Mark Danner has a probing article at TomDispatch.com on the career arc of Dick Cheney, the self-selected Vice President under George W. Bush. Cheney’s approach to history, an attitude he shared with Karl Rove and Donald Rumsfeld, was the idea he could make his own reality, independent of history. Previous precedents on waterboarding as torture? They don’t matter. The predictable civil war that resulted from our invasion of Iraq? Doesn’t matter. History is made by the big swinging dicks, no regrets, no apologies.
Even when the insurgency in Iraq was obvious to all, Cheney and Rumsfeld sought to deny that reality. Recall that Cheney said in 2005 that the insurgency was in its last throes even as it was beginning to peak. Recall that Rumsfeld said in July 2003 “I don’t do quagmires” even as he and the U.S. military were sinking into one in post-invasion Iraq.
History teaches humility, but Cheney and Rumsfeld were having none of that. History is a sovereign remedy to hubris, but Cheney and Rumsfeld were all about hubris. Faced with history’s uncertainty, as represented by favorite questions like “Yes, but” and “Are you sure,” Cheney and Rumsfeld hissed like vampires confronting garlic.
The end of history — in the sense of ignoring its lessons — came with Cheney and Rumsfeld.
And like Danner says in his article, we’re left today with the bloody mess these dicks created.
As a historian, I like to think we learn valuable lessons from history. Those who don’t learn from the mistakes of the past are condemned to repeat them, or so my students tell me, paraphrasing (often unknowingly) the words of George Santayana.
We applaud that saying as a truism, yet why do we persist in pursuing mistaken courses? Why two costly and destructive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why an energy policy that exploits dirty fossil fuels at the expense of the environment? Why a foreign policy that is dominated by military interventionists in love with Special Forces and drones?
In part, I think, because our decision makers have no respect for the lessons of history. They think the lessons don’t apply to them. They think they can make history freely: that history is like a blank canvas for their creative (and destructive) impulses. They figure they are in complete control. Hubris, in other words.
Such hubris was captured in a notorious boast of the Bush Administration (in words later attributed to Karl Rove) that judicious study of the past was, well, antiquarian and passé. Why? Because men like Karl Rove would strut the historical stage to create an entirely new reality. And the rest of us would be reduced to impotent watchers, our only role being to applaud the big swinging dicks at their climactic “mission accomplished” moments. In Rove’s words:
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Rove’s rejection of history stemmed from hubris. For the character of Joaquin in Scott Anderson’s novel Triage, history is “The worst invention of man” for a very different reason. History was to be reviled because it tries to make rational what is often irrational; history invents reasons for what is often unreasonable or beyond reason.
In Joaquin’s words:
“We invented history for the same reason we invented God, because the alternative is too terrible to imagine. To accept that there is no reason for any of it, that we are only animals—special animals, maybe, but still animals—and there is no explaining the things we do, that happen to us—too awful, no? … To hell with history. If there is anything to be learned from any of it, it is only that civilization is fragile, that in war it takes nothing for a man—any man, fascist, communist, schoolteacher, peasant, it doesn’t matter—to become a beast.”
As a good Catholic, I was taught that wisdom begins with the fear of God. A secular version might be that wisdom begins with the fear of history. Our history. Because it teaches us what we’re capable of. We invent all sorts of seemingly reasonable excuses to kill one another. We grow bored, so we kill. In the words of Joaquin, we come to slaughter one another “because we wanted to see how blood ran, because it seemed an interesting thing to do. We killed because we could. That was the reason.”
The beginning of wisdom is not the fear of God. It’s the fear of ourselves—the destruction that we as humans are capable of in the name of creating new realities. The historical record provides a bible of sorts that records our harshness as well as our extraordinary capacity for self-deception. Such knowledge is not to be reviled, nor should it be dismissed.
The more we dismiss history—the more we exalt ourselves as unconstrained creators of new realities—the more we pursue policies that are unwise—perhaps even murderously so. If we learn nothing else from history, let us learn that.
Apache Scouts, Listening (National Gallery of Art)
W.J. Astore
Frederic Remington understood the color of night, and he also understood something of the uniqueness of the Native Americans he painted. This lesson was brought home to me by David Heidler, a good friend and a leading historian of American history. Visiting an exhibition of Remington’s nocturnes, Heidler had this to say about how these paintings moved him:
[Remington’s works] reminded [me] of something easily forgotten by the sanitized depictions of Indians inflicted on our own times. Remington was able to portray them as obviously aboriginal while preserving their stoicism and majesty. Hollywood Indians, whether in Kevin Costner’s wolf-waltzing epic or the Mohican picture featuring the terminally taciturn Daniel Day Lewis as foil for the grumpily taciturn Russell Means, are simply European ethnics festooned in feathers and possessed of nifty woodcraft.
Remington’s Indians, though, are people so alien that one instantly recognizes them as part of another world uneasily coming to terms with an encroaching one. His “Apache Scouts, Listening” perfectly captures the odd division between the near-feral instincts of the scouts and the tentativeness of their army employers. The several Apaches are in various postures, mainly ones of repose, but their necks are elongated, their broad faces frozen with concentration and all directed just beyond the viewer; the two army officers sit on horses in the background, their hands cupping their ears in an effort to hear that the Apaches obviously can detect with ease. It is night and winter, and a full moon illuminates the scene with jarring clarity, the light ambient from the heavy snow on the ground.
I could still be standing there watching it if allowed to.
Few Hollywood movies that I’ve seen capture the distinctiveness and uniqueness of Native Americans on their terms. Our movies are mitigated (or polluted) by the Western gaze, tending to portray Indians as either “savages” or mystical proto-environmentalists/Zen gurus. We see what we want to see, not what is.
Back in the bad old days of John Wayne westerns, Indians were typically portrayed as savages who deserved to be extirpated or shunted on to reservations where they could be “civilized.” Nowadays, the “magical” Indian is more common, a noble brave and guru to the White man who highlights the White man’s materialism, prejudice, and violence.
Although it’s not a perfect movie (it has its own political agenda), “Little Big Man” with Dustin Hoffman and Chief Dan George captures at least some of the distinctiveness of Indians, at least for me. The decision to allow the Indians to speak fluently in English (when it’s meant to be Cheyenne) helps to bridge the gap of understanding (no Pidgin English as in old westerns, and no distracting subtitles as in the sanctimonious “Dances with Wolves”).
The depiction of Native Americans in LBM is neither universally positive nor negative. The brutality of Indians is shown in the opening scene of carnage in the aftermath of an attack on White settlers. The Cheyenne encampment is described in humorous terms (from my memory): “When first entering an Indian camp, one might be excused from thinking, I’ve seen the dump. Where’s the camp?” It’s an amusing reminder that standards of cleanliness for Plains Indians differed from White town folk. The Cheyenne also eat boiled dog, which the narrator (Hoffman) describes as downright delicate in taste (I doubt that scene would survive Humane Society inspection today).
But for me the most harrowing scene is Chief Dan George’s masterful speech as he holds a scalp. He explains how the Indians (the “human beings”) believe everything is alive but the White man believes everything is dead. It captures the animism of the Indians and their connection to nature while highlighting the instrumentalism and ruthlessness of (some) Whites.
The gulf in understanding between our peoples only exacerbated the wars over turf. And the Indians sensed, as Chief Dan George says in the movie, that they were on the losing side of the demographics (an endless supply of White men, but a limited number of Human Beings, notes Chief Dan George).
But watch “Little Big Man” for yourself and draw your own conclusions. Even better, take a close look at Remington’s nocturnes. Try to place yourself in the paintings as my friend David Heidler so powerfully did. Such a vivid exercise in imaginative exploration — using Remington’s work as a time machine that transports you to a different world among a people who are far more diverse and complicated and alien than Hollywood has ever managed to capture — is both transfixing and transformative. And fun!
Author’s note: I’d like to thank David Heidler for his permission to cite and share his personal (and moving) reaction to Remington.
Bracing Views 