Another Brick to the Head

“Don’t know much about history” was not one of those pop music lines that applied to me as a kid. I knew my history—or at least the part they chose to teach us in school…and I liked it, for reasons I’ve never quite understood about myself. Perhaps it will make a worthwhile conversation with a therapist one day when I’m stretched out on a couch and asked to recount my earliest childhood memories and go into amazing detail about the view from my crib…literally my crib--not some urban lingo to describe the lovely home I live in now, but the crib where I could look up and see my Uncle Eddie’s candied, redhead girlfriend June smiling down on me. Where I could look down and see the black cocker spaniel Mickey we owned for all of about 15 minutes looking up at me. And I could look across the room and see my dad sprawled out on the chair, bloodied and bruised from yet another Friday night fight with his arch-enemy, a guy from the neighborhood named Smokey. I suspect the therapist would conclude that my love of history comes from the same place most such loves come from…we love the things we’re good at. It’s really just a short baby step, hop, skip, and a jump from mastering the world from outside my crib to mastering the world of Ancient Rome or the Civil War. If my memory has room for the lovely June, why not room for Caesar’s wife? If it has room for my father’s wounds, why not room for the wounds of Antietam?
I wonder, though, if even my facility for remembering would do me much good as a student in this age of gerrymandered history. I know that there’s always been a large element of hokum in so-called settled history—written as it is by history’s winners and tall tale spinners. The first bit of history I can recall learning in grade school was that George Washington never told a lie. I can still see the illustration of young George handing the ax over to his father as the felled cherry tree bears mute witness to his crime in the background. Of course, to praise a man for this trifling truth when he went through life wearing a wig, false teeth and fought a war for freedom while being a slaveholder practically begs the mockery of Spinelli, God of Irony. My sweet spot for irony gets all tingly when I think of teachers using a lie to teach kids a story about not lying. Though, in truth, this could be unfair to all the teachers who taught that hoary little story to generations of grade schoolers. Perhaps they believed it to be true themselves. After all, they came up through the same education system I did. And it’s not even an education system problem. Human beings just naturally like to mythologize, and have so from the beginning of time. Making up shit is pretty much what we do when we’re not too busy taking a shit or having shit happen.
Which brings another favorite pop music line to mind: When I think back on all that crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all. That song came out when I was myself a dispenser of such crap as a high school English teacher. I wasn’t willfully teaching crap to my students. But so it must have seemed to my charges when they pondered what good it did them to learn about split infinitives and Hamlet’s soliloquy. I wondered much the same when I was a student in high school, struggling with the value of knowns and unknowns. As my sunset years exponentially fall down upon me, I’ve yet to have anyone ask me even once in my life about the difference between rational and irrational numbers. So, it’s not for nothing that my kindly math teacher failed to adequately answer the question: Why do I need to learn this?
Another pop line: “Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!” Indeed, rock ‘n roll has not been kind to education. But then, who has? It is the whipping boy of American society—faced with a task that would humble the vaunted American military if that military had to work with the same handicaps—smaller, more vulnerable budgets; fragmented approaches for reaching poorly defined objectives; a largely non-voluntary army of students; and way too much disrespect from a citizenry that doesn’t think twice about building schools in Kabul but will rant the live-long day over a school bond issue at home.
I take some comfort in the fact that our bloated military budget does go to some extent to finishing the education that many of our students failed or aborted in their schooling. They are in fact receiving training that should help them be more employable. And painful as it is to give any justification for the US’s excessive, far-flung military bases, at least someone’s learning world geography. Anyway, not likely Pink Floyd would ever sing: “Hey sergeants, leave them kids alone!”
Not likely either that if our vaunted military were--say, in an act of local nation building--to take over our beleaguered public schools it would be able to wholly succeed. Yes, I can see it succeeding in advancing technical skills and surely overall discipline would improve. But when it comes to history, our imaginary faculty in cammies and body armor will think they’re back in Afghanistan because our national sense of past pretty much resembles that cobbled country. Every hilltop village has its own version of what is and isn’t true and is ready to kill anyone who says otherwise. At this particular moment in history we have rightwingers looking to eliminate Thomas Jefferson from our past for his skeptical views on religion, and we have lefties who want to diminish him for his slave holding. We have revisionist historians who want to recast Lincoln as a wily legislative operator rather than an inspiring orator moved by the better angels of his nature. We have Cheney torture apologists desperately wanting Hollywood, the town they hate more than Tehran, to validate them with an Oscar for Zero Dark Thirty. We have Oliver Stone, America’s foremost purveyor of sensationalized history, suddenly trying to be taken seriously as a documentarian of legitimately contrarian history.  We have some people actually taking Quentin Tarantino seriously as an historian. (Historians who don’t get out much can be excused for confusing Tarantino with David McCullough, but Spike Lee? Yes, Spike, Django Unchained probably is unfair to “your” people, but Do the Right Thing was probably unfair to “my” people…it surely was unfair to the Boston Celtics, pioneers against racism in the NBA. So do us all a favor…shut up and make a movie about our people.)
Most unsettling on this anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination, we have the tribe of deeply disturbed idiots from Gun Appreciation Day, who tell us that MLK--had he managed to outdraw James Earl Ray that day--would be supportive of their cause because Martin would have known deep in his pacifist heart that if slaves had had guns, well then, they never would’ve been slaves. And of course Sally Hemmings could’ve shot Thomas Jefferson’s balls off.
Yes, if our military took over our public education, they’d have their hands full. I’d rather leave the job to this guy.