that sold out one of his own, an undercover agent for the British that gave up innocent men to save his own skin, and a politician that orchestrated and benefited from all of the carnage from that time.

I really enjoyed reading this. As a history geek, I enjoyed how Neville integrated the history of The Troubles into the structure of an action adventure revenge ghost story. If you come into this novel with a limited knowledge of the subject, you will leave with a deeper understanding of this time. If you know something about it, this knowledge will make reading the novel an even richer experience.

Gerry Fegan is a great character. Once an implacable, remorseless murderer, he is now tortured by guilt and is nearly wrecked by it.  He is trying to atone for his past sins, even if in so doing he commits further murders.

I’ve read several of Neville’s novels and they seem to all have a similar flaw. The protagonist of all action genre novels such as these always takes a certain amount of damage. This goes all of the way back to the pulp detective novels even in the 1930s. The protagonist gets hit on the head and knocked unconscious. Later, he comes to with a headache but proceeds as if nothing happened. For whatever reason, Neville seems to do this to a fault. His protagonists are beaten within an inch of death, usually several times, but always pop back up and win the day. Here, Fegan endures, among other things, a brutal beating, a brick to the head, and a gunshot wound.

Even with that flaw, this is a brilliant read. I believe that this is the third time that I’ve read this novel and have enjoyed it every time.

Is It Still A Con If The Subject Is Willing?

Title: Veritas

Rating: 4 Stars

Karen King is one of the most respected religious historians. She is currently the Hollis Professor of Divinity at the Harvard Divinity School. This is the oldest endowed chair in the US (it even comes with the right to graze a cow in Harvard Yard!). Her specialty is working with previously unknown Christian texts.

First a word about these texts. There are many people that think that the Bible represents the complete work of early Christianity. Many people believe that the books of the Bible are divinely inspired. In fact, there are many books from the early days of Christianity that didn’t make the cut. Most of this paring down took place as Christianity became the state religion of Rome. Because of that, the books that did make the cut are biased against female centered books. Therefore, we ended up with a version of Jesus that was celibate and had only male disciples.

Other Christian texts from that era have been unearthed. Many of them are the so-called Gnostic books, which are centered more upon acquiring faith through knowledge than mysticism.

This was King’s specialty. Specifically, in her career she was very focused on fleshing out Mary Magdalene. Far from the redeemed prostitute that is conventionally her role, King saw Mary in a more central role in the life of Jesus, even as perhaps an apostle.

One day she gets an e-mail from someone claiming ownership of a fragment of Coptic papyrus that she might find interesting. King ignores the e-mail. About a year later, she gets another message. This time she explicitly shuts down the sender, telling him that she’s not interested. However, four months later, out of the blue, she e-mails him back and says that she’d like to take a look at the papyrus.

Quickly, she gets some experts to examine the papyrus for authenticity. They take a quick look at it and agree that it looks good. After doing some analysis on the text, she’s ready to make an announcement. At a conference, across the street from the Vatican, she announces that the fragment is authentic, that it claims that Jesus had a wife, and that she was his disciple. Such a bombshell announcement gets world wide coverage. Weirdly, at this presentation, King only talked. She didn’t actually display any of her evidence (she claimed her laptop’s drive was corrupted).

Eventually the papyrus became public. All kinds of red flags started to go off. First of all, the script was horribly written, as if by an amateur. Some of the phrases that are in the papyrus are direct copies from other Gnostic gospels. The one phrase that does appear to be unique to it is full of Coptic grammatical errors. Even more bizarrely, the line breaks occur at the exact same place as other manuscripts. Since each manuscript is handwritten on different sized papyrus by a wide variety of writers, this is essentially an impossibility.

Sabar (the author) has been involved in the story from the beginning. Here he begins to deeply research the provenance of the papyrus. Two people that vouchsafed the papyrus decades ago are now dead, so their words cannot be verified. The previous owner of the papyrus is also now dead. As Sabar probed deeper, the previous owner raises even more questions. The owner was an East German that was a machine operator most of his life. He was known as a simple man with no intellectual interests, much less a collector of Coptic papyrus.

Out of all of this, the spotlight shines on a man named Walter Fritz. He had an education in ancient manuscripts, but was certainly no expert. He had access to ancient papyrus strips that he could have easily stolen and repurposed. He knew the two people that authenticated the papyrus decades ago and was in partnership with the former East German. 

Eventually Sabar tracks him down and begins to talk to him. Sabar quickly realizes that he’s dealing with a consummate con man. Fritz quickly pivots on every lie that Sabar catches him on and spins another tale. Upon further digging, Sabar discovers that Fritz was also responsible for hosting several porn sites. He’s in deep financial trouble just at the time when the e-mail offer comes to Professor King. Ultimately, Fritz admits that he was the one that contacted King.

King couldn’t have been a better target for Fritz’s con. She was actively looking for evidence that could counter the current patriarchal view of the current set of gospels. She seemed perfectly positioned to be a target for Fritz’s approach. You begin to feel sorry for King. She was just a little too hungry for papyrus proof and so naively was the victim of the con.

But then you discover that, while all of this was going on, Harvard Divinity School was in trouble. Harvard was conducting a review that was going to be quite critical of the school. It was going to recommend that a separate religious studies department be set up independent of the school. This would have completely changed its charter.

If it seems strange that King e-mailed Fritz out of the blue after four months of radio silence, some of the mystery clears up when you learn that that e-mail was sent just two days after the commission began to investigate.  King then rushed to judgement. Those experts that she consulted? Well, one of them was her mentor while the other was her protege. Of the people that did the scientific analysis, one was a childhood friend and the other was the brother in law of her mentor. She was able to use her senior position at the school to effectively quash the planned publish of a scathing rebuttal of the papyrus.

By announcing her news, making it a world wide event, and then going on a nation wide speaking tour, she brought the Harvard Divinity School a level of fame that it’d never had before. It had the effect of killing the commission’s recommendation.

She saved the school, but eventually the truth came out. The papyrus has been thoroughly discredited. Her motivations have been held up for scorn. She is embarking upon a ‘phased retirement’ from her position at the school.

In some ways, she has doubled down. She has publicly stated that the authenticity of the fragment is less important than its ‘operational effectiveness’. Somehow, the fact that she was able to promote her theory makes the truth of the fragment inconsequential.

So, here is where we are at. A famed historian is telling us that facts and truth don’t matter as long as it’s in the service of some larger belief.

This is coming from a Harvard history professor. Is there any wonder than that over half of all Republicans still think of Donald Trump as the true President?

If facts don’t matter, then you can believe anything.

Another Lost Generation

Title: Eat The Apple

Rating: 4 Stars

Eat the Apple is the story of Matt Young’s time in the Marine Corps. During his four years, he did not one, not two, but three tours of Iraq. Joining when he was eighteen, by the time that he left the Corps at the age of twenty-two, he was a completely different man.

His decision to join wasn’t the result of some grand familial military heritage. He wasn’t trying to avenge 9/11. He had no great sense of patriotism. He was eighteen, aimless, and, as a result of poor influences and media saturation, a pretty messed up idea of masculinity. If not for the Corps, he saw an alternative future as a failed husband, a failed father, an alcoholic, prejudiced, bitter old man.

Looking for father figures from the ranks of the Marine Corps probably wasn’t a top tier choice. Whether being physically and mentally abused during training by officers that have grown embittered, or the old salts of years experience not that much older than himself, or officers screaming about all of the ways that you’re going to kill your comrades, or your comrades incessant talk of masturbation and murder, the Corps is a noxious brew of toxic masculinity.

By the time that he first arrives in Iraq in 2006, the most serious fighting is mostly over. The patrols that he goes on are dangerous, but it’s not the aggressive, door kicking, block by block, sniper shooting fighting that had previously happened in places like Fallujah. He does go out on patrol and one of his comrades is killed. He gets injured when the vehicle he was riding in is blown up by an Improvised Explosive Device. He does not kill anyone and I don’t recollect him mentioning even shooting his weapon in anger.

Even so, this tour changes him. He talks about a person-thing that he develops. When things get really tough, this person-thing steps in and takes over. It removes all humanity from himself and everyone else around him. At one point, a suicide bomber in a car rams a Humvee. Remains of the bomber are strewn everywhere. Young (as the person-thing) picks up a piece of flesh and realizes that it’s the fully formed face of the bomber. Young places that face over his face like a mask and then leers and screams at the gathering crowd.

By the time he starts his second tour, the danger is even less. He has to seek out danger by doing things like sneaking close to a bomb detonation just for the fleeting moment of feeling alive. For the thrill of killing something, anything, he admits to shooting stray dogs. The third tour is even more benign. By this point, he’s basically serving as an honor guard.

By now, he’s been promoted to Corporal and is considered one of the old salts. Having reached this point, he now realizes how unqualified and unworthy he is to be a leader of men. In fact, one of his most raw confessions was describing when he intentionally preyed upon the most emotionally vulnerable Marine that looked up to him. By the time that Young was done with the Marine, he’d been kicked out the Corps, taken up a life of crime, and was dead.

During this whole time, he is alcoholic, self-destructive, reckless, and abusive. He is a man lost. Civilians that hear that he has done three tours of duty look at him as if he must be mad. He feels disappointed that he has no horrifying stories to tell. He tells one group of civilians that he never even got to kill anybody. It comes out nearly as a statement of regret. To make a better narrative for himself, he begins to make up stories of heroic exploits. Doing so gives his service some gloss to the civilians, but it leaves him even more adrift from himself.

In the last six months or so of his time in the Corps, he begins to clean up. Published in 2018, this book also reflects nearly a decade of reflection.

Not that long ago, I read Cherry, by Nico Walker. It’s the story of a man from an apparently normal middle class kind of background that joins the service, goes to Iraq, ends up addicted to drugs, and becomes an armed bank robber. It is a work of fiction but Nico Walker was an Iraq War veteran that, at the time that he was writing Cherry, was serving time in prison for armed bank robbery.

It’s probably hard to tell from my post this far, but both of these works are darkly humorous as the protagonist spirals downward. Both authors (at least up to this point) end up on a personally redemptive path.

Even though humorous, reading both of these books leaves me sad for an entire generation. Growing up in the aftermath of 9/11 and a nation seemingly permanently at war, it’s a generation that seems to be lost. Factor in such things as the economic pain of the Great Recession and the opioid crisis makes the picture even grimmer.  The American dream of a family, house, and good solid job never seemed more elusive for an entire generation.

Flailing around, they seek out the military. Looking for stability, they try to find it from leadership that is not much older than them and who are, in all likelihood, flailing around trying to find that same stability. While trying to find it, they are sent off to fight a war that, by this point, no one really understands. Sent off on patrols with no real objective and surrounded by people that hate their presence, the military itself seems lost.

Having left Iraq and now in the process of leaving Afghanistan, it can only be hoped that future leaders will use our soldiers more judiciously.

The American dream has never seemed so far away for so many. In the aftermath of WWI, there was a different American cohort that was known as the Lost Generation. A century later, another one seems to be appearing.

An Unchangeable Object

A while ago, I proposed a second Bill of Rights. This was not my idea. FDR proposed it some eighty years ago. I took his proposed amendments and adapted them to fit the changing needs of the 21st century.

I’m under no illusion that getting a second Bill of Rights passed will be easy. The Constitution, by design, is not easy to change. There are technically two paths to amend the Constitution. So far in our history, only one path has ever been used. A proposed amendment must pass with a two-thirds vote in both the US House of Representatives and the Senate. It then gets submitted to the states. Three-fourths (38 states) of the states’ legislatures must then vote and pass the amendment. Once the 38th state submits its results back to the federal government, the amendment is official.

How many times has the Constitution been changed in 230 years? A grand total of 27 times. Keep in mind that one of those times was the 21st amendment, which basically amounted to saying never mind about the whole Prohibition 18th amendment. So, really, 25 changes have been made to the Constitution in 230 years. The question is, what changes have been made and when?

The first 10 amendments are the most famous. These are the Bill of Rights. You can make a real argument that these amendments really aren’t so much amendments as the second part of the Constitution. States that agreed to ratify the Constitution in the first place did so with the understanding that a Bill of Rights would be immediately forthcoming. Indeed they were. The Constitution was ratified in June of 1788 and the Bill of Rights were proposed in September of 1789. Notice that if we consider the Bill of Rights as being really a part of the Constitution, then we have only made 15 effective changes to it over the last 230 years.

The next two amendments ratified were Whoops! They were glaring mistakes that the founders muffed on and needed to be ratified quickly. One had to do with states’ rights and the second was about voting for President and Vice-President separately (to keep the Thomas Jefferson / Aaron Burr fiasco from re-occurring). These were wrapped by about 1804. Notice that we are now down to about 13 effective changes over the last 215 years.

And then all constitutional scholars apparently went to sleep. Everything was apparently perfect. That is, until the years between 1865 through 1870. Can you guess what happened? Yep, The Civil War. That whole 3/5 slave compromise then seemed to be slightly misguided, among other things. During this time, the 13th through the 15th amendments were passed. It eliminated slavery (um, except for prisoners), redefined citizenship, and opened up voting (except for the ladies of course, and Southern politicians found all kinds of creative ways to violate its spirit).

And then all constitutional scholars went back to sleep. Everything was apparently perfect again. Not so fast! The progressives are now on the case. When I say progressives, I really kind of only mean the Anti-Saloon League and their brethren. Gaining power during the years between 1909 to 1918, four amendments were passed. Three of them were directly related to Prohibition. The 16th amendment was creating the income tax. This was done specifically to replace the alcohol taxes that were about to go away when Prohibition was passed. The 18th amendment was Prohibition. The 19th amendment granted women the right to vote. The pro-Prohibition forces supported it because they thought that women, as a block, would never vote to repeal Prohibition. During this time, the only progressive amendment passed not directly related to the Prohibition forces was the 17th. This required the direct election of senators. 

That was all done by 1920. Not counting the Prohibition repeal amendment (the 21st), that leaves us with 7 amendments that were passed over the last 100 years. Looking at them, they seem pretty small change or were in response to specific timely concerns. Let’s look at them. 

20th (ratified in 1933): Moves the Presidential inauguration from March to January. Due to travel in a large country, it made sense in the early days to have the inauguration more than 4 months after the election, but it does make for a pretty long lame duck President. Moving the inauguration to January moved the lame duck President back two months.

22nd (ratified in 1951): Limited the President to two terms. Proposed in 1947, a bare two years after FDR’s fourth election, it’s pretty obvious what inspired it.

23rd (ratified in 1961): Grants DC representation in the electoral college. This is very much solving a small problem while ignoring the much larger problem. Grant DC statehood!

24th (ratified in 1964): Takes away the use of poll taxes as a barrier to voting. This was in response to Southern states trying to get around the 15th amendment. This is the fourth amendment that’s been passed trying to move the country past our historical treatment of people of color. Interesting trivia: Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina still have not ratified this amendment.

25th (ratified in 1967): Presidential succession was a problem with the original document. It did not spell out what actually happened when a President dies. Also, there was no action taken if a Vice President died or was removed from office. There were legitimate times in our history where, if a President had died, it would not have been clear who would have succeeded. Specifically in response to JFK’s assassination, this better defined presidential succession.

26th (ratified in 1971): Another long standing issue was being young enough to die for your country but not old enough to vote. The 1960s youth movement and the Vietnam movement was enough of a motivator to get this passed.

27th (ratified in 1992): This one is really small beer. Believe it or not, this was first proposed as part of the original Bill of Rights and then languished for 200 years. It basically says that any legislative pay raises can’t take effect until after an election passes. I’m not aware of any movement of lawmakers granting themselves huge raises. In fact, this was passed primarily due to the efforts of one man. This really seems to be a solution in search of a problem.

There you have it. It’s probably symbolically significant that the last amendment passed was so trivial.

Historically speaking, of the 27 amendments, 12 of them can be tied to early constitution days, 3 of them are immediately after The Civil War, and 4 of them from the progressive era (plus 1 more for the Prohibition repeal). So, 20 of the amendments come from 3 periods of time totaling about 25 years.

The other 7 amendments are spread out over the remaining 200 years. This averages out to about one amendment every 30 years (and it’s been 30 years since the last one has been passed, so we’re due!).

This is a problem. As smart as the founding fathers were in democracy, and yes, they were very smart, still they were white male slave owners living in the 18th century that thought Native Americans were savages and didn’t think of women as full citizens. Not to mention the fact that they lived in an age of horses with no electricity in a country whose population was huddled on the East Coast. In 1790, the population of the US was around 4,000,000. It’s now around 330,000,000.

Do we really think that the Constitution is some sacred document that was handed down to us from some holy mountain? No, it was written by men from our long ago past. It is long past time for us to make the changes necessary so that our Constitution reflects our values and our reality today.

Faceoff Mais Oui

Title: Eyes Without A Face

Rating: 3 Stars

I have no idea how I even stumbled upon this film. It’s a pretty obscure French horror film from 1960. Even if obscure, it is part of the Criterion collection and has been cited as an influence on other films, so it’s not a completely random pick. 

The story features Dr Génessier. A couple of years ago, he lost his wife. Much more recently, he was apparently driving recklessly in a car with his daughter Christiane. He got into an accident. He was unscathed but Christiane was horribly injured. In fact, she essentially lost her face (?!).

For some untold reason, Dr Génessier decides to keep her disfigurement a secret. Instead he resolves to give her a new face (?!). Luckily for all, the good doctor specializes in heterograft surgeries (?!).

The good doctor has an Igor named Louise. She goes out and recruits unsuspecting women to come visit the doctor’s home. There, they kill the woman and then carve off her face and try to transplant it onto the daughter. Unfortunately, the skin grafts eventually are rejected and they need to find another victim.

Meanwhile, the police are getting understandably suspicious about a recent spate of missing women. The doctor falls under suspicion. Will the police be able to save the latest victim? Will Christiane ever be able to look in a mirror again?

This is quite the film. First things first. When it was released in 1960, it was shocking. People fainted watching it. Now we’re in the year 2021 in the era of the Saw franchise. If that’s your frame of reference, the face transplant probably appears pretty mild. However, if you can somehow put yourself in the time of 1960, you will understand the hullabaloo. It very graphically shows the doctor taking a scalpel and carving the victim’s face. Blood flows. With forceps, he carefully peels off the victim’s face. Given the time, it is a pretty seriously disturbing scene. I can’t think of a similar film from that time that is as graphic.

If you’re looking for a film that might have been inspired by it, I can’t help but think about the John Woo kinda insane Face/Off film. In this film, characters played by two of the all time great scene chewers, John Travolta and Nicholas Cage, undergo surgery to swap each other’s faces. It’s as crazy as it sounds. Comparing the process of face removal between the two films, they seem very similar.

Christiane, while waiting for a new face, goes around in a fairly lifelike mask. As I was watching it, it reminded me of the mask that Tom Cruise wore (he lost his face in a car accident too!) in Vanilla Sky. Intentional or not, Eyes Without A Face got there first.

In the plot department, in case you’re worried that it’s not insane enough, it gets a bit more insane. A young woman is arrested for the apparently heinous crime of…shoplifting. The police threaten to throw the book at her unless she agrees to go undercover and offer herself up as a potential victim of the doctor. He almost succeeds in carving off her face. The police puts an untrained woman in a dangerous situation so that she can avoid a shoplifting punishment? What is it, a fine? Pay the fine, lady!

The only disappointment is the actor playing the doctor. This is a great role that could have been the next Frankenstein. Traumatized by grief and guilt, he becomes obsessed with somehow assuaging that by ‘fixing’ his daughter, even if that means killing several other young woman. I’d imagine that this has all kinds of acting possibilities. Instead, the doctor is played flat. If he’s at all concerned about how his life got to the point that it has and the choices that he’s made to get there, he keeps it all hidden. He just has a very quiet determination. I would have liked to see a bit more spark in the performance.

So, yes, not a tremendously awesome film, but I was entertained and found it interesting to watch. If you’re interested in horror and want to see a fairly early French entry, this could be the film for you.