Book Reviews: Stuck in the 19th Century
Dec. 10th, 2010 09:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sunnyskywalkerI haven't had much time for fun reading lately, but these were fairly quick and pretty interesting.
The Alienist by Caleb Carr
My sister recommended this one. Set in New York of 1896, it follows a band of detectives - a reporter, a woman working in the police station, a couple of Jewish forensics experts, and an alienist (psychologist) who employs former murderers (but they had good reasons!) - set about inventing criminal profiling to catch a serial killer preying on young boy prostitutes. Oh, and they have to do this in secret, because as much as Police Commissioner Teddy Roosevelt is enjoying reforming the corrupt police department, this kind of investigation is so new that even he wouldn't get away with it unless they can deliver results. Basically it's like Criminal Minds: The Previous Generation.
The best part is the history. You really get a sense of 1896 New York - what it looked (and smelled) like, which were the posh restaurants, what contemporary mores made of prepubescent child prostitutes (totally their own fault, those wicked sinners), and what theories in science and psychology were hot. Dr. Laszlo Kreizler is on the forefront of the idea that maybe sometimes traumas in one's past influence present behavior in ways a person doesn't choose 100% consciously. Not that he has our names for PTSD or the various personality-warping effects, but you can see modern psychology shaping up. They also have some wild, unproven new techniques like comparing fingerprints, and cliques of Irish cops and the henchmen of powerful men occasionally muck things up, so it's a lot of fun. There's also a nice undermining of our expectations when a person of interest's backstory involving "kidnap! by savage Indians!" ends up with the truth being, "Uh, no. Even if they did things this way, which they don't, they wouldn't be this far east. Someone is just using people's prejudices to his advantage."
That said, I'm tiring of entertainment which relies on finding ever more gruesome way to have fictional people murdered. Whatever happened to bank robberies and dastardly political conspiracies with low body counts? Can't we profile a crooked railroad baron for once? And no more than one body turns up mysteriously, neatly and quickly executed? Plus the book features a refrigerated woman, which is also getting old.
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson
Since this one involves a serial killer in 1893 Chicago, but is nonfiction, it makes a good companion to The Alienist. The chapters alternate between two plots: in one, various dudes try to put together the Chicago World's Fair against all odds; in the other, a charming young man calling himself Dr. H.H. Holmes has an inordinate number of women disappear around him. Especially in his hotel while people are pouring into town for the fair. The hotel he built to his own design, which explains the soundproof vaults, secret gas lines, cremation furnace... The Fair part has a lot of interesting tidbits, from the landscape architect's obsession with a more natural landscape look to cameos by people like Mark Twain (who was sick during his whole visit and couldn't go to the Fair) to Walt Disney's dad to the search for a counter to France's Eiffel Tower, which ends with this guy Ferris who wants to build a really big wheel. The story of how they essentially built a whole city - albeit a temporary, Disney-before-Disney fake one - in just a couple years is also pretty interesting.
What was disappointing was the lack of follow-through on the themes I saw in the introduction. Much is made of how this Fair is so much about national and city pride, a kind of obsession with image, even if it means a false one (like the false buildings which only look real)... and then when it comes time to compare the results with Holmes also building up his image to impress people and lure them in, we get, "Neato, zippers and dancing girls!" Now, granted they weren't trying to line people up for slaughter at the World's Fair... but on the other hand, people died. The author goes so far as to call them victims of the Fair. He mentions how construction workers died in horrible accidents, workers had to keep building in horrible weather, safety issues got overlooked in the rush, and workers were constantly threatening to strike over the conditions and wages - yet doesn't spend much time on any of this. He mentions that the recession made the World's Fair one of the best/only employers around and so the workers don't have as much leverage as they might, but doesn't really compare that to Holmes also taking advantage of others' vulnerability by at first offering what looks like a good deal. And he mentions that the Fair ending leads to a collapse in the local job market, but pretty much abandons that train of thought at once. I guess potential economic predation is not as exciting as imagining young women screaming in soundproof vaults with acid on the floor or girls locked in a trunk for hours before being killed? And he does imagine these scenes, in great detail. But never bothers imagining a scene for one of those hard-up workers taking a job at the Fair, thinking he's lucky, and then dying in a horrible accident. He doesn't go into the lives of the firemen who died due to poor communication and lack of safety precautions. Just the pretty girls.
The white ones, that is. He also mentions that whole villages were shipped in from other continents, residents and all hired to be entertainment, but not why ordinary people from Algeria & etc. were willing to travel halfway around the world to be gawked at by strangers. Were they that hard up for money? Did anyone ever misrepresent the deal to them? Did they think it would be an adventure? Or maybe an opportunity for international diplomacy? Larson goes into all sorts of real and imagined detail about why various young women wanted to travel to big cities in the 1890s, but none for why these Fair workers picked their travel plans. And what happened to them afterward? He mentions that one belly dancer might have been the same girl popping out of a cake at some famous party a few years later, and that's it. If we're going to get novelistic detail about what Holmes's victims might have been thinking in their last moments, can't we get a few more sentences about what might have happened to what looks like hundreds of people lured to the Fair for six months' work and then possibly abandoned in a strange land? How might one go from just living in Egypt minding one's own business to popping out of a cake in the US? And given that the other belly-dancing girls apparently disappear from the historical record, for all we know, instead of going home or getting a job somewhere else, they could have ended up just like the girls Holmes lured into his hotel. He wasn't the only killer in Chicago, after all, and someone might have figured no one would miss a foreign dancing girl.
Plus there's the massive defoliation of various places to bring in plants for the landscaping, the millions of dollars sunk into the Fair, and the boost to the national ego in a very specific, colonialist way (the world is ours to hire villages of exotic people to gawk at! plus we have superior technology to everyone!) which makes you remember that the Spanish-American War is coming up in just a few years. And he keeps mentioning the great economic benefit of the massive pig-slaughtering operations in Chicago, but only in connection to Holmes. The Fair had some good consequences (automatic dishwashers!), but if you're going to write a whole book paralleling the Fair with a serial killer, why not actually draw some parallels? If the author had just been going for "serial killer bad, White city good, opposites are opposite" that would have been one thing, but he said the Fair had victims, and hinted at some darker aftereffects, so I expected him to talk about that.
I'd still recommend it, but if you also think the story of the Fair's domestic and imported workers would be interesting, expect to feel a bit cheated.
Climb the Wind: A Novel of Another America by Pamela Sargent
Lemuel Rowland, formerly Poneshao of the Seneca but raised by whites, finds himself drawn into a vast movement to unite all the Plains tribes under Chief Touch-the-Clouds and kick the United States so hard they won't come back. He's torn, since he fought in the Union Army, and he's disturbed by how brutal Touch-the-Clouds and co. can be, but he also does not like the idea of a bunch of railroad barons forcing their way onto the Plains for fun and profit, bringing gold miners and settlers and soldiers along to kill all the Indians. He also thinks the Indian confederation can't possibly win... although those rockets their secret Chinese engineers have cooked up will make it a much harder fight...
This is another book I felt didn't quite live up to its promise. We hop around through many viewpoints, which is fine - but it feels more like we're just being dragged to whomever's eyes are in the right place at the right time than actually following characters. At one point Rowland wants revenge, and thinks that unfortunately an atrocity might be just the thing to turn local whites against the US - but we only find out later that oh, by the way, he got his wish when the building he was in was bombed and 300 people died. And we never hear his perspective on that event. Even though he's one of the main characters. WTF? We randomly dip into one of the Chinese engineers' heads near the end, for no reason other than to admire the rockets, but not to add anything other than "whee, they work great! just like always!" Even non-PoV characters get this treatment: one, a free black man named Virgil, is Rowland's friend and goes to join the Sioux because he hears they treat blacks the same as anyone else. We could have just stopped there and assumed he lived happily ever after, or conversely showed some kind of arc for him. Instead he pops up a bit later living in a cabin, says hi, invites Calamity Jane over for some company, and then we don't hear from them again for ages. They pop up again for a couple pages, now friends, just in time to see Bismarck, SD having some trouble - which we already saw, from another POV. And they're kind of mentioned later as existing. But they never really get developed as characters, nor do they add any real information to the story after Jane leaves the 7th Cavalry, nor do they even demonstrate any trends (Virgil is apparently the only black man living in a cabin on Indian land), so what was the point?
So basically you just get jerked around to whatever set-pieces the author wants you to see, or to... well, I don't even know for what purpose sometimes. It's just like how in-story characters get jerked around by the Sinister and Mysterious Russian Who Is Probably an Arms Dealer and who seems to have contacts and influence everywhere. Yes, really. He's an Alaskan Russian maybe-arms dealer with an Aleut grandma, at least? Not that that ever really makes much difference to anything.
The alternate history scenario itself was really interesting, though! I particularly liked Touch-the-Clouds hiring Edison so his people could get some of these talking wires for themselves, and the voice-recording gadget so everyone can hear what was really said in treaty conferences... Using the Black Hills gold to finance arms deals and bribes and material for Chinese rockets was a neat idea, and she showed how conflicted they might be over that decision given that the Black Hills are sacred. (Some reason that the gold is a gift to them to help drive off the whites, and others think that the spirits don't like any mining, period.) The Union holding off on major Indian wars for a while due to a resurgent South and various financial troubles, leading to independent Texas and California when they don't get anything out of this Union deal, was neat. I do wish we knew whether President Grant getting run over by a carriage was an accident or an assassination, though, especially given the chain of events it set in motion.
Also, the author mentions a quote about how things might have been different with an Indian Genghis Khan to unite the tribes, and gives a relatively minor historical Lakota that role... but why reinvent the wheel when there really was such a figure? Tecumseh did create an intertribal confederation to drive the whites back. Why not start there and, say, assume Tenskwatawa did better at the battle of Tippecanoe? And then they used the War of 1812 to their advantage better somehow? It was more interesting than the short and boring account in high school history books would have you believe. Were there not enough tipis and warbonnets for the author in that scenario? (A lot of Americans forget that the Plains nations aren't the only Native peoples.)
Or to really really shake things up, you could have a prologue wherein Leif Erikson and co. accidentally bring smallpox etc. to the Americas centuries early. Then when European colonists start showing up in earnest, the Indians have had time to build up resistance to their disease pool. Cortes gets himself killed down in Mexico, because the Aztecs stay healthy and united. The Pilgrims, instead of landing on the site of a village totally wiped out by disease, have to make nice with the residents of Patuxet. And then what?
The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America by Susan Faludi
After 9/11, Faludi got a call from a journalist who tried to get her to say that the tragedy proved feminism was wrong. She wasn't the only one - editorials popped up everywhere saying that this showed macho manly manliness was the only way to go, and those sensitive women should just shut up and let the men do the men's jobs. And she thought, what's that got to do with anything? That male victims in the WTC outnumbered female 3:1 showed that there wasn't equality in the workforce, and it's not like the terrorists were angry liberated women. They might have been angry about the idea of liberated women, in fact. The New York City Fire Department had one of the lowest percentages of female firefighters around, but that didn't stop over 300 buff, macho men from dying, because all the weightlifting in the world won't save you from a collapsing skyscraper. The men who ignored the fire department's faulty radios for 8 years were, well, men, and they didn't donate money to feminist causes instead of buying new radios. So what gives?
She looks at the stories that got told - and that didn't. We didn't hear much about the female rescue worker who got dozens of people to safety and then died herself, or the women who helped dig their colleagues out of the rubble. We didn't hear much about the faulty radios for years. We didn't hear the firefighters who said they were just as much scared, helpless victims as anyone else in the towers. We didn't hear why the fire department's budget got slashed after 9/11, or why they still weren't getting decent anti-terrorism training or even equipment for years afterward. We didn't hear about Jessica Lynch's best friend Lori, who picked her up when her convoy got abandoned and who was the first Hopi woman to die as a US soldier. (She even named her daughter after Lori.)
We did hear that the firemen were totally buff and women everywhere wanted to date them - even though this didn't actually pan out as a big trend. We got pictures of men carrying women (well, a woman) out of the buildings, even though men carrying men would have been more representative, and they had to do some searching for the "right" pictures. And we got endless stories about how women everywhere were fleeing the workplace and politics and all that icky man stuff to stay home and have babies, and there was going to be a marriage and baby boom any day now... even though the data didn't bear this out. Pundits did elaborate mental backbends to explain how Those People were jealous of our freedoms, so naturally we should... take away our women's freedoms to show how free we are? The Afghan women were oppressed for being forced to stay home and not have any power, but our women were bitches for wanting to leave home and maybe have some power, so we should repeal laws that help them do that so we'll be more like the Taliban? Huh?
She analyzes the story of Jessica Lynch, and the stories people wanted to hear about Jessica Lynch. Interviews with the surgeon and nurses suggest they took excellent care of her - using one of their only metal plates to fix her bones, putting her on their only specially-designed bed to prevent bedsores, bringing her home-cooked food and the nurse's own clothes, and trying to give her back to the Americans several times before the Americans finally came in to rescue her. The story of them trying to take Jessica in an ambulance to American forces, only to be shot at because the Americans couldn't tell who was an enemy and who wasn't, could have been played as tragic irony... but it got ignored, instead, as did the parts about US soldiers kicking down hospital doors when doctors were trying to hand them the keys. Jessica herself confirms that she only remembers good treatment. Yet for some reason, all the media wanted to talk about was how surely her injuries weren't from being thrown from a Humvee, but from being horribly tortured and raped. Never mind the surgeon who said being raped after the crash would have killed her, or that Jessica didn't remember any such thing. Everyone wanted to hear the story of how the delicate, fragile white girl was raped by savages, even if it hardly had a shred of evidence to support it. What's up with that?
And here's where the 19th-century link comes in. Faludi analyzes the rhetoric used during these years, and finds a striking obsession with Wild West comparisons. Presidents are tough like John Wayne, fighting in Afghanistan is like cowboys and Indians, and people keep explicitly making these comparisons and citing Westerns like High Noon to support that tough cowboy image as a Good American Thing Which Will Make Us Win. Which is a bit weird, given that the actual cowboys and Indians period was - what, about 30 years? Out of centuries of US history?
So she goes further back. Some of the earliest bestsellers in the colonies/US? Captivity narratives, especially those by/about captured women. Faludi doesn't press the point about the various Indian raids and captures being retaliation for the white settlers' colonial policies, focusing instead on how the white settlers framed their problem. And that was that towns and families were never, ever safe, because at any minute they could be attacked by terrorists, and there was usually nothing they could do about it. (Metacom's Rebellion burned, like, a third of New England.) The terrorists wouldn't form up into nations with defined boundaries and stand in lines to be shot, like gentlemen, but would hit and run and you could never tell which locals were friendly and which were planning to attack. Well, that sounds familiar... And the captivity narratives reveal a whole bunch of helpless men: they're too far away to help, or fell asleep on watch, or get scared and run away. Sometimes the women rescue themselves - Mrs. Rowlandson negotiated her own ransom, and shortly into her captivity Hannah Dustin killed and scalped ten Indians (including children) and then went home to collect the bounty. Worse yet, sometimes the women didn't want to come home.
The colonists freaked out about this, as you might imagine, and started trying to rewrite the narrative to get things back under control. You can tell they've got bees in their bonnets by the way they focus on captured women even though there were actually probably more captured men. But that feeling of helplessness had to go - so instead of not being able to do anything about the captures, they could make it a happy ending where they saved the captives! And whom could these men save but people weaker than themselves - ie, women and children? Yes, that's it, they're capturing our helpless women to rape them, but we'll save the women's chastity! And if the real women kept not cooperating by rescuing themselves or by happily marrying Indian men and refusing to come home, well, then we'll just have to ignore or rewrite that. Literally, since some captivity narratives get plagiarized for later stories in which all the parts where women handle anything get left out and the men suddenly get competent and rescue them. And this rewriting kept up as colonists moved further and further west, onto the Plains, were homesteads were often isolated, easy targets. The US spent decades and millions of dollars trying to kill the Plains Indians and round up the survivors onto nice, defined reservations where they could keep an eye on them, instead of having them wander who-knows-where to strike again.
So, yeah, no wonder everyone kept talking like they popped out of a Western dime novel after centuries of this scenario. And if the only way to feel in control of a situation in which you are helpless is to force women to be so weak that you can actually manage to rescue them, then by golly, a man's got to do what a man's got to do.
Now, where this whole pathology came from in the first place - because it existed before Europeans started colonizing the Americas, but just got massively reinforced over the years - is not something Faludi answers. (Also, do women tell stories about rescuing babies to make themselves feel less helpless in bad times, or is this a guy thing? No idea, and I think that would be relevant.) Although really, how could you answer that question? What she does is trace how this narrative developed and got reinforced over time, and how the backlash that seemed to come out of left field after 9/11 was, in fact, a continuation of that deeply-ingrained narrative.
The Alienist by Caleb Carr
My sister recommended this one. Set in New York of 1896, it follows a band of detectives - a reporter, a woman working in the police station, a couple of Jewish forensics experts, and an alienist (psychologist) who employs former murderers (but they had good reasons!) - set about inventing criminal profiling to catch a serial killer preying on young boy prostitutes. Oh, and they have to do this in secret, because as much as Police Commissioner Teddy Roosevelt is enjoying reforming the corrupt police department, this kind of investigation is so new that even he wouldn't get away with it unless they can deliver results. Basically it's like Criminal Minds: The Previous Generation.
The best part is the history. You really get a sense of 1896 New York - what it looked (and smelled) like, which were the posh restaurants, what contemporary mores made of prepubescent child prostitutes (totally their own fault, those wicked sinners), and what theories in science and psychology were hot. Dr. Laszlo Kreizler is on the forefront of the idea that maybe sometimes traumas in one's past influence present behavior in ways a person doesn't choose 100% consciously. Not that he has our names for PTSD or the various personality-warping effects, but you can see modern psychology shaping up. They also have some wild, unproven new techniques like comparing fingerprints, and cliques of Irish cops and the henchmen of powerful men occasionally muck things up, so it's a lot of fun. There's also a nice undermining of our expectations when a person of interest's backstory involving "kidnap! by savage Indians!" ends up with the truth being, "Uh, no. Even if they did things this way, which they don't, they wouldn't be this far east. Someone is just using people's prejudices to his advantage."
That said, I'm tiring of entertainment which relies on finding ever more gruesome way to have fictional people murdered. Whatever happened to bank robberies and dastardly political conspiracies with low body counts? Can't we profile a crooked railroad baron for once? And no more than one body turns up mysteriously, neatly and quickly executed? Plus the book features a refrigerated woman, which is also getting old.
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson
Since this one involves a serial killer in 1893 Chicago, but is nonfiction, it makes a good companion to The Alienist. The chapters alternate between two plots: in one, various dudes try to put together the Chicago World's Fair against all odds; in the other, a charming young man calling himself Dr. H.H. Holmes has an inordinate number of women disappear around him. Especially in his hotel while people are pouring into town for the fair. The hotel he built to his own design, which explains the soundproof vaults, secret gas lines, cremation furnace... The Fair part has a lot of interesting tidbits, from the landscape architect's obsession with a more natural landscape look to cameos by people like Mark Twain (who was sick during his whole visit and couldn't go to the Fair) to Walt Disney's dad to the search for a counter to France's Eiffel Tower, which ends with this guy Ferris who wants to build a really big wheel. The story of how they essentially built a whole city - albeit a temporary, Disney-before-Disney fake one - in just a couple years is also pretty interesting.
What was disappointing was the lack of follow-through on the themes I saw in the introduction. Much is made of how this Fair is so much about national and city pride, a kind of obsession with image, even if it means a false one (like the false buildings which only look real)... and then when it comes time to compare the results with Holmes also building up his image to impress people and lure them in, we get, "Neato, zippers and dancing girls!" Now, granted they weren't trying to line people up for slaughter at the World's Fair... but on the other hand, people died. The author goes so far as to call them victims of the Fair. He mentions how construction workers died in horrible accidents, workers had to keep building in horrible weather, safety issues got overlooked in the rush, and workers were constantly threatening to strike over the conditions and wages - yet doesn't spend much time on any of this. He mentions that the recession made the World's Fair one of the best/only employers around and so the workers don't have as much leverage as they might, but doesn't really compare that to Holmes also taking advantage of others' vulnerability by at first offering what looks like a good deal. And he mentions that the Fair ending leads to a collapse in the local job market, but pretty much abandons that train of thought at once. I guess potential economic predation is not as exciting as imagining young women screaming in soundproof vaults with acid on the floor or girls locked in a trunk for hours before being killed? And he does imagine these scenes, in great detail. But never bothers imagining a scene for one of those hard-up workers taking a job at the Fair, thinking he's lucky, and then dying in a horrible accident. He doesn't go into the lives of the firemen who died due to poor communication and lack of safety precautions. Just the pretty girls.
The white ones, that is. He also mentions that whole villages were shipped in from other continents, residents and all hired to be entertainment, but not why ordinary people from Algeria & etc. were willing to travel halfway around the world to be gawked at by strangers. Were they that hard up for money? Did anyone ever misrepresent the deal to them? Did they think it would be an adventure? Or maybe an opportunity for international diplomacy? Larson goes into all sorts of real and imagined detail about why various young women wanted to travel to big cities in the 1890s, but none for why these Fair workers picked their travel plans. And what happened to them afterward? He mentions that one belly dancer might have been the same girl popping out of a cake at some famous party a few years later, and that's it. If we're going to get novelistic detail about what Holmes's victims might have been thinking in their last moments, can't we get a few more sentences about what might have happened to what looks like hundreds of people lured to the Fair for six months' work and then possibly abandoned in a strange land? How might one go from just living in Egypt minding one's own business to popping out of a cake in the US? And given that the other belly-dancing girls apparently disappear from the historical record, for all we know, instead of going home or getting a job somewhere else, they could have ended up just like the girls Holmes lured into his hotel. He wasn't the only killer in Chicago, after all, and someone might have figured no one would miss a foreign dancing girl.
Plus there's the massive defoliation of various places to bring in plants for the landscaping, the millions of dollars sunk into the Fair, and the boost to the national ego in a very specific, colonialist way (the world is ours to hire villages of exotic people to gawk at! plus we have superior technology to everyone!) which makes you remember that the Spanish-American War is coming up in just a few years. And he keeps mentioning the great economic benefit of the massive pig-slaughtering operations in Chicago, but only in connection to Holmes. The Fair had some good consequences (automatic dishwashers!), but if you're going to write a whole book paralleling the Fair with a serial killer, why not actually draw some parallels? If the author had just been going for "serial killer bad, White city good, opposites are opposite" that would have been one thing, but he said the Fair had victims, and hinted at some darker aftereffects, so I expected him to talk about that.
I'd still recommend it, but if you also think the story of the Fair's domestic and imported workers would be interesting, expect to feel a bit cheated.
Climb the Wind: A Novel of Another America by Pamela Sargent
Lemuel Rowland, formerly Poneshao of the Seneca but raised by whites, finds himself drawn into a vast movement to unite all the Plains tribes under Chief Touch-the-Clouds and kick the United States so hard they won't come back. He's torn, since he fought in the Union Army, and he's disturbed by how brutal Touch-the-Clouds and co. can be, but he also does not like the idea of a bunch of railroad barons forcing their way onto the Plains for fun and profit, bringing gold miners and settlers and soldiers along to kill all the Indians. He also thinks the Indian confederation can't possibly win... although those rockets their secret Chinese engineers have cooked up will make it a much harder fight...
This is another book I felt didn't quite live up to its promise. We hop around through many viewpoints, which is fine - but it feels more like we're just being dragged to whomever's eyes are in the right place at the right time than actually following characters. At one point Rowland wants revenge, and thinks that unfortunately an atrocity might be just the thing to turn local whites against the US - but we only find out later that oh, by the way, he got his wish when the building he was in was bombed and 300 people died. And we never hear his perspective on that event. Even though he's one of the main characters. WTF? We randomly dip into one of the Chinese engineers' heads near the end, for no reason other than to admire the rockets, but not to add anything other than "whee, they work great! just like always!" Even non-PoV characters get this treatment: one, a free black man named Virgil, is Rowland's friend and goes to join the Sioux because he hears they treat blacks the same as anyone else. We could have just stopped there and assumed he lived happily ever after, or conversely showed some kind of arc for him. Instead he pops up a bit later living in a cabin, says hi, invites Calamity Jane over for some company, and then we don't hear from them again for ages. They pop up again for a couple pages, now friends, just in time to see Bismarck, SD having some trouble - which we already saw, from another POV. And they're kind of mentioned later as existing. But they never really get developed as characters, nor do they add any real information to the story after Jane leaves the 7th Cavalry, nor do they even demonstrate any trends (Virgil is apparently the only black man living in a cabin on Indian land), so what was the point?
So basically you just get jerked around to whatever set-pieces the author wants you to see, or to... well, I don't even know for what purpose sometimes. It's just like how in-story characters get jerked around by the Sinister and Mysterious Russian Who Is Probably an Arms Dealer and who seems to have contacts and influence everywhere. Yes, really. He's an Alaskan Russian maybe-arms dealer with an Aleut grandma, at least? Not that that ever really makes much difference to anything.
The alternate history scenario itself was really interesting, though! I particularly liked Touch-the-Clouds hiring Edison so his people could get some of these talking wires for themselves, and the voice-recording gadget so everyone can hear what was really said in treaty conferences... Using the Black Hills gold to finance arms deals and bribes and material for Chinese rockets was a neat idea, and she showed how conflicted they might be over that decision given that the Black Hills are sacred. (Some reason that the gold is a gift to them to help drive off the whites, and others think that the spirits don't like any mining, period.) The Union holding off on major Indian wars for a while due to a resurgent South and various financial troubles, leading to independent Texas and California when they don't get anything out of this Union deal, was neat. I do wish we knew whether President Grant getting run over by a carriage was an accident or an assassination, though, especially given the chain of events it set in motion.
Also, the author mentions a quote about how things might have been different with an Indian Genghis Khan to unite the tribes, and gives a relatively minor historical Lakota that role... but why reinvent the wheel when there really was such a figure? Tecumseh did create an intertribal confederation to drive the whites back. Why not start there and, say, assume Tenskwatawa did better at the battle of Tippecanoe? And then they used the War of 1812 to their advantage better somehow? It was more interesting than the short and boring account in high school history books would have you believe. Were there not enough tipis and warbonnets for the author in that scenario? (A lot of Americans forget that the Plains nations aren't the only Native peoples.)
Or to really really shake things up, you could have a prologue wherein Leif Erikson and co. accidentally bring smallpox etc. to the Americas centuries early. Then when European colonists start showing up in earnest, the Indians have had time to build up resistance to their disease pool. Cortes gets himself killed down in Mexico, because the Aztecs stay healthy and united. The Pilgrims, instead of landing on the site of a village totally wiped out by disease, have to make nice with the residents of Patuxet. And then what?
The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America by Susan Faludi
After 9/11, Faludi got a call from a journalist who tried to get her to say that the tragedy proved feminism was wrong. She wasn't the only one - editorials popped up everywhere saying that this showed macho manly manliness was the only way to go, and those sensitive women should just shut up and let the men do the men's jobs. And she thought, what's that got to do with anything? That male victims in the WTC outnumbered female 3:1 showed that there wasn't equality in the workforce, and it's not like the terrorists were angry liberated women. They might have been angry about the idea of liberated women, in fact. The New York City Fire Department had one of the lowest percentages of female firefighters around, but that didn't stop over 300 buff, macho men from dying, because all the weightlifting in the world won't save you from a collapsing skyscraper. The men who ignored the fire department's faulty radios for 8 years were, well, men, and they didn't donate money to feminist causes instead of buying new radios. So what gives?
She looks at the stories that got told - and that didn't. We didn't hear much about the female rescue worker who got dozens of people to safety and then died herself, or the women who helped dig their colleagues out of the rubble. We didn't hear much about the faulty radios for years. We didn't hear the firefighters who said they were just as much scared, helpless victims as anyone else in the towers. We didn't hear why the fire department's budget got slashed after 9/11, or why they still weren't getting decent anti-terrorism training or even equipment for years afterward. We didn't hear about Jessica Lynch's best friend Lori, who picked her up when her convoy got abandoned and who was the first Hopi woman to die as a US soldier. (She even named her daughter after Lori.)
We did hear that the firemen were totally buff and women everywhere wanted to date them - even though this didn't actually pan out as a big trend. We got pictures of men carrying women (well, a woman) out of the buildings, even though men carrying men would have been more representative, and they had to do some searching for the "right" pictures. And we got endless stories about how women everywhere were fleeing the workplace and politics and all that icky man stuff to stay home and have babies, and there was going to be a marriage and baby boom any day now... even though the data didn't bear this out. Pundits did elaborate mental backbends to explain how Those People were jealous of our freedoms, so naturally we should... take away our women's freedoms to show how free we are? The Afghan women were oppressed for being forced to stay home and not have any power, but our women were bitches for wanting to leave home and maybe have some power, so we should repeal laws that help them do that so we'll be more like the Taliban? Huh?
She analyzes the story of Jessica Lynch, and the stories people wanted to hear about Jessica Lynch. Interviews with the surgeon and nurses suggest they took excellent care of her - using one of their only metal plates to fix her bones, putting her on their only specially-designed bed to prevent bedsores, bringing her home-cooked food and the nurse's own clothes, and trying to give her back to the Americans several times before the Americans finally came in to rescue her. The story of them trying to take Jessica in an ambulance to American forces, only to be shot at because the Americans couldn't tell who was an enemy and who wasn't, could have been played as tragic irony... but it got ignored, instead, as did the parts about US soldiers kicking down hospital doors when doctors were trying to hand them the keys. Jessica herself confirms that she only remembers good treatment. Yet for some reason, all the media wanted to talk about was how surely her injuries weren't from being thrown from a Humvee, but from being horribly tortured and raped. Never mind the surgeon who said being raped after the crash would have killed her, or that Jessica didn't remember any such thing. Everyone wanted to hear the story of how the delicate, fragile white girl was raped by savages, even if it hardly had a shred of evidence to support it. What's up with that?
And here's where the 19th-century link comes in. Faludi analyzes the rhetoric used during these years, and finds a striking obsession with Wild West comparisons. Presidents are tough like John Wayne, fighting in Afghanistan is like cowboys and Indians, and people keep explicitly making these comparisons and citing Westerns like High Noon to support that tough cowboy image as a Good American Thing Which Will Make Us Win. Which is a bit weird, given that the actual cowboys and Indians period was - what, about 30 years? Out of centuries of US history?
So she goes further back. Some of the earliest bestsellers in the colonies/US? Captivity narratives, especially those by/about captured women. Faludi doesn't press the point about the various Indian raids and captures being retaliation for the white settlers' colonial policies, focusing instead on how the white settlers framed their problem. And that was that towns and families were never, ever safe, because at any minute they could be attacked by terrorists, and there was usually nothing they could do about it. (Metacom's Rebellion burned, like, a third of New England.) The terrorists wouldn't form up into nations with defined boundaries and stand in lines to be shot, like gentlemen, but would hit and run and you could never tell which locals were friendly and which were planning to attack. Well, that sounds familiar... And the captivity narratives reveal a whole bunch of helpless men: they're too far away to help, or fell asleep on watch, or get scared and run away. Sometimes the women rescue themselves - Mrs. Rowlandson negotiated her own ransom, and shortly into her captivity Hannah Dustin killed and scalped ten Indians (including children) and then went home to collect the bounty. Worse yet, sometimes the women didn't want to come home.
The colonists freaked out about this, as you might imagine, and started trying to rewrite the narrative to get things back under control. You can tell they've got bees in their bonnets by the way they focus on captured women even though there were actually probably more captured men. But that feeling of helplessness had to go - so instead of not being able to do anything about the captures, they could make it a happy ending where they saved the captives! And whom could these men save but people weaker than themselves - ie, women and children? Yes, that's it, they're capturing our helpless women to rape them, but we'll save the women's chastity! And if the real women kept not cooperating by rescuing themselves or by happily marrying Indian men and refusing to come home, well, then we'll just have to ignore or rewrite that. Literally, since some captivity narratives get plagiarized for later stories in which all the parts where women handle anything get left out and the men suddenly get competent and rescue them. And this rewriting kept up as colonists moved further and further west, onto the Plains, were homesteads were often isolated, easy targets. The US spent decades and millions of dollars trying to kill the Plains Indians and round up the survivors onto nice, defined reservations where they could keep an eye on them, instead of having them wander who-knows-where to strike again.
So, yeah, no wonder everyone kept talking like they popped out of a Western dime novel after centuries of this scenario. And if the only way to feel in control of a situation in which you are helpless is to force women to be so weak that you can actually manage to rescue them, then by golly, a man's got to do what a man's got to do.
Now, where this whole pathology came from in the first place - because it existed before Europeans started colonizing the Americas, but just got massively reinforced over the years - is not something Faludi answers. (Also, do women tell stories about rescuing babies to make themselves feel less helpless in bad times, or is this a guy thing? No idea, and I think that would be relevant.) Although really, how could you answer that question? What she does is trace how this narrative developed and got reinforced over time, and how the backlash that seemed to come out of left field after 9/11 was, in fact, a continuation of that deeply-ingrained narrative.
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-11 01:36 am (UTC)Re: Alt history, I guess if you want an Indian Genghis Khan, you want him to have a cavalry-based army, so you go for the Plains Indians over Tecumseh…
Problem with doing a ‘smallpox comes early’ alt-history is that it’s such a radical change that after the first few decades, you’re effectively writing fantasy. No reason that, without a thriving Spanish Empire to make colonization look like a good idea, that there’s even going to be Pilgrims a few centuries later – the Americas end up more like Africa or Asia, small European trading posts and deals with native nations, full scale colonization only in the nineteenth century… Be fun, but I can understand why writers prefer to stick to more limited and predictable changes.
Re: cultural narratives – I have a vague theory that, being a revolutionary nation, Americans define their nation primarily through struggle; I don’t think there’s a strong concept of what a peacetime America looks like. I think that reinforces some of the issues in American culture – if you identify your society as being in a constant struggle against the forces of darkness and despair, you end up endorsing a very masculine, militarised concept of society. Weakness cannot be tolerated, and even the principles of liberal democracy start to look suspect when you’re engaged in a life or death struggle for supremacy against the British/Indians/Kraut/Commies/Whoever…
I think the decline of American hegemony is the only thing that will let the society work out these issues – assuming it can survive such a decline.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-11 06:05 pm (UTC)The even weirder thing is that not only is a lot of American identity wrapped up in struggle against foreign enemies, but it's also frequently not defined as war - even defined as peace. Textbooks will flat out say that the US was at peace between the Civil War and the Spanish-American War, though they usually just gloss over the latter and skip to WWI. (Although they will make sure you memorize key term "yellow journalism" and the slogan "Remember the Maine!" while not expecting you to think of this as a serious war that counts as anything more than a national ego boost.) Educated commentators will talk about 9/11 as one of the only attacks on American soil in all seriousness, counting only maybe the War of 1812 besides Pearl Harbor as earlier ones. (Unless they remember Pancho Villa's raid on Texas, but no one ever does.) And this while mentioning that we were also occasionally wiping out some Indian nations and even getting attacked in return, and watching Westerns every other week! It's a mind-boggling example of cognitive dissonance. You would think that spending decades and tens of millions of dollars fighting would register as "not peace," but no. And you're absolutely right about the masculine, militarized ideal and democracy being suspect ("someone has to be the decider").
Surviving the decline is the trick, isn't it. Right now everyone is still talking about getting the economy back to "normal," but "normal" requires consuming mountains upon mountains of mass-produced disposable plastic thingamabobs, which I really don't think is a sustainable long-term economic foundation. (Some, yes. Even lots. But not the astronomical amounts we've got.) But I haven't heard anyone even ask what alternatives there might be even as supplements to "normal" in a public forum, apart from vague nostalgic ramblings about how we used to manufacture our own mountains of consumer goods. Where do you even start?
(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-12 04:57 am (UTC)I always find it fascinating how things like the Philippine Insurgency or the various occupations of Haiti ended up almost completely erased from American popular consciousness - for that matter, most of the non-scholarly treatments of the Civil War gloss over the way the first KKK was, effectively, the post-war Southern insurgent army. Makes one wonder how or if the Afghanistan campaign will be remembered...
(Not, of course, that Australia is much better - for some reason, our involvement in the Vietnam War has been almost entirely forgotten, despite the fact that it would fit perfectly into our existing war-time narratives of "We got dragged into a great power's stupid overseas conflict/Could have done great things were it not for ignorant foreign leadership". On the other hand, we don't have the same military-industrial complex, so it's as big a gap in our understanding of our own society...)
I keep meaning to organise my thoughts and write an essay-ish thing on the total political apathy in most of the western world at the moment - linked, I think, to a sense that the current system cannot be repaired but that there's no alternatives available...
(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-12 07:17 pm (UTC)Or the Haitian Revolution, which along with the Seminole Wars gets buried with all the things that freaked white Southern planters out. You only get to mention small failed revolts, preferably by madmen with almost no following. If you leave that out, any further interaction with Haiti isn't going to get in either, because it might be related somehow or make us look bad. Also, even if South Carolina's declaration of secession explicitly said slavery was a major factor, you have to try to paper that over with talk about "economics" and "states' rights" while pretending they didn't mean the economics of slavery and states' rights to designate some people as property. (Less so in history classes in northern states, but still a bit.)
I think the only thing US students ever learn about Australian history is a) convicts! and b) Gallipoli, and the latter only because of the movie. Maybe there's some kind of deal - we'll pretend you weren't in Vietnam (because that would make it not all about us) if you will?
I'd read that essay.