James’s Comments

James’s comments from the History is Not Boring group.

Note: James is not currently a member of this group.

You might enjoy reading Terry Jones' book "Barbarians" - he presents the Romans as maybe the greatest villains in western history in a very well-researched and fun-to-read chronology detailing how the Romans, in several different parts of the ancient world, overran and destroyed cultures that were in many ways more advanced than the Romans themselves were. Ultimately, if you agree with his conclusions, the Roman empire may have held back the progress of Western civilization by more than a thousand years and committed enough genocides and crimes against humanity to make the Nazis look tame.

Also, John Adams was controversial because while he was president, he pushed for the Alien and Sedition acts and then tried to use them to make it a crime to criticize or make fun of the president (it especially irked Adams that some journalists responded to his pompous ego by dubbing him His Rotundity). It came to a Constitutional test when he sought to imprison journalists who disagreed with his politics or supported his opponent, Jefferson, in a presidential election. Adams ultimately lost that legal battle, and Jefferson won the election and took Adams' place. The Alien and Sedition acts were highly unpopular with the American public, which had just fought a long war to free themselves of that kind of oppression and weren't interested in simply exchanging a dictatorial king in England for one who happened to be native-born. So along with his great contributions, Adams has to be remembered as the first president to think that the job came with a crown and scepter. The most notable others to fall into that error have been Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon (who said once in an interview that "if the president does it, then it isn't illegal,") and George W. Bush. Wilson, a Democrat, and Bush, a Republican, have pushed it the farthest. So far. After Adams, Wilson, and Nixon, there were public backlashes that resulted in more legal restraints on the power of the executive branch (though those legal restraints have sometimes been secretly violated). We'll see whether that happens again this time.

I love the image on the New Mexico state flag too, and it's always been my home state, but it diminishes it for me to know that the Zunis feel the way they do about their sacred symbol being used, without their consent, in a way that to them is sacreligious.

And regarding the PTSD, I'd still rather have PTSD from a virtual plane crash than die, or be maimed and have worse PTSD, in a real one.

Barbarossa,
It makes sense that people might get PTSD from an experience like that, especially under two conditions: if friendly troops were in danger or were hurt or killed where they could see it, and/or if in the course of their missions they used the drone's weapons and killed someone.

On the plus side, psychologists are using virtual reality to treat PTSD, as well as helping people overcome phobias, by exposing them to gradually more intense and realistic recreations while providing moral and emotional support, giving them the chance to talk it through, and helping them change any distorted thinking that's making it worse, like unfairly blaming themselves or fearing things that no longer threaten them.

I suspect you're right about the relationship between reenactments and time passed. You probably wouldn't have found a lot of people who wanted to do Civil War reenactments in 1870. And not many people nowadays have a gut reaction to Napoleon similar to that they have to Hitler, but in his time Napoleon, and the French Army, were nearly as hated and feared as Hitler and the Wehrmacht were in the 20th century - both were seen by their contemporaries as leaders and armies responsible for wars that wrecked Europe.

I just read "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam" by LtCol. John Nagl, U.S. Army. He is one of the authors of the current manual on counterinsurgency being used by the Army and Marine Corps, which was published last year.

Learning to Eat Soup is interesting and flows well, it's very well organized, and it does a better job than anything else I've seen yet at explaining why the British succeeded in defeating a homegrown rural Communist rebellion with foreign support (from China) in Malaya, ending the process by overseeing free elections to create an independent Malayan government that was really representative of the entire population, and why we failed in a pretty similar situation in Vietnam. It offers a lot of insight into our best options for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well, which is fitting, as the author recently spent a combat tour in Iraq putting the principles he described into action.

Yes, Manuel is right about Washington. He could have made the presidency much more like royalty while he was in office, and chose not to - for example, he nixed the idea of having people call the president "your majesty," "your excellency," "your highness," etc. in favor of "Mr. President," which is a lot more humble, and he chose not to run again after his second term.

He didn't want the presidency much in the first place - he would rather have been relaxing at home.

Some of the brightest people in the British government in the years before 1776 tried very hard to get the King and Parliament - more the House of Lords than the House of Commons - to be more generous and less dictatorial with the American colonies; they foresaw exactly what ended up happening. But the king and the advisors to whom he chose to listen took it as a challenge to their egos and their authority and dug in their heels, making the Revolution inevitable. George III was not the sharpest knife in the drawer, even before he went crazy.

I think that as far as shaping the history and role in the world of the U.S., though, the Spanish-American War and World War I were pivotal. Before those two wars, the U.S. was a regional power that much of Europe didn't take very seriously. After, it was in the top tier of world powers.

Thanks - it was definitely a life-altering experience, one of the things that shaped me into whoever I am now. It haunted me for a lot of years, but with help I've worked through it.

No doubt it's one of the main reasons that as a psychotherapist I've made PTSD one of my specialties. I was facilitating a PTSD group in the prison when I worked in the mental hospital there, and while I was trying to explain some of the symptoms and effects in plain English, I described some of my own reactions to things; one guy's jaw dropped, and he pointed at me and said, "You DO have this too!"

Not to hijack the subject of the string, though, and to get back to reenactment -

I've just started reading a book about the beginnings of computer gaming, and interestingly enough, most of the people who created the big multiplayer online games with medieval or mystical themes, like Ultima and World of Warcraft, had earlier been active in the Society for Creative Anachronism, and/or played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons, and the S.C.A. activities in particular helped them make their depiction of sword-fighting and other ancient modes of combat more realistic. So you could call that another kind of reenactment, and in some cases just enactment, because once people get into the Tolkien-like part of the games involving magic, they're acting out things that are mythical rather than historic.

Another aspect of reenactment that may become common soon: the interface equipment used for computer gaming is steadily advancing, making the experience more and more realistic, to the point that in some ways it's starting to approach a similar level of realism for some game genres. For example, it is now affordable for a lot of people with basically middle-class disposable incomes to buy systems where instead of looking at a monitor on a desk in front of them, they wear a rig with small monitors in front of their eyes; software can provide a 3D effect, kind of like the old Viewmaster toys a lot of us had as kids, and you can also get a hardware/software combo that tracks your head's movements via infrared reflectors on a ball cap or something you wear and shifts the point of view on the monitor to match your movements. Marry up those two, and you have a full-field-of-view 3D perspective that shifts realistically when you move your head.

Combine that with one of the newer headphone sets that uses multiple tiny speakers to give you directional sound not only from left or right but also from in front or behind you; some also have feedback motors so that if something happens in the game that would make you feel a vibration or a jolt, you literally get thumped on the head.

At that point, it really is the next best (or worst) thing to being there, especially for games where you're flying planes or doing things like that. So would that count as a reenactment of, say, flying a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain? I think it might. It would certainly be close enough in some ways to give you a much better intuitive understanding of what that was like.

I had a brutal awakening along these lines myself at 18. I was in the Marines, in the infantry as a mortarman; I'd been in about a year. Being in the military was an adventure, like being in the movies.

I wanted to be the best at my job and studied it - one of the greatest challenges for a mortar team is hitting a helicopter in a landing zone (LZ), because the chopper will be in and out in a matter of seconds and the time from when you fire the mortar until it hits can be over a minute (the shell arcs very high and drops almost vertically on the target, so it travels about 3 times what the straight-line distance would be.) I thought about it a lot as a technical challenge and tried to come up with ways to solve that timing problem.

Then, on the last day of a training exercise in the Philippines, a helicopter crashed and killed nearly everyone aboard, about 30 people. I was one of the volunteers who were the first to the crash site to see if we could save anyone. They were all dead there, in the worst ways imaginable - it looked as if someone had set off a bomb in a butcher shop. I was watching myself and the others with me walking around, checking the wreckage and the dead, and it suddenly hit me that this was exactly what I'd been trying to figure out the best way to do, and it was a horror beyond description. I felt an incredible sense of shame and stupidity at my own naivete, although it had been exactly the way my culture and training had taught me to see things. I never felt like I was in the movies again, and nothing was ever just a technical challenge again.

I stayed in for 20 years, but I never lost sight of what a terrible and serious business I was in after that day. I stayed because I believe it's a job we need people to do, because I was good at it, and because I believed that maybe I would do a better job at getting as many people home in one piece as possible than someone else who still thought they were in the movies might.

I think of that when I hear people, politicians or others, make belligerent speeches and treat war as a casual thing when it's clear they have no idea what they're talking about. I wish there was some way to run them through some reenactment that would give them that kind of awakening too.

Yes, that's the way it works here. Albuquerque sits on a very deep clay and silt deposit, and to find bedrock you'd have to go down over a mile deep, and because of that the tallest building in this city is around ten stories. If someone tried to build a skyscraper here it would fall over in the next good windstorm.

I like Arizona's flag. Aesthetically I also like the flag of my own state, New Mexico, but it bothers me that its central symbol is the zia, the use of which in that way is sacreligious to the culture from which it's taken. It's pretty disrespectful to basically say, "We've conquered you and relegated you to a reservation and a cultural backwater - and hey, that's a cool symbol you have for your religion, we'll take that too."

In a similar vein, I taught my first wife to shoot (she'd literally never touched a firearm before). She had a knack for it and enjoyed it. She had been a fan of detective novels and programs for years, but the next time after she learned to shoot that we watched some TV show where the hero whipped out a little revolver with a two-inch barrel, spun on his heel, and shot some villain off the roof of a building a hundred yards away, she literally jumped to her feet, pointed at the TV, and shouted "That's impossible!"
I saw something like that happen in a recent documentary on the battle of Gettysburg. A group of reenactors recreated the role of Union infantry firing period rifles at the Confederate soldiers making Pickett's Charge, to measure the effect of that fire. These guys were used to doing battle reenactments, but not with live ammunition. They set up cardboard cutouts in front of cinderblocks to represent the Southern troops and shot at them with real authentic period ammunition. When they saw the damage and visualized it with real people they were shocked and horrified; some looked sick. They said they'd never understood that part of the history until then.

So sometimes experiencing something really is the best way to understand it.

A friend of ours used to work as a docent at one of those Colonial Williamsburg-style historical parks - she wore period clothes and demonstrated everyday activities. She thoroughly enjoyed that job.
When I was a teenager I was active in the Society for Creative Anachonism (admittedly, their degree of accuracy varies - as one bumper sticker notes, it's not the Society for Compulsive Authenticity.) After I learned about the skills and amount of effort involved in sword-and-shield combat, I had a richer appreciation for history. It was fascinating to learn about the food of other times and places, too.

Thanks for the corrected info on skyscrapers and bedrock - I had gotten that from a documentary, and hadn't questioned it because I trusted the source, but appreciate having the right facts. I do prefer to have accurate data.

As Manuel said, racism exists everywhere. Research suggests that it may be because fear and suspicion of the Other once had a pro-survival value (we see it in other species too, as in birds who will peck one of their own who hatches as an albino to death). In a crowded high-tech world, we're long past that time, but our basic nature hasn't changed much. On the upbeat side, children seem quite able to learn acceptance and respect as easily as they learn intolerance.

Regarding personal choice and expression, I like the phrase "my freedom to swing my arm stops where your nose begins." If it does no harm, it's no one else's business. Hate speech or symbolism does harm, so it other people's business.

As for identifying with the status or deeds of our ancestors (or descendants for that matter, all you rabid Little League parents!) is concerned, Robert Heinlein got it right when he described a little lizard proudly claiming to be a brontosaurus on his mother's side. It's like an inmate I worked with, who liked to build models of Viking ships and talk about his warrior ancestors - his friends usually laughed and said "Ah, your ancestors are dairy farmers, not warriors."

Personally, I like the Flying Spaghetti Monster religion better. It has precisely the same amount of supporting evidence, and it's more imaginative and more fun.

All of us have beliefs that don't have enough evidence to make them more than opinion. The key is to acknowledge that border between unsupported opinion - as in "my baby is the world's best looking, because that's what my heart tells me" and evidence-based fact, as in "Professor Plum did it in the billiard room with the knife, because here's the victim's DNA on the blade and on Professor Plum's sleeve and Professor Plum's DNA on the knife and the pool table where we found the victim."

If I want someone else to accept a belief of mine, I should offer evidence strong enough to make other beliefs improbable and/or a sound chain of logic starting with mutually accepted assumptions. Otherwise I'm just wasting time and oxygen.

I see logic and the scientific method as the things that have made the sharing and accumulation of information, and civilization as we know it, possible. They are what moved humanity beyond just making up stories that seemed plausible and then treating them as fact. And that is what literalist religion is, no more or less.

Just the latest in a long, long series of that kind of unconscious ironies. Kind of like Bush insisting publicly that war was a last resort with Iraq, when he'd said months earlier to members of the Senate "f**k, Saddam, we're taking him out"; like his characterizing terrorists (accurately) as willing to kill innocent people to achieve their aims, when his administration has consistently tried to fight a guerrilla war with heavy artillery and air strikes, killing and maiming huge numbers of the civilians they claim to be protecting; like the people who preach about a "culture of life" while they push the death penalty and poison the air, water, and soil; and on and on.

Aww, I doubt that... maybe we're all just catching our breaths.

You can see a lot of Manhattan's geology just by looking at the skyline; the taller the buildings, the deeper and stronger the bedrock on which it's built.

Following up on that, I love the American flag because of the Constitution and the good aspects of the history it stands for, and I get choked up sometimes when I see it at ceremonies, but I adamantly disagree with those who want to make it illegal to burn or desecrate a flag. I would never choose to do so myself, but I respect the right of others to express the message of protest that conveys. To destroy that actual freedom in order to protect its symbolic representation would make that symbol's meaning hollow.