On Anachronistic Bullshit

12 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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Afrocentricity, Anachronisms, Anachronistic, Beating a Dead Horse, Black Nationalism, Bullshit, Burnout, Conference Presentations, Fear of a "Black" America (2004), Jesus, Journal of American History, Mental Exhaustion, Multicultural Education, Multiculturalism, Nat Turner, OAH, Politics of Academia, Politics of Education, Socialism, Toronto

Kirsten Dunst and Jason Schwartzman get anachronistic between shots on set of Marie Antoinette (2006), September 2012. (Pinterest via http://buzzfeed.com).

It’s that time of year in academia, folks. The heart of the fall scholarly conference schedule, between the beginning of October and mid-November (American Political Science Association conference as an exception, though). For the first time in a few years, I’m part of the schedule, as part of a panel on American imperialism and narcissism this weekend at the Society of U.S. Intellectual Historians conference here in DC.

The topic is a departure for me. In the couple of dozen or so conference presentations I’ve done since the mid-1990s, I have discussed two interrelated topics. Multiculturalism in the contexts of US history, African American history, and education policy was one, and covered every presentation I did between 1992 and 2003. Education reform in the context of college access, retention, and diversity was the other, and covered every conference presentation or other talk I did from 2004 through 2009.

Bokeem Woodbine, October 12, 2015. (http://imdb.com)

I never wanted to be wedded to one topic my whole career. It was the academic equivalent of being typecast, like Bokeem Woodbine (thug) or Anthony Azizi (terrorist). But in the spring of 2003, there I was, doing conferences as “Dr. Multiculturalism,” either for the benefit of eager grad students or to the chagrin of more senior scholars.

No one really discusses this issue in academia. The idea that any of us can decide to move on to a completely different topic as a scholar, become engrossed in it, even become an expert and present and write on that topic, and then move on to the next one (yes, there are consequences, but…). At best, most scholars in academia have variations-on-a-theme careers, covering sports history and society, moving from baseball to football to tennis. Or from Black migration in the early 20th century to gentrification and its impact on Black families in the ’90s and ’00s. (It’s not as if many academicians can’t find the time to pick up another idea!)

What’s even worse are the ways in which we in academia beat up on each other’s work at conferences, and not in a constructively critical way, either (that would be refreshing). The key for me moving on from multiculturalism began at the 1999 Organization of American Historians conference in Toronto. I presented on “The Black Brahmins of Harvard: W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, and Alain L. Locke on
Multiculturalism, 1890-1940.” Admittedly, there were a few issues with the paper. I didn’t include any Black women in my consideration (although, given Harvard’s institutional racism and sexism in this period, Black women were almost nonexistent, including at the doctoral level). I had to deal with the Afrocentricity sect, who didn’t see multiculturalism as a fellow traveler, but instead as a Eurocentric “feel-good” understanding of US and Black culture.

Most importantly, I was being “anachronistic.” I had applied a term that hadn’t become commonplace until the 1970s to a previous period in history, one in which the term hadn’t been conceived. It didn’t matter that cultural pluralism had existed as a term since the 1890s and that many in the philosophy and education fields had used cultural pluralism and multiculturalism interchangeably. For this group of cultural and education historians, multiculturalism in my work equalled a no-go zone.

Jesus was a Socialist bumper sticker, an anachronism, October 12, 2015. (http://plus.google.com).

Though I managed a few short articles and a chapter on multiculturalism, time and time again, the question of anachronism came up. And despite all of my documented evidence, more senior scholars at journals refused to accept multiculturalism and Black history in the same sentence. “Surely you must be referring to Afrocentricity or Black Nationalism,” one reviewer for the Journal of American History wrote on a manuscript that he rejected in 2002.

It never occurred to me to call them directly on this bullshit. These same folks will write articles with titles like, “Was Jesus a Socialist?” or “a Marxist?,” or “Nat Turner’s Rebellion and the Birth of Black Nationalism.” Talk about anachronistic! Jesus and Karl Marx are roughly 1,800 years apart, and Black Nationalism is a specifically mid-to-late-twentieth century term. Yet this was much more all right than my early-thirties-self yammering about something as complex as multiculturalism and its role in the thinking and education of African Americans.

Beating a dead horse cartoon, September 2012. (Marc Cortez, http://marccortez.com).

I’m hardly arguing that academicians who didn’t like my work should have seen my brilliance and allowed me to publish or present more on multiculturalism. Heck, by 1999, I was tired of my former dissertation topic already! A bit more honesty about what really bothered them, though, would’ve been helpful. The idea that ordinary people could be unconsciously participating in multiculturalist activities, in this case, ordinary Black folk, some academicians found unacceptable. The idea that I could write this was unacceptable to quite a few. The fact that my former patron in Joe Trotter wasn’t out there opening up doors for me on my topic left me in a bad place politically as well. I wasn’t supposed to be in academia, after all, at conferences or in scholarly journals. I know now that part of the point was to thin out the herd of competition, to anoint some and shun so many others, me included.

The constant rejection on fairly hypocritical grounds just made it easier for me to publish Fear of a “Black” America in ’04 and move on. Since I am at the beginning of the process of thinking through a new topic, I don’t have mental exhaustion as an excuse for crumbling in the face of soul-destroying, narcissistic opposition. I also have at least one thing going for me these days. I feel I’m old enough now to call numbskulls on their bullshit.

Aside

“And There’s Winners, And There’s Losers…

19 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, New York City, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work

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"Pink Houses" (1983), 2016 Election, American Narcissism, Bankruptcy, Comb-Over, Donald Trump, FOX News Debate, Frank Sinatra, Hypocrisy, John Mellencamp, Losers, Misogyny, Narcissism, New York, New York" (1980), Racism, RNC Debate, The Donald, Trump Supporters, Winners, Xenophobia

“But they ain’t no big deal/’Cause the simple man, baby/Pays for thrills/The bills the pills that kill” – John Mellencamp, “Pink Houses” (1983).

Donald Trump’s entire campaign might as well be called “The Ultimate Narcissist Does The Pink Houses” Tour, complete with Def Leppard, his kids, and Omarosa going to bat for him on CNN. Trump and his angry band of supporters see the world in the simplest way, like an indoctrinated twelve-year-old forced to be part of a religious cult (I can definitely relate). Trump sees himself as a “winner,” the US as a country that used to be a “winner,” and anything or anyone who doesn’t fit his narrative as “losers.” Of course there’s a contradiction here. Trump doesn’t have the courage to call many of his supporters “losers,” though there are about four decades’ worth of his actions and statements that would serve as evidence of his thoughts about his base.

2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump meeting with New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, Gillette Stadium, Foxboro, MA, October 21, 2012. (Nancy Lane/Boston Herald;http://bostonhearld.com).

At the “Big Boys” RNC debate a couple of weeks ago, Trump couched everything in terms of “winners” and “losers.” President Obama was an “incompetent loser.” The US is “losing to China” economically. Mexican immigrants are turning the US into “a nation of losers.” The US has to “win” against ISIS (I prefer the term Islamic State or IS that most news agencies use outside the US, but that would make me a loser). Trump’s pronouncements at the debate and since have been about more than sound bites of “us” vs. “them,” as the more progressive media elements have said. It’s been about presenting himself as America’s winner, as the one at “the top of the heap, king of the hill, A-number-1.”

In a nation full of narcissists, this has a real appeal, even if the reality of Trump’s life contradicts both the winner image he portrays and the lives that most of his supporters actually live. The most obvious is Trump’s net worth being more like between $1.4 billion and $4 billion (Oprah Winfrey territory), and not the $10 billion he says it is. Or that he has — or, as Trump would say, “my companies” have — filed for Chapter 11 four times in the past quarter-century. Or his multiple divorces. Or his ridiculous comb-over in 20+mph winds.

I guess all of those falsities and setbacks should be more nuanced, as part of life’s long and bumpy journey. By Trump’s own definition, because his net worth — though envy-inducing — is hardly #1 (still between Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Michael Bloomberg), he should see himself as a loser. Because Trump has seen multiple business ventures crash and burn, the “loser” moniker could fit. Oh, but narcissism allows for those suffering from grandiose inflations of themselves to see their failings, their losses as mere bumps in the road, and not part of the “winners and losers” narrative.

Picture of abandoned Palma Nova mobile home park, where the last of the 900 families had been evicted in 2009, Davie, Florida, February 15, 2010. (Mike Stocker/Miami Sun-Sentinel; http://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/broward/fl-palma-nova-davie-pg-photogallery.html).

The same goes for Trump’s supporters, most of whom couldn’t hope to be PTA president at their neighborhood elementary school, much less run for POTUS. The US is so replete with narcissism that it’s in the bloodstream of ordinary low-income Americans (the majority of the working population, by the way). And as such, their reasons for supporting Trump are as sad as they are predictable. They see him as a winner, even though he was born into wealth via his real estate magnate father (or as many New Yorkers saw him, slum lord), Fred Trump. The Donald was born halfway between third and home plate, and somehow ordinary Americans see him as a quintessential American?

Trump’s supporters also see him as someone who “tells it like it is.” Really? Ready to be fooled again, just like with so many numbskulls and wing-nuts who’ve sold Americans the magic of tax cuts for the rich and for corporations and endless prosperity in the past? Some of these narcissists are like gambling addicts, taking their last dollars to a slot machine on the hope of making it rich with crusty toenails. It both a real shame, and pitiful to watch.

Aside

“White Privilege,” “Privileged Whites,” and Other Clarifications

01 Saturday Aug 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, New York City, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

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American Exceptionalism, Bigotry, Black Reconstruction (1935), Central Park, Colorblindness, Egalitarianism, Homelessness, Privileged Whites, Psychological Wages, Public Wages, Race, Racism, Socioeconomic Status, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wages of Whiteness, White Privilege, Whiteness

"White Privilege-Amex," April 2014. (http://theblacksphere.net/).

“White Privilege-Amex,” in black and white, April 2014. (http://theblacksphere.net/).

It is hard to discuss race. It is definitely so in the US, where virtually everyone believes that their individual good intentions mean more than systemic oppression and ugly truths. And it is really hard on people of color when they/we discuss race with most Whites and some people of color (e.g., Black conservatives, the elite of color, those with internalized racism issues), as their belief in American exceptionalism and individualism is so strong that any evidence to the contrary must be wrong. Especially if the person providing the evidence is Black, Latino, Native American or Asian, and even more so if they are women of color.

One thing that’s been on my mind lately is the lazy use of terms by the media around race. And their laziness is our collective and individual laziness as well. So much so that most Americans use the terms for discussing race about the same way most Americans eat — they say “gimme lots of fat” while refusing the vegetables and healthy, but “put everything on it” at the same time.

Mr. Moneybags of Monopoly (1934) fame, July 31, 2015. (http://streetsmartbrazil.com/).

For example, most Whites see the terms White privilege and privileged Whites and assume they mean the same thing. They don’t and can’t. White privilege refers to both systemic and individual racial discrimination and disparities that almost no one White would ever have to deal with in most circumstances. It has little to do with socioeconomic standing, level of education, social networks, or any other variable to which most Americans who play devil’s advocate often refer. Privileged Whites, though, refers to the fact that this socioeconomic group is either upper middle class or wealthy, often with high education levels. The latter can also refer to White privilege, but then again, that’s already assumed in America’s racial construction of itself.

Anyone who is White and poor and also assumes that White privilege (or, to use W.E.B. Du Bois’ term, Whiteness) is ascribing to them a socioeconomic status that they do not possess, that’s just incorrect. As Du Bois wrote in Black Reconstruction (1935), even the poorest Whites received societal compensation, at least in part, through a “public and psychological wage.” In Jim Crow times, it was one in which poor Whites “were given public deference…were admitted freely…to public functions and public parks.” At the same time, the “police were drawn from their ranks and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with leniency” (pp. 700-01). Come to think of it, much of this still applies in 2015, even though the Civil Rights Movement dismantled Jim Crow, no?

But it’s not just terms like White privilege and privileged Whites that throws off all but a small minority of Americans. Most use terms like race, racism and bigotry interchangeably, as if they work at an Apple factory in the Longhua Subdivision of Shenzhen, in Guangdong Province, China (it’s outside Hong Kong) making iPhones and iPads. Race is a construct and not a biological fact in the case of Homo sapiens, since humans are all part of one species, albeit with some rather interesting surface variations. Racism is the result of a construct to justify social and economic advantages in the US and all over the globe, as well as the systemic construction and maintenance of such advantages. Bigotry, though, is something we as individuals all possess, regardless of race, gender, ideology, religion, atheism, or any other variable. There’s more, but I’ve already written a post about this.

A clip from The Colbert Report in a segment about the end of stop and frisk in New York City, August 2013. (http://globalgrind.com via http://billmoyers.com).

And there’s this whole notion of color blindness, the idea that millions of Americans who see everything in color can claim that they’re colorblind to race. “I don’t care if you’re white, black, red, green or purple. It doesn’t matter to me,” most Americans often say. There’s two problems with this statement and these phrases. One is that unless someone is actually, physically and neurologically colorblind, what one is doing is choosing to ignore differences, which is completely different from tolerating, accepting or embracing difference. One might as well say that they don’t see the homeless in the middle of Central Park in New York, that’s how ridiculous — maybe even tone-deaf and callous — this idea is.

Two is that there aren’t any green, purple, blue or other weird hues of humanity anywhere on this planet. Heck, technically, Whites are pink, Blacks are varying shades of brown, Native Americans have reddish undertones (and then only some), and so on. The point is, this idea of color blindness to race is straight horse manure, allowing many Americans to feel good about their views on race, racism and bigotry without any serious thought about their country or the people in it at all.

And that is why conversations on race in the US remain a pipe dream for some, and raise the fear of the specter of Judgment Day for others.

Aside

Finding A Memory, Knowing the Whole Truth

16 Thursday Jul 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, Youth

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1976, 425 South Sixth Avenue, 616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Bicentennial, Big Wheel, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Diana, Eidetic Memory, First Grade, Mother-Son Relationship, Mount Vernon Hospital, Nathan Hale Elementary, Photographic Memory, Playground, Repressed Memories, Sarai Washington, Sexual Abuse, Sexual Assault

From Cam Jansen Mysteries, a series of children’s books about a girl with a photographic memory who would solve mysteries and take pictures in her mind of the clues, August 9, 2012. (http://appraisingpages.com).

No one’s memories — even those whom are eidetic or whose memories can be near photographic — are perfect, especially over the long haul. As far as the scientific community knows, there are no exceptions. I include myself in that category. This despite having a memory cycle that has seldom let me down. Since August 8, 1974, there have been only a few gaps of any major significance. I might not be able to tell you exactly what I had for dinner on July 16, ’85, but my guess would include either chicken and dumplings or $5 spaghetti with meat sauce and frozen chopped broccoli, both courtesy of my shopping at C-Town in Pelham, New York almost every day (it was a welcome relief from the heat of sitting home at 616, anyway).

One area where my memory had let me down was parts of the summer of ’76, the bicentennial summer. I could vague remember being down in the city for some of the festivities that July 4th, followed by a long sleep on the free Metro-North ride that day, only to end up in New Haven, CT because my father had been drinking and sleeping on the train, too. I remembered my Mom buying a Polaroid and taking pictures of herself and us and her new furniture at 425 South Sixth at the beginning of the month.

And I remembered that this had occurred a couple of weeks later:

My first memories playing with a group of Black males in Mount Vernon, New York are all negative. When I was six in ’76, a group of preteens on the neighborhood playground near Nathan Hale Elementary on South 6th Avenue tried to force me into sucking one of their dicks, practically sticking it in my face to do so. I got away before being truly scarred for life.

But I knew that I couldn’t remember what occurred beyond that, not only for the rest of that day, but for the next three weeks afterward. It had bothered me for years that I couldn’t remember beyond the flash of images I did write down.

Even in writing Boy @ The Window (which thankfully wasn’t about my earliest years growing up), as much as I drilled down into my past, I couldn’t fully conjure the memory of this incident. And when I did try, I ended up inducing headaches.

It was the year after publishing my memoir that I realized my headaches weren’t just because I needed new pillows for my neck. I had a repressed memory, maybe even more than one. I didn’t try to find a way to un-repress the memory, though. I figured that if I concentrated on other memories from the spring and summer of ’76, it would manifest itself, one way or the other. The key was my Big Wheel, the only toy I truly loved growing up, and my first “girlfriend” in Diana, who moved away at the end of first grade. Those memories helped me conjure up the buried memories I needed to fill in the blanks.

Cecil Parker Elementary School (formerly Nathan Hale ES), Mount Vernon, NY, November 23, 2006. (Donald Earl Collins).

Over the course of a couple of weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas last year, I either had dreams or wide-awake flashbacks that filled in my blanks. I was in fact sexually assaulted, by a light-skinned thirteen or fourteen-year-old. With the help of two of his friends, he had gotten his penis in my mouth while I was being held down to the ground on the rain-soaked, asphalt, Nathan Hale playground. I only got away because his friends were laughing after I spit his penis out of my mouth, laughing so hard that they were no longer holding me down.

I did a bit of digging into July ’76. I already knew from my memories it had rained on a Tuesday or Wednesday the week after July 4th. Turns out on that Wednesday, July 14, a quarter-inch of rain fell on the New York City area, as there was thundershower activity and high winds that afternoon, with a high of 78°F. That, unfortunately, confirmed everything.

1976 Chevrolet Nova, Seattle, WA area (not the right color, but the right model), July 16, 2015. (http://youtube.com).

What I remembered next after was probably just as horrific. I didn’t tell my Mom about my incident for weeks, because I was supposed to stay home while she went to work at Mount Vernon Hospital that day. I did tell her, though, about three weeks later, on the first Saturday in August, as she and my father were arguing as usual. And, my Mom being my Mom, she didn’t believe me, leading to my first attempt at taking my own life. I ran out of 425 South Sixth, straight into the street, and waited to be run down by an older Black guy in a Chevy Nova (more on that at a later date).

But maybe what triggered these repressed memories in the first place was the trauma of losing my sister Sarai in July ’10. After all, that’s also the week I learned that one of my younger brothers had been raped by a short Black guy in his early twenties while pursuing his video game addiction via arcades at the age of nine. As traumatic as that revelation was, it was my Mom’s response that was the most chilling. “It serves you right. I told you to stay away from that man,” my Mom said in response.

Maybe it was too much for my Mom to hear on the same week as her only daughter’s death. Then again, from what I’ve come to remember now, finding out about any one of her children being abused was always too much for my Mom to bear. As for me, knowing the whole truth has made sleeping much easier, my dreams more peaceful, and my headaches all about stress and neck tension.

Aside

American Narcissism, or, “Smiling, Crying, and Celebrity”

10 Friday Jul 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Movies, music, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

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"Charlie X", "Original Of The Species" (2005), American Narcissism, Captain James T. Kirk, Gordon Ramsey, How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb (2004), Kitchen Nightmares, Narcissism, Psychic Powers, Self-Aggrandizement, Self-Love, Self-Promotion, South Carolina State Rep. Jenny Horne, Star Trek, Star Trek TOS (1966-69), Thasians, U2, US Foreign Policy, US History, William Shatner

South Carolina Representative Jenny Horne (Republican) speaking on floor of House chamber, Columbia, SC, July 8, 2015. (http://www.slate.com via C-SPAN3).

There are so many examples of the US as a nation of narcissists that when I step outside of my own narcissism, it literally leaves me with vertigo. I can see narcissism everywhere. In how Americans drive, as if they’re the only car on the road in bumper-to-bumper traffic. I see it in how people walk on sidewalks, as if no one else will ever need space to walk in the opposite direction, or as if everyone wants to walk at a slow, plodding pace. I see it in how we reacted to even minor criticism, as if the comment “this needs revision” equals “you’re a lazy, untalented hack of a writer,” and deserves a response equally personal and nasty.

From U2’s “Original Of The Species” (2005) video, from How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb (2004) album, July 9, 2015. (http://youtube.com).

One of the better demonstrations of narcissism American style is through our popular culture. From Frank Sinatra to Rick Ross, Mae West to Nicki Minaj, we have a century’s worth of pop culture divas as examples of narcissism at the level of prominent American individuals. The narcissism is so normal that we have benign terms for it, like “self-promotion” or “self-love.” People, especially in the pop culture world, should promote and love themselves, of course. But at what point is narcissism a self-defeating process of “me as triumphant,” “me as the center of the universe,” “me for everyone to like/love more and more?”

A clear-cut example of art imitating life imitating art for me around narcissism would be a Star Trek: TOS (The Original Series) episode. Season 1, Episode 2, September 15, 1966, was the airing of the “Charlie X” episode on NBC. It was the one in which a seventeen-year-old who had been stranded on an alien planet since the age of three was taken up to the Enterprise by a transport ship. Once on the Enterprise, the teenager displayed both petulance and his toolbox of god-like powers, hurting crew members or making them disappear at a whim. All because they either unknowingly insulted him or made him jealous in some way. As one story line summary for the episode reads, “Captain Kirk must learn the limits to the power of a 17-year-old boy with the psychic ability to create anything and destroy anyone.”

Charlie Evans, played by Robert Walker, Jr., Star Trek TOS, Season 1, Episode 2, September 15, 1966. (https://thesouloftheplot.files.wordpress.com/).

The Charlie Evans character became fixated on a female crew member — consistently called “a girl” in 1966 (that wasn’t acceptable even back then) — in one Yeoman Janice Rand. Charlie’s obsession with having her, his dislike for criticism and being told what to do, his inability to check his emotions, his destructive responses, were all based on his needs from moment to moment. Every potential slight, every action that he couldn’t control led Charlie to do some damning things. With his thoughts, Charlie took away Lt. Uhura’s voice, broke Spock’s legs, blinded another crew member, took away one woman’s face, aged another woman, and made one other woman disappear. When Charlie couldn’t win at chess, he melted the chess pieces. “I can make you all go away! Any time I want to!,” Charlie exclaimed at one point in the episode.

Within a scene or two, just before the episode’s climax, Kirk finally said, “Charlie, there are a million things in this universe you can have and a million things you can’t have. It’s no fun facing that, but that’s the way things are.” This was when Charlie was on the verge of taking over the ship and possibly wiping out the Enterprise‘s crew. But then, the Thasians came (the aliens who’d given Charlie his powers in the first place) with their own starship to take Charlie in as one of their own. “We gave him [Charlie] the power so he could live. He will use it – always. And he will destroy you, or, you will be forced to destroy him,” the face of the Thasians said. Then, the Thasians disappeared Charlie to their starship, with Charlie’s final words, “I wanna stay… stay… stay… stay… sta…” lingering on the Enterprise‘s bridge.

Defaced woman, Star Trek TOS, Season 1, Episode 2, September 15, 1966. (http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/).

If this episode doesn’t serve as a metaphor for America as a nation and Americans as 320 million individuals with varying levels of narcissism, I don’t know what does. America has always declared itself at the center of the world, centuries before it became a world superpower. Any affront — real or perceived — has often led to skirmishes and wars, embargoes and removals. America’s relatively short history includes Indian wars, Barbary pirates, the War of 1812, the American Revolution, Manifest Destiny and the Mexican-American War, the Monroe Doctrine, Banana Republics and Cuba, Manuel Noriega and Panama, Beirut and Grenada. The central theme of American history and foreign policy has been to self-aggrandize, to settle scores, to challenge other countries to duels, to take advantage of those in the most vulnerable places in the US and around the globe.

So too has narcissism been a part of ordinary Americans’ lives. Just watch a rerun of Kitchen Nightmares on BBC America or on FOX. Any criticism delivered by soccer coach-chef Gordon Ramsey is received about the same way as a toddler reacts when their favorite toy goes missing. Taunts, tantrums, threats, gnashing of teeth, juvenile guilt and despair.

And, for a moment, there may even be a haunting realization that your intellect and experiences aren’t at the center of the universe. But just for a moment. After all, there aren’t any Thasians to check and balance America’s narcissism. Still, narcissism has a way of using up people and nations. Maybe in a hundred years, maybe in 500, but some time in the future, historians will write about American narcissism the same way many historians write about the gross inequalities of an over-glorified ancient Rome.

Aside

A Family, A Man In Uniform, A War In Continuum

07 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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" Wino Park, "Napalm Girl", "The Redcatchers, 199th Light Infantry Brigade, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Alcoholism, BBQ restaurant, Collins Family, Demond Harris, Falon Collins, Family History, Felton Collins, Howard University, Kim Phuc, Lamont Sanford, MSW, Nick Ut, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, Sanford and Son, Vietnam War, Violence, War

Extended Collins family photo (top row down, l-to-r: me, Jasmine, Uncle Felton, Falon, my dad, Aunt Christene, my son Noah), West Hyattsville, MD, May 8, 2015. (Donald Earl Collins).

Two months ago, I met portions of my extended Collins family in Maryland for the first time. I had no idea that my father had a younger brother, nor that his name was Felton, until I had received a call in August 2013 from my uncle about spotting him and his older daughter Falon a place to stay while she found a place to live here in suburban Maryland. My first cousin moved to the area to begin work on her MSW at Howard University’s School of Social Work. We couldn’t accommodate such a last-minute request, unless my uncle and first cousin had been willing to sleep on the floor.

When Falon graduated in May, I finally had the chance to meet this younger part of the Collins family, as well as an aunt I hadn’t seen since I was five (more on this next month). Among the things that came out of these meetings and our dinner together was that my Uncle Felton was not only a military veteran, but a Vietnam veteran with the 199th Light Infantry Brigade (“The Redcatchers”) between 1967 and 1969, no less. I knew that somehow the federal government managed to overlook my uncles on my mother’s side and not draft them for the Vietnam war effort (a “miracle” of rural Arkansas segregation, I assumed). So this was a lot of new information to take in.

Kim Phuc with her then infant son, Ontario, Canada, 1995. (Joe McNally/Time & Life Pics). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws -- photo illustrative of subject/ for educational purposes only.

Kim Phúc with her then infant son, Ontario, Canada, 1995. (Joe McNally/Time & Life Pics). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws — photo illustrative of subject/ for educational purposes only.

But then again, it shouldn’t have been new information at all. Except for the fact that my father had spent the first thirty years of my life too inebriated or caught up in New York City life to remember to hand down basic family history to me and my older brother Darren.

I was really almost too young to remember Vietnam, but with my ability to observe and remember going back to Nixon’s resignation and the OPEC oil crises, I had noticed a few things. Like some of the news clips of the end of the war in ’75, of refugees on aircraft carriers, pictures of B-52s destroying village after village and city after city. Not to mention, the iconic, Pulitzer Prize-winning 1972 photo “The Terror of War” by Nick Ut (also known as “Napalm Girl”), depicting a then nine-year-old, severely burned Kim Phúc, which I asked my Mom about a couple of years later. She didn’t give me an answer.

That’s what I knew in my little seven-year-old mind about Vietnam prior to moving to 616 in ’77. In the corner of our tripartite apartment building, living in a basement apartment of the “B” building, was a man who looked like Lamont Sanford to me. Except he wore a beat-up green Army jacket and green hat on his head most of the time. I often saw him come and go, where I didn’t know. I also saw parents who warned their kids to stay away from him, some young Turks who occasionally stopped the man to make fun of him, and kids who sometimes teased him for having served in Vietnam, parroting their parents, I guess.

The Vietnam veteran couldn’t have been more than thirty, but he moved like he was at least a decade older. It was as if he was afraid to move, to be outside, to be around life, the way he moved, or rather, lurked in his comings and goings. I mostly felt sad for him, because it seemed like no one wanted to bother themselves with his existence.

Demond Harris as Lamont Sanford standing next to Redd Foxx as Fred Sanford in midst of faux heart attack, Sanford and Son (1972-77), July 8. 2015. (http://gawker.com).

I witnessed his infrequent sojourns from his 616 apartment and back until sometime in late ’79, or early ’80, when I realized he had moved out. Given that I was hardly outside lurking myself those years, between being on lockdown for running away and Darren’s Clear View summer camps, it was amazing that I noticed his absence at all.

At the same time, during our (me and my older brother Darren’s) outings with my father between ’79 and ’81, I noticed that in his occasional stops at “Wino Park” (a mini-park on the corner of South Fulton and East Third in Mount Vernon), there were quite a few veterans in their late twenties or early thirties there. A typical Friday evening or Saturday afternoon outing could be spent watching Jimme and his drunk friends eat food they bought from the pit bbq joint across the street from the park while drinking beer, malt liquor, hard liquor, and cheap wine from paper bags. All while they took turns peeing on the rock face that jutted out on the side of the park, or around one of a handful of barren trees nearby.

The Vietnam veterans were the quietest people in the group. They were the ones who could laugh, but often didn’t, and rarely smiled. Sometimes, having to spend as long as an hour watching my father hang with these men, I found myself wondering about the man in his post-war uniform who used to live at 616. What happened to him? Did he take drugs? Was he really crazy? Did he drink in a semi-sullen silence and watch older drunks like my father make fools of themselves?

When there’s only either Wino Park or 240 East Third with Ida and Callie Mae to look forward to, wondering what happened to a silent veteran seemed like a much more useful activity. Of course, now we celebrate every veteran as a hero. Yet we don’t do nearly enough for veterans — for any Americans, really, much less the damage we do to the rest of the world in the name of America — who suffer from the wounds of war and life. We prefer to glorify or shun them all without thought, like the little narcissists we all are.

Fake History, Historians’ Fakery

09 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race

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A&E, Academic Historians, Academicians, American Heroes Channel, David Mallott, Discovery Communications, Documentaries, Eurocentric Perspective, Fake History, Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, H2, Historical Documentaries, History, History as Entertainment, Insomnia, Kenneth Branagh, Military History, Peter Coyote, Sleep Aids, Sleeping Pills, Thomas R. Martin, Thomas S. Burns, TV Series, TV Shows

Fake History Channel Twitter account, June 2012. (@NotHistory1).

For many of you, this will sound like a “been-there, done-that” kind of a post, but I’m posting anyway. It’s fairly evident Discovery Communications and A&E’s collection of history-related channels are meant for an older crowd of mostly White males with a hankering for military history, for big wars and powerful European (and occasionally Asian/Middle Eastern) men in history. H-History, H2 (soon to be Vice Channel), American Heroes Channel, and Military History are basically a collection of old and new-yet-rehashed documentaries on history that middle-aged and elderly White men can keep up with without ever feeling challenged by facts or different views on such facts. Especially when it comes to anything beyond the actual battlefields of World War II.

Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, regular snake-oil salesman on H2, History regarding Ancient Aliens, June 6, 2015. (tumblr.com).

I can only criticize the TV networks and their owners but so much, though. The fact is, the only reason I watch these channels is to fall asleep faster, after a long day, getting my hyper eleven-year-old son to bed, and after some prayer or finishing up some work. Because History and H2 now dip their toes into reality TV and dramatic TV series with Pawn Stars, Ancient Aliens, Vikings, and Texas Rising, I can’t use these useless shows to cure insomnia. In the past year, American Heroes Channel’s gotten into the act, with How We Got Here and America’s Most Badass, a regular portrayal of great White men (and occasionally, women) and their self-made, rugged individualism building a modern America with their bare hands and teeth.

The result is that I can’t fall asleep to these channels anymore. But for the past seven months, I’ve discovered a treasure chest of older or fairly recent documentaries on either Netflix or YouTube to watch, or rather, to watch me as I fall asleep. I listen for soothing narrators, like actors Peter Coyote, Avery Brooks, Keith David or Martin Sheen, or at least, British voices like Robert Powell or Kenneth Branagh.

I look for histories that I know all too well, boring enough to fall asleep to, but not so boring that it leaves me thinking about how poorly the producers did in putting together their documentary. So World War II in Colour, World War I in Colour, Barbarians, Barbarians II, Ancients Behaving Badly, Rome: Power and Glory, Engineering An Empire, Rome: Rise and Fall of an Empire, The Story of India, Islam: Empire of Faith, and The Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance have been my go-to sleeping pills since last Thanksgiving (I also fall asleep to Wild China, Lions in Battle, Aerial America, The Universe, How The Universe Works, Cosmos, the BBC Planet Earth series, and other, less problematic shows and documentaries). Other documentaries, like We Shall Remain (on the plight of Native Americans since 1607) or The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, would cause too much pain, anger or interest, blowing an opportunity for six-and-a-half hours of sleep or more for that night.

Thomas R. Martin, Jeremiah O’Connor Professor in Classics at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA, June 6, 2015. (http://www.historyseries.net).

So I tend to tolerate — but definitely do not accept — the ideas that the creators of these documentaries push. Like Rome being “the greatest empire the world has ever known” (the Mongols, the Hellenistic Greeks, the Arabs of the Dar al-Islam days, T’ang Dynasty China, Achaemenid Persia, even the British would all beg to differ) or Archimedes as the “greatest genius of the ancient world” (Imhotep’s probably saying, “Really now?!?”). That’s bullshit, of course, typical White and European navel-gazing. This is exactly why there’s no need for a White History Month or a college major in White Male Studies. As I often have that thought, I usually fall asleep, secure in the fact that this mythology would never make it into any class I teach.

Lately, though, I’ve noticed that some of the so-called academic historians that help move the story along in some of these documentaries. Some, like Thomas S. Burns (Emory University), Thomas R. Martin (College of the Holy Cross), and Robocop (1988) actor/historian Peter Weller (Syracuse University), all tell the story of ancient Rome’s rise and fall, or the medieval spread of smallpox and bubonic plague as if they actually lived through it. The assumptions they make about the people of 1,500 or 2,000 years ago are just staggering. It’s as if Rome and Western Europe had a monopoly on civilization, and that when Rome fell, a black cloud full of lightning bolts descended on the subcontinent like Hell itself, drowning it in invasion and sickness for half a millennium. Except that Spain (especially under the Moors), parts of Italy, southern France and Byzantine Europe weren’t exactly crying for a return to the glory days of 20,000 rich Roman families and 16 million slaves.

Krispy Kreme Hot Dogs at minor-league Wilmington (DE) Blue Rocks (consisting of glazed raspberry jelly donut, with hot dog, bacon and onions in between), April 16, 2015. (http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/18/living/gallery/hybrid-food-mashups/).

Others, like David B. Mallott, associate professor and associate dean at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, have applied modern-day thinking of social science — in his case, psychiatry — to their alleged analysis in these overly scripted documentaries. Describing someone like Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great as “bloodthirsty” isn’t exactly in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, is it, Dr. Mallott? And, given the historical context — a time without the UN Declaration of Human Rights or the Geneva Convention on the treatment of civilians or prisoners of war — would borderline personality disorder or schizophrenia with violent paranoid delusions really apply to Julius Caesar or Napoleon Bonaparte? Ugh!

If you’re going to entertain me, Discovery Communications or A&E, can you please do it without using the pretense of academic expertise as support for your grandiose mythologizing of historical events and the powerful Eurasian men involved? At least when the BBC and PBS do documentaries, they don’t just turn it over to geeks in the fifties and sixties to act out their preteen imaginations of what Rome must’ve been like two millennia ago. How can I continue to fall asleep to your shows and documentaries if you continue to exaggerate and lie and have academically trained hacks-for-historians and social scientists do the same, all in the name of entertainment?