Tag: History

Sympathy for the Devils.

The mystery of the grassy knoll has finally been solved, and the second shooter was…John Wilkes Booth?! For the first time in an age, I took advantage of the New York theater scene last night and caught the much-heralded revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins at the Roundabout Theatre, which chronicles the inner demons of Mssrs. Booth, Oswald, Hinckley, and assorted other murderers and would-be-murderers of presidents. All in all, I’d say I enjoyed it, although it took a musical number or two for me to warm to the material (some never made the leap — the guy next to me left outraged.) And there’s some memorable performances here, particularly Denis O’Hare as Charles Guiteau (Garfield’s assassin) and Michael Cerveris as Booth.

Still, the basic (and ahistorical) message of the play — that all assassins, whatever their surface motives, are just looking for a little happiness, a little love, and a little fame — was encapsulated much more succinctly by Peter Gabriel’s excellent “Family Snapshot” two decades ago. And, while I like that song and admire what this play was trying to be, this “everybody needs a hug” thesis is too reductively simplistic. Notwithstanding freak shows like Hinckley, assassination is by its very definition a political act, as is distressingly obvious to all of us given recent events in the Middle East. Sure, a lot of assassins are flat-out crazies…Hinckley, Mark David Chapman, Sirhan Sirhan. But others — Booth, Guiteau, Leon “McKinley” Czolgosz, James Earl Ray, Brutus — had a political agenda in mind that can’t be explained solely by “bad reviews” or a lack of affection as a child (which is perhaps why the Sondheim play ignores the Stalwart v. Halfbreed internecine strife propelling Guiteau to his foul deed.)

Still, if you can stomach the subject matter, Assassins is a moderately engaging fever dream rumination on American loneliness and presidential murder, replete with a sinister carnival barker and Moebius strip leaps in and out of historic continuity. Perhaps the most resonant effect in the play is that of the other assassins — eerie, floating, voiceless heads underlit to resemble Capt. Howdy in The Exorcist — watching their colleagues from the mists of History, or from the grave. Misery loves company, and from Cassius on, assassins just adore a conspiracy.

Prez Suicide, don’t do it!

“Sweet steel! Come forth from out your sheath, And glist’ning, speak your powers; Rip up the organs of my breath, And draw my blood in showers!” Historians learn more about Abraham Lincoln’s Reznor period with the discovery of his long-rumored suicide poem, published in 1838 (when Abe was 29.)

No man can serve two masters

, but he can hang them on the wall. I finally got around to picking up and framing my M.Phil, the boon of the orals experience, yesterday. Unfortunately, it may take a PhD to figure out — or care about — the difference between a Master of Arts in History and a Master of Philosophy in History. But, hey, two pieces of paper with my name on them…that’s gotta mean something, right?

Gipperpalooza.

So…you might’ve missed this little story in all the D-Day hullabaloo, but apparently former President Ronald Reagan died. Due to my cable issues, I’ve thankfully missed much of the canonization and hagiography of the past few days, although I’m sure the GOP will repeat it all at their upcoming convention anyway.

I know it’s bad form to speak ill of the recently deceased, so I’ll let others handle straightening the record about Ronnie’s not-so-stellar presidency. But, given all the revisionist history out and about at the moment, I do think this is a good time to consider the thesis of Reagan’s America by Garry Wills:

Much of Garry Wills’s argument in Reagan’s America can be encapsulated by George Costanza’s advice to Jerry Seinfeld, prior to Jerry’s being polygraphed about his Melrose Place viewing habits: “It’s not a lie if you believe it.” Over and over again, Wills scrutinizes the tales and myths told by Reagan about himself in his private speeches, public addresses, and autobiography, and finds them to be embellished, exaggerated, and – more often than not – patently false. And therein lies his uncanny appeal for so many people: Reagan’s myths are America’s myths…As Wills puts it, “the truth about [America’s] actual behavior, whether on the old frontier or the new, is as threatening to our sense of identity as the terrorist himself.” (452) And because Reagan believes so thoroughly in his own American myths, many Americans could join him in believing them as well…[Wills writes,] “Visiting Reaganland is very much like taking children to Disneyland…It is a safe past, with no sharp edges to stumble against. The more visits one makes to such a past, the better is one immunized against any troubling cursions of a real [American past.] If capitalist ‘conservatism’ canoot be rooted in the real past it works to obliterate, then it will invent a deracinating past, a nostalgia for the new, a substitute history to lull us in the time machine that travels on no roads, reaching goals no one could plan.” (459-460)

In sum, “Reagan gives our history the continuity of a celluloid Mobius strip. We rides its curves backwards and forwards at the same time, and he is always there.” (440) Put differently, the appeal of Ronald Reagan for so many is that he offers us a simulacrum of American history that is both appealingly mythic and appallingly untrue.

Well, at the very least, the effusive eulogizing going on right now may help topple barriers to stem-cell research. And, no matter what one’s political persuasion, I think we can all agree that helping to eliminate scourges like Alzheimer’s Disease would make a wonderful asset to Ronald Reagan’s legacy.

Not yet overcome.


“We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” As Brown v. Board turns 50, segregation persists, such that America’s schools are now barely as integrated as they were in 1969. Let’s get it together, y’all.

No Tenure for You.

Sean Wilentz reviews trained historian Condoleeza Rice’s sense of her field in light of her recent testimony, and finds her wanting. Notes Wilentz, “The American Historical Review’s notice of her first book, a study of Russia and the Czech army after 1948, charged that Rice ‘frequently does not sift facts from propaganda and valid information from disinformation or misinformation’ and that she ‘passes judgments and expresses opinions without adequate knowledge of the facts.’)” Well, dang, no wonder the Bushies jumped on hiring her for National Security Advisor…she sounds like a great fit.

Mission Compromised.


When writing about Touchstone’s new version of The Alamo, I find myself in a very similar situation as I was post-Hellboy. Part of me really wants to say nice things about this movie. The occasional film flourishes aside (such as Davy Crockett’s last stand), I think The Alamo for the most part tries to get the history right…Dennis Quaid’s Sam Houston is more a whiskey-doused speculator than American hero, Crockett is something of a congressman on the make, and there’s at least a nod to such ugly realities as American slavery and the land-grab nature of the whole Texian enterprise. Moreover, the Mexican view of the battle is also more fleshed out than we’ve come to expect in Alamo movies, even if Santa Anna is played like a straight-up Bond villain. Heck, compared to Gods & Generals, it’s like this movie was written by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky.

But, frankly, The Alamo turns out to be kinda dull through most of the middle hour. The set-up is well-done, the payoff is well-done (notwithstanding the twenty minute foray into the Battle of San Jacinto, which reminded me of the Doolittle Raid in Michael Bay’s lousy Pearl Harbor), but the twelve days of siege that comprise much of the movie is ultimately a bore. “Well, Col. Bowie, we’re all going to die.” “Yes sir, Lt. Col. Travis, that’s correct, we’re dead ducks. What do you think, Davy?” “I’m with you fellers. Mincemeat.” Part of the problem in this second act is that the film keeps slipping away from the history in favor of lapses into movie convention. We’ve got Davy Crockett and fiddle having their “King of the World” moment on the eve of the final battle. We’ve got the vaguely rousing “we will go down in history” speech by Travis. We’ve got Jason Patric — surely, the only actor who’s been poised on the brink of the big time longer than Billy Crudup — dying of consumption for interminable stretches, with all the deathbed movie tropes that entails. (Jim Bowie’s bout with sickness holds very little dramatic impact, given that we know he’s on the way out anyway.) For almost all of this section of the film, even as a history buff, I was fidgeting for the big battle to start, and I couldn’t help thinking (and feeling guilty about it) that all of this men-under-siege grimness was done better a year ago in The Two Towers.

Yet, the one major respite from the middle hour’s blandness is Billy Bob Thornton as Davy (“He prefers David”) Crockett. While Sam Houston is sidelined, William Travis is a (pretty good) unknown, and Jim Bowie is moaning and clutching the sheets, Billy Bob’s Crockett is just trying to keep his chin up, and he’s the only character here who seems both realistic and larger-than-life. Throughout the film, even when forced into the most goofy lines or plot devices, Billy Bob/Crockett has a grim, self-deprecating smile on his face that says both “Can you believe it? I’m Davy Crockett!” and “How the hell did I end up dying in this backwater mission?” And some of the best sequences in the film involve Davy ruminating on his own myth, or remembering his days as an Indian fighter. In sum, Billy Bob is so good here that I spent most of the film contemplating who else I’d cast alongside Thornton for the definitive American History miniseries. Christopher Walken as 1850 Henry Clay? Fred Thompson as James Buchanan? Adrien Brody as Mexican War-era Lincoln? The possibilities are endless.