I’m watching “The Alamo” last night. John Wayne plays the famous Davy Crockett, probably more famous for the song then any actual moments of life. It ends, I’m sure you know, with the Alamo falling to Santa Anna’s enormous army and this silly scene where the ‘grand’ and ‘civil’ Mexican army lets the wife of one of the officers leave. This got me thinking about the idea of history, that is real history, not that sort of thing the movie the Alamo pretends is the stuff. Davy Crockett hardly resembled the real David Crockett and Jim Bowie...well, in real life James Bowie was the one that issued the proclimation of no surrender, he wanted to stay.
The US has a pretty short history. It only goes back a few hundred years. Where elsewhere in the world nations have long, long
histories. I hear it said sometimes
that we Americans have no sense of history, because of the fact that we don’t
have that much history under our belt as it were. They try and tell us that because they have thousands of years of
the stuff that that somehow gives them a better perspective. It’s actually perceived as such through most
of the world. I see two major issues with
this sort of logic:
1. Nations with very
long and ancient histories seem to forget that everyone has had time to grok
this story. Historians have dissected,
analyzed, and cataloged it. The people
of those nations have interpreted the meanings and lost the original context of
the events. They fail to realize that,
even though in their minds the event is still considered a recent event, too
many fingers have been into the broth and thus spoiled the original story.
2. Also, by living
this life of ancient history as important, they seem to ignore their relative
recent history. One need not look to
far from the Middle East to see how this affects old nations. Israel, a new nation, founded in ’48, is
treated like the empire of 2500 years ago, to that region of the world, it’s
the same old story, and the recent events have little, to no bearing on what
that ancient story tells.
We, here in the US, are still young enough to have a fresher attitude toward our history. We look at a building built in the 1800 and say, “That’s one old building!” And because of this we are able to do something that other nations are not. We are able to watch movies like the Alamo, review stories of our war against the King, and any other historical event with the eye of actually feeling like we are part of it. It is recent enough in our minds to have not been completely scrutinized by the grand scrubbing bubbles of grandfather time. Because of this we have identity. We have an understanding of our personal position within the system, where we might chose to play with in the rules or we might not. And that is something our enemy doesn’t understand. They have no recent identity. They have no forward momentum or understanding of who or what they are. A few days ago I made mention of Greece, who up until 1829 was under rule by the Ottoman Empire. But is Greece Identifiable as a nation of the future…or are they a dinosaur, sucking on the marrow of ancient bones lying about their historical crypt? This is because; they find their history, their 3000 year old history, more valuable than they find their history from 1829 to present. What is a mere two hundred years to a nation 3000 years old? That is backwards thinking. It makes you a weakness, a sort of cancer that will eventually be evaporated in the drying sun.
History is important as a tool for the future, not a crutch
on which to lean for generations to come.
And the US is in a unique position.
It could maintain loyalty its historical past as a treasure, or it can
do what the rest of the world, and every civilization to ever populate this planet
has done: tuck it away in a neat little pouch and enjoy it, like it’s our
salvation, like it’s a manifest destiny…guiding us to something great. The trouble is, it isn’t.
It’s just history. If laying waste to the work my father has done for himself and this country is irreverent, and if looking back at the Moon landing is too fresh to have any historical value, then I don’t want any part of the old world. Screw them and their old dusty parchments and vellums that lie in their neat little vacuum glass cases, who, by the way, were probably invented by an American in the last 100 years. Screw the old countries that spend eons pointing proudly at the long linage of dead kings and nobles that they say they arise from, only to show that they themselves lack even the most basic of human understanding, as if all that noble inbreeding had finally paid off! They act like castles mean something. They treat old paved roads like sacred pathways. They look only at one moment in their history as the star that shone the way, while all the time since then they’ve never moved! If that is what having a long history is about, let the vampires of Europe have it. Let the fatal fanatics of the Middle East have it.
We’ll just laugh someday from our colonies at Alpha Centauri A.