"Welcome To The Stage Of History"

Spent most of the day helping Wen with Wizard of Oz rehersal. She's already got the first act blocked, and the kids did pretty well considering it's still early in the process. I'm really looking forward to seeing what she's able to do with it as things progress.

After rehersals, Wen and I went to Borders for their Educator Appreciation weekend. Anyone who is an educator or retired educator can get 25% off any purchase all weekend. Granted, I didn't have any way to prove my current employment (having left my paycheck stub at home and not having any sort of ID or badge from Accotink, since apparently they don't go in for for that sort of stuff), but I bought a couple of books that could be useful anyway: the complete works of Edgar A. Poe and Joseph Campbell's The Hero with 1000 Faces. Wen managed to grab about $100 worth of plays, monologues, and the like, and that was with her discount.

One thing I noticed while we were at Borders, though. It's something that'd nagged at the back of my mind since my days at Ozarks, but it was really put in sharp focus today. While browsing through the history books in an effort to find something for my classes, I wandered through both the Eurpoean and American history sections. I know I'm not teaching any classes on world history or anything right now, but I still like to dig through the books and see if there's anything interesting (saw a couple of British history books I was sorely tempted to pick up, but didn't). While I perused the American history books, I noticed a couple of trends: first, that most American history books deal with wars. We're fascinated with wars, whether the Revolution, the Civil War, or especially World War II. Second, we glorify war in a rather frightening manner. The words "glory" and "honor" popped up in entirely too many titles. We almost revel in the gory details, nearly deify battle and death and destruction. It's disturbing, really, the point to which we glorify war and the extent to which we obsess over it in our history. Yes, much of our history has been shaped by war. That's undeniable, in the same way that the English language's diversity and flexibility was undeniably shaped by Britian's conquest by various peoples and groups over the centuries. But to idolize warfare the way we do...it's unhealthy and creates a distorted impression of what war is actually like. American historians (especially such popular "historians" as Stephen "never had an original thought or book" Amrbose) seem to think that all the guys fighting for America over the years have been these idealogues who were always fighting for Truth, Justice, Freedom, and The American Way.

And while I'm not discounting the possibility that some people of that nature did fight for America--it would be foolish to deny their existence--presenting this as the general character of our armies as a whole is ridiculous. The Founding Fathers may have been attempting to create a better life and a country where all citizens could pursue life, liberty, and happiness as they saw fit, but they were also greedy bastards who didn't want to pay Britain's steep taxes (even though those taxes were levied to pay for a war that had been fought to protect the colonists). Folks in the Civil War may have been fighting over whether or not a state ought to have more power than the federal government and vice-versa, or even over the issue of the morality of slavery, but they were also fighting because they just couldn't get along and were spoiling for a good fight.

Part of the problem, I think, is that America has viewed war as the path we took to becoming the world's only remaining superpower. And this is, to a great extent, true: our involvement in the two World Wars established us as the new Britain, the new Rome, and we took to the role after the Second World War as though it were our birthright. Warfare was our path to greatness. Once there, we assumed the only way to remain at the top of the heap was through the occasional flexing of the military muscle (okay, so maybe "occasional" is a bit facetious), as all major world powers from Athens on down had seen fit to do.

Ultimately, this is why I really do not like American history: the focus is so heavily on warfare, and that focus is always in terms which are much too positive. "Look at war," American history books say. "Look at America in war. We are glorious, we are mighty, we are here because we fought bravely, and our bravery makes us morally good." We do not fight because we are right, we are right because we fight. This seems to be the dominant view of America's involvement in war. It's unsettling, really, but this mentality has existed for as long as America has. The notion that we are a nation destined (destined to be great, destined to grow--i.e., "Manifest Destiny"--destined to rule) is one intimately tied up the creation and evolution of our country and our ideals. All men may be created equal, but not all countries are created equal. Some are, apparently, better than others. We sought "a more perfect union," and we believe we have found it here. In many ways, America is still stuck in the old Enlightenment ideal of continual progress: we are always improving things, always moving forward, getting closer to some idealized utopia that can be attained if we just keep going.

But you can't progress indefinitely. History moves in cycles, not straight lines. The wheel turns, things reach a peak and then decline. It's natural for this to happen. We can't possibly remain the biggest kid on the block. Babylon couldn't do it. Athens couldn't manage it. Rome fell. Spain rose and slid into weakness. Britain had an empire upon which the sun never set, and now they are essentially limited to a few tiny islands off the coast of Europe. It's only been fifty or sixty years since they were still an empire. The downswing can come quickly.

America must learn the lessons of history. War is not a glorious thing. It's brutal, it's vicious. It is sometimes necessary, but it is not something to be celebrated or rejoiced in. To slip into cliches for a moment, those who live by the sword do eventually die by it, and those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. Unless we as a country and as a society understand that we cannot continue behaving the way we do, one day we'll wake up to find the Vandals and the Visigoths at our doorstep, the Empire revolting all over, and the people incapable of doing anything but standing by and watching.

~chuck

Song of the Moment: My Morning Jacket, "Wordless Chorus"