Disorderly Content

Last weekend I drove out to Clements, a flyspeck of a town near Stockton in the Central Valley. My reason for visiting: a Civil War reenactment I'd found out about after one of the reenactors read an earlier post and recognized a smoke ring as being produced by his very own replica 1841 cannon. He pointed me to his group's site, which got me to a calendar of upcoming events. So when the day arrived, I headed east in search of some interesting photo ops. Which I got; you can see some of the result on my Flickr page and others in my stock photo portfolio. But that's not what I wanted to write about.

What I found interesting is how real it started to feel, with the cannons blazing and the rifles firing and the few mounted combatants racing at each other. And the fallen, doing a pretty good job of looking injured, or dead. That's when it stopped being fun, at least for a moment. I thought about the real battles, a long way from here and a long time past, when it wasn't about entertainment, and when the discomfort of living rough lasted for months and years instead of a long weekend. It was a relief to see the battlefield dead rise up, shake hands and relax before their next encounter.

One other thing: in rating one of my pictures for a different stock photo site, a reviewer emailed me about how strange he found it that people in California stage Civil War reenactments, since California didn't even exist at the time. Turns out he was wrong. As any West Coast football fan knows, California took on a certain prominence with the 1849 Gold Rush; it became a state a year later. And even though there wasn't any Civil War action out here, there were battles as close as Arizona and New Mexico, to say nothing of tens of thousands of volunteers who saw action elsewhere. Not that any of that matters to the reenactors. I bet they'd be at it no matter where they lived.

Yes, it's Cinco de Mayo, which various posts remind me has nothing whatsoever to do with Mexican independence. Which is funny, since that's what I always thought was behind all those crowds waiting for tables where they can eat chips and drink margaritas. But no, Cinco de Mayo is about a French defeat in a small Mexican town a hundred and forty-four years ago. Which didn't stop Napoleon's army; they eventually took Mexico City, installed their Emperor and ruled the country for a few years. Not that any of that matters today; any excuse for drinking heavily is a good one. Just avoid Mexican restaurants if you aren't into long lines.

Every time I drive over Donner Pass on my way to Reno, I think about the Donner Party that gave it its name. This wasn't a party in the balloons and cake and presence sense of the word, as I imagine you well know. But now it turns out that it may not have been the "feast of human flesh" I'd always heard about. According to an article in the Independent, new forensic evidence from one of the Donner Party's camps shows no evidence of cannibalism at all. It may be just another example of the press taking a sensational but unsubstantiated story and running with it. Bad enough to discover that Alfred Packer was wrongly convicted, although the nice tunes from the South Park boys' Cannibal: The Musical eases the pain of that. But even the Donner Party would rather starve than eat their own? What is this world coming to?

The death of Rosa Parks has inspired a lot of tributes, from having her lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda to Apple's resurrection of their Think Different campaign on their homepage a couple of days ago. Mrs. Parks was a pivotal figure in the Civil Rights movement who deserves all the attention she's receiving now, even if it's too late for her to enjoy it. And assuming for the moment that she wanted more attention while she was with us. But it does make me wonder why we like the myth of Rosa Parks so much better than the reality.

The story we all know is about a working woman with tired feet who just had enough one day and refused to move to the back of the bus. That version of the story has a nice Western feel; you can almost hear John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart speechifyin' about how "a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do". But it wasn't that way at all. Rose Parks was an activist, not merely a tired seamstress. And a boycott had been under discussion for quite some time. People in the movement were looking for the right person to take the right action at the right place and time. Mrs. Parks agreed to be that person.

But we don't like activists; we want catalysts, the more accidental the better. And if we don't get 'em, we'll invent 'em. And give 'em tired feet. That's a particularly nice touch.

Maybe it's our cynical age. Maybe I'm just getting cranky, or at least crankier. But I find myself less and less sure of things as I get older. More suspicious of those who are sure, who claim some special pipeline to God. And a lot less surprised when something I've known and taken for granted forever turns out not to be true.

The source of this minor revelation was this week's episode of the radio series This American Life on NPR. Early in the broadcast, they discussed Ben Franklin's famous experiment with lightning, which my older brother once described thusly:

"Benjamin Franklin, inventor was he.
Out in a storm with a kite and a key.
Proved how electric the lightning can be."

Which I'm sure wasn't original with him, but that's beside the point. Anyway, the gist of the story was that the whole business with the key probably didn't happen. There's a mention in Franklin's early writings where he suggests that such an experiment could be done, with no indication that he had done, or intended to do, the deed himself. It was only many years later, in perhaps a benign attempt to pad his resume for future generations, that he claimed to have been out in that storm. What's funny of course is that few people had resumes that needed padding less than old Ben.

Anyway, I'm surprised that I'm not really surprised. I've known that George Washington and the cherry tree was a crock since I was in junior high. And Columbus didn't have to convince anyone that the world was round, a fact we used in a school play in the third grade. (Actually, he did come up with one revelation regarding the size of the earth. Turns out in that case that he was wrong and conventional wisdom was right.) But Franklin and the kite? At the age of fifty I still bought that one.

And yet I'm neither shocked nor upset to lose another historic tableau. In part that's because it doesn't really matter. And in part, I guess, because I've learned to take most of what we're taught with a "Lot's wife"-sized grain of salt. Even in an age of video cameras we can be bamboozled by those concerned with a higher purpose. (The Jessica Lynch story comes to mind.) How much easier was it in an age where direct evidence was so much harder to come by?