Monthly Archives: July 2019

Current Events

We Have Seen This Before

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In Amsterdam last week I visited the Dutch Resistance Museum, dedicated to chronicling the history of the German occupation of Amsterdam, the Holocaust in the Netherlands, and those courageous citizens who chose to resist. The Nazis deported 107,000 Dutch Jews to labor camps. Only 5500 survived.

It was a wrenching museum experience. It must be especially so for those who lost family and friends in the Holocaust. I visited on the Friday of a week in which the President of the United States told four women of color who serve in Congress to go back to where they came from. All four of them were American citizens. When the President spoke at a “rally” in North Carolina the crowd eagerly and enthusiastically followed his racist lead. “Send her back,” they chanted, about a US Representative who migrated to the United States as a child and has been a citizen longer than the President’s wife. We have no need, the President said, for people who hate America, who criticize me in “disgusting terms.” Love it or leave it. Criticism is unwelcome. It is easy and intellectually lazy to make facile comparisons between President Trump’s America and Nazi Germany, but there can be no denying the rhetorical similarities. The President and his supporters parroted in their chants and howls the excesses of the Nazis and their sympathizers. All this was abundantly clear from looking at the exhibits at the Dutch Resistance Museum.

I am not one of those who is surprised and disappointed by Donald Trump. This is precisely what I expected from him, what he has shown himself to be. I am disappointed, but not surprised, that significant numbers of people have no problem with his many well-documented faults, who will bend themselves over backwards to defend him. Completely abdicating any sort of critical thought, or empathy, and ignoring entirely the obligations of informed citizenship, they march along merrily towards despotism. Ignorant of the traditions and history of American constitutionalism, by the tens of millions they roar their support for this tyrant, egged on by a well-oiled propaganda machine that promotes as it shapes this President. Meanwhile, fearful of the backlash that followed Hillary Clinton’s apt description of Trump’s followers as “deplorables,” Democrats offer tepid resistance that thus far does not extend to a concerted effort to remove him from office for high crimes and misdemeanors, including obstruction of justice, violations of the emoluments clause, and allegations of rape. He has assembled an unholy alliance of corporate elites, grifters, racists, and creeps, unopposed effectively by a timorous Democratic party leadership that should call its supporters out into the streets. Any reflection on the history presented in Amsterdam makes clear that we are not doing enough to counter his policies, and the tens of millions of Americans who continue to embrace his racist and cruel policies. I find it difficult to laugh at the many people who make fun of this president, and the crazy things his supporters say. No, I think now. They are dangerous.

I refuse to believe that our current crisis is not a product, in some small part, of assaults on the teaching of history and the liberal arts generally–fields that emphasize to students the importance of questioning and analyzing sources, investigating and researching deeply, and reading and thinking critically. True, the bulk of Trump’s support comes from non-college educated Americans. “I love the poorly-educated,” he once said. But it seems to me that he does not want you to think. You do not need to see or hear the evidence, he says, whether the unredacted Mueller Report or his tax returns or the testimony of cabinet officials lawfully subpoenaed by Congress. You must not question him.

I am teaching my Humanities class in Oxford this summer. We take our cue from Pericles and discuss how the purpose of government is to secure the commonwealth, the good of the whole. That requires that American citizens exercise what the Revolutionary generation saw as “virtue”: the ability to set aside one’s self-interest for the good of the community. Corruption, in this sense, is virtue’s opposite. In order to exercise this virtue, citizens must be independent, able to exercise their will freely, and they must be active, engaged, and informed. Those who are ill-informed, and constitutionally illiterate, and who do not think and reason about the way things are and the way things ought to be, make perfect tools for a tyrant. A citizen, for instance, who knows nothing of the language of Article II of the United States Constitution is unlikely to challenge the president’s spurious and frightening claim that it gives him “the right to do whatever I want.”

Evidence of this assault on engaged citizenship, and the kind of education that promotes it, is visible everywhere you look. The conservative Republican governor of Alaska has effectively shit-canned his state’s higher education system. Ted Cruz, that Texas Senator who combines sadism with unctuousness, has proposed legislation to label the activists in “Antifa” as a terrorist organization, while white supremacists and nationalists continue to regularly gun down ordinary Americans with their military hardware. Scott Walker, the former governor of Wisconsin who with his allies in that state eviscerated its flagship university system, has been placed by President Trump on the board of the Smithsonian’s Woodrow Wilson Foundation. The Wilson Center is non-partisan and highly-regarded, while Walker has railed against “the absolute crap taking place on college campuses across the country.” So strongly does Walker oppose the teaching of critical thinking and research on college campuses that he included in this tweet, in all caps, “I AM PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN,” with a large American flag, four tiny American flags, and four statues of liberty (an ironic choice to be sure, given the Republicans’ penchant for caging children carried here by their asylum-seeking parents).

It is a common refrain. You hear it again and again and again. Liberals are corrupting the young. They are teaching “Socialist” and radical lessons in colleges and universities. The policies “radical socialist liberals” favor are dangerous and destructive, even though they are already in place in much of the western world. Liberals are “Un-American,” or “America-Haters” and, especially if they are people of color, they should go back to the “shit-hole countries” and other places they came from. And they teach history in a way that encourages students to hate their country.

These Republican charges are vile nonsense. Republicans want to silence dissent and impose their own white nationalist views of the majority of Americans who find them repellent, even if that means controlling the media, restricting the right to vote, and incarcerating ever growing numbers of Americans. We who educate do not need to become activists. Always we must remember the canons of our discipline. But nevertheless, in the course of doing our jobs as we ought, we will resist and challenge these policies. If truth has a liberal bias, as Stephen Colbert once joked, history shows these Republican operatives for what they are: a grave threat to the Constitution. That tens of millions of Americans continue to support these policies, despite all they might have seen and heard if they kept their eyes and ears open, demonstrates the magnitude of the threat we face. It is a challenge we can and must confront. Our job is, as I have written on this blog, to promote intellectual courage, so that our students will ask probing and important questions, dig relentlessly for answers, and assess carefully and critically what they see and hear. Courageous thinkers will challenge the assertions of those with power. They will demand of them the evidence that supports their reasoning. They will not accept pat answers, slogans, and sound bites. Because they call those in power to account, they are seen as a threat. And, time and again, Republicans have acted on that threat. As historians, most assuredly we can say we have seen this before.

2020 Campaign

A “People First Indigenous Communities Policy” Or a Communities First Indigenous Peoples Policy. Either Way…

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Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro has released a proposal for American Indian policy should he be elected. While this may or may not elevate this consistently impressive candidate to the front of the crowded field, it is consequential. The San Antonio Express News announced that “Castro Outflanks Rivals with Plan for Native Americans.” Buzzfeed ran with the headline, “This Democratic Candidate Has the First Plan to Fix the Disparities Faced by the Native American Community.” Vox announced, “Castro Unveils Ambitious Plan to Empower Native American Communities.” If Elizabeth Warren “has a plan for that,” increasingly so too does Castro.

For generations, according to Castro’s policy statement, “Indigenous communities have been treated as second-class citizens rather than sovereign tribal nations free to determine their destiny.” The United States has failed to honor its obligations under treaty and law, and has failed to “respect unique government-to-government relationships.” Meanwhile, it allows “corporations to exploit sacred land for their own profits.”

Castro pointed out that this history has had huge consequences, and has resulted in significant and deeply entrenched inequality and injustice. The United States created these problems, he suggests, and must work with Native American communities to fix them. It is a thorough indictment, based on sound reading and a command of the issues. Castro saw some of these problems first hand when he served as HUD Secretary under President Obama, and gained some experience then working with tribal communities.

As President, Castro asserts, “I will partner with indigenous communities for a fairer and more prosperous future.” This is, in a sense, what the law requires, but Castro shows an awareness of the problems–of the weight of historical injustice–much deeper than we shall ever see from the Trump Administration.

Castro’s plan contains five major provisions: Strengthening Tribal Sovereignty, Honoring Treaty Commitments, Justice for Indigenous Women, Eliminating Barriers to Democratic Participation, and Partnering with Indigenous Communities Throughout the Americas. Each of these contains several specific proposals. Some of them are ideas that have been around for quite some time. Some of them require rolling back Trump Administration policies damaging to native peoples. Castro, for instance, would change the current administration’s definition of domestic violence to one that includes “psychological abuse and other non-violent actions.” Some of these proposals are important, innovative, and entirely new.

The entire proposal shows a candidate aware of a complex set of policy questions in all of its depth, who has a staff with enough expertise to produce a proposal that is informed, aware, and actionable. Castro’s knowledge of these issues is up-to-date. The Democrats have many capable candidates, but none of them have spoken as forcefully on Native American issues. I have no idea who will win the Democratic nomination, or if Castro will be around at the end of the race, but this proposal is truly significant. I cannot remember a candidate this early producing so thorough a plan. Should you choose to discuss it with your students, or read it yourself, you can do so right here.

Liberal Arts, Uncategorized

What Is Yours Is Ours

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I have visited the British Museum in London many times. The first time was in 1988, a couple of months after I completed my undergraduate degree. I had taken two courses in Ancient History, another in Medieval Europe, as we called it back then, and I was was eager to see the museum’s “treasures.” I was an uncritical consumer, excited to see things that I had read about but could see nowhere else.

That was over thirty years ago. Now I am a more critical consumer of museums, so much so, that my family has to tell me to lighten up whenever we visit one. I am teaching my college’s Western Humanities course in England now, and we are based as a class in Oxford’s Lincoln College. Western Humanities, required of all students at Geneseo, began as a “Great Books” course taught over two semesters by a significant percentage of the faculty. Recently we pared that requirement down to one course, and faculty are slowly modifying the original menu of works they might assign.

I think the course is one of great value. And to understand more deeply what they are reading: Sophocles, Thucydides, Plato, Cicero, the Bible, Augustine, Aquinas, More, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, we have arranged a number of excursions. On Friday we took in a performance of Measure for Measure by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon. I sent the students on their own to the Ashmolean, a minature version of the British Museum here in Oxford. And a week from Friday we will visit the British Museum in London.

I want the students to think critically about what they see there. I had no guidance when I went, but I would like them to explore how and why it was that they came to see these objects in London, and what, really, we can learn from them. I want the students to look at the museum’s collections and decide if they can see past the artifact to the actual people behind it. In the statuary, the religious items, the decorative arts, and the household objects on display, can the students arrive at a sense of what these people valued. From these items, collected and displayed, can the students arrive at an understanding of what these people considered good and bad, beautiful and loathsome, funny or boring? What did they view as heroic? Cowardly? What frightened them, or kept them up at night? What values did they see as worthy of emulation?

It is easy, I worry, for students to view a trip to the museum as an assignment where they are required to look at stuff, often for some vague set of reasons: because this is something that you should do, or because these are an important part of the students’ cultural inheritance, with which all the heirs of that tradition ought to be familiar. I agree with these statements, I suppose–how could I not–but there is more to it than that. Look for the people who made these things, who attempted to communicate or to evoke some feeling or response in those who saw their work. If history is the study of continuity and change, measured across time and space, in peoples, institutions, and cultures, the student’s human connection to those people far removed from them spatially and chronologically is an important part of the understanding we want to encourage. As I watched the thousands of people milling about, moving through the uncomfortably warm exhibit rooms, looking at everything a bit, I wonder what really do the hordes of tourists get out of this.

I want the students to think, as well, about why these objects are considered classic and significant. Who gets to decide? The British Museum’s “collections,” a word they use a lot, have a fraught history, to put it politely. The British Museum, in my view, has not adequately addressed how it came to amass such a large collection. Take, for instance, the famous “Elgin Marbles,” looted, according to some sources, from the Acropolis in Athens.

Other items, from other parts of the world, appear in displays with little information on how these objects arrived in London and what the descendants of those people whose culture is represented feel about this. How might various people talk back to the interpretive signs and displays that museum visitors see?

For instance, the British Museum has an “Enlightenment Gallery” that might just as well be called the “Colonialism and Empire” Gallery. As a history student, this room seduced me. I loved it. Old books like the shelves surrounding the room. Artifacts are placed on these shelves and in case around the room. Little remarked upon is the significance of these objects. What did they mean to the people to whom they originally belonged. Some of them were looted from graves, from collections around the world. There is no museum in Cairo or Athens where so large a collection of English treasures are housed. The English took these objects, and their curators will tell us what they mean. And if that requires presenting funerary objects and other items of sacred significance, it matters little.

It is unstated, but so clear when you think about it. What was yours, the British Museum says, is now ours, and we will decide what it means and its value. The Museum still says that whatever one thinks of Lord Elgin, his decision to snatch a large chunk of Athens’ cultural patrimony saved it from destruction, loss, and damage. We know better than you how to collect.

I do not follow the museum world as closely as I should, but I certainly am aware of a growing movement to “decolonize the museum.” If the British Museum is any indication, we have a long way to go.

TDIH

Some Thoughts on an Old Friend.

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I’ve had this picture in my car for months now. I picked it up somewhere in our old house. It must have fallen out of an album while we were preparing to move. I look at it a lot: the high desert in California, with two of my best friends from college, at least thirty years ago. I kept it close to hand because the people in it mattered so much to me at a point where our lives were pretty much free from responsibility, at least compared to now. Life was easy then, it seems now, even when it did not feel that way at the time. That is Jon in the front of the car, where the engine should go, and I am on the car’s roof. Kim, Jon’s girlfriend, is in the driver’s seat. I woke up on Friday with a message on my phone that Kim had died the day before, on the Fourth of July. Ovarian cancer, eight months after she first was diagnosed.

Hazy like the past.

There was a Los Angeles anchorman for Eyewitness News named Jerry Dunphy. He had a long career and I can still hear his voice clearly in my head. He had an introductory line for which he was famous: “From the desert to the sea, to all of Southern California, Good Evening.” It became the inspiration for that road trip. We had been camping in Joshua Tree. Could we make it from the desert, to the mountains, to the valley, and to the surf in one day? California is amazing like that, and writing these words makes me feel homesick.

I met Kim in the fall of 1985, when we both began as students at Cal State Long Beach. We lived in the dorms. She shared a suite with a bunch of girls, two of whom, Toast and Psycho, became part of a circle of friends who became something new during those years in Long Beach. Kim and I had classes near each other, and we sat in the hallway outside our rooms before they began, reading the Daily Forty-Niner or the Long Beach newspaper or whatever else was lying around, laughing constantly. Kim laughed a lot. I remember that, and her smile was warm and welcoming. She had the greatest smile and she was generous with it.

Kim, Rich, myself, and Jon, having breakfast in San Francisco, sometime between 1988-1990

I saw Kim a lot over the course of the late 1980s. Jon and I were housemates, so Kim was around our place in Bellflower a lot. We made road trips, camping, or to see bands. We hit the freeway to see shows. I have vague memories of going to some country music festival, somewhere, maybe near a dam, which I must have gone to ironically, since I generally hate most country music. But I cannot remember for certain.

It has probably been twenty-five years at least since I last saw Kim. I do not know her kids’ names, nor that of her husbad. I moved to New York, and then to Montana, and back to New York. She moved to Sacramento. We kept in touch a bit on Facebook. Kim became an archaeologist, working on California’s native communities. She gave me some advice as I worked on both editions of Native America. I loved the digital humanities project she and her colleagues and indigenous collaborators produced. I continued to learn from her, but I did not get back to California as much as I should have.

Historians like me, we look for the significance in events. Too many of us, I think, ask students to identify and give the significance of this, that, or another person, place, or thing. I have railed against this on this blog before, because it is perfectly possible to live a life rich with meaning and entirely fulfilling without understanding the Alamo, or the Lend-Lease Act, or the Treaty of Westphalia. But what are the truly significant events in a life? The events that make you who or what you are? The moments, after which, nothing ever will be the same again? Maybe they were newsworthy events. Maybe you lived through something that historians will write about. But these events can also be a road trip, full of experiences that carry meaning only for those who were there, magic moments, points in time to which we are tethered, as we move through the desert, from sand to snow to surf, past abandoned farms, dry lake beds, anonymous tract housing, and concrete rivers, always in the warm bright California sun. Kim was at or around a lot of those events, during this important time in my own life from a long time ago. It was good to know her, from the desert to the sea, across all of Southern California.