NeverMedia

A stroll down Memory Lane.

Introduction

Can we judge historical people by the standards of our times?

It’s a popular topic of discussion amongst high school and college students the world over. I know, because I get into conversations like that all the damn time.

In the vampire community, it’s a hot-button political issue that has never been resolved.

For me, it’s even a relationship problem.

I was born during the Reconstruction after the Civil War. I was born into a family of abolitionists who supported the Radical Republicans – who, among other things, had representatives who supported racial equality a century before we actually achieved it in this country.

My parents weren’t exactly perfect on race relations. I still cringe whenever I think of things they said about the Native Americans, especially my father. And I know that if someone more liberal had ever called them out on it, they probably would have said something like: ‘I refer only to the wild Indians – there live some civilized Indians’ – yeah, that’s not much better.

But if I can think of one group my parents taught me to hate, absolutely hate with no caveat or qualification – it would be the Southerners. Especially my father. My mother was fresh off the boat from Norway; when I was born, she’d been living in Wisconsin for less than five years. My father was a born and bred Norwegian American whose own father was killed in action in the Civil War. Seeing as how my father was born in 1851, he was still a child by today’s standards. Goddammit: he was a child one way or another.

Young adults in any era.

I grew up being told that the South was an evil society who wanted to own people like us Northern folk owned livestock, and that those traitors to our country deserved far worse than what our overly lenient government dished out to them. My father tended to call them ‘rebel bastards.’

I was twenty years old when I first fell in with the vampire community and met Cathy. She confessed that she’d been a slave-owner. An English one, mind – she didn’t come to America until after the Civil War. But she was a slave-owner.

And yes, this was when she was a vampire. She was indeed using the slaves for as much blood as they could give and still survive.

She didn’t kill any of them. And she did eventually set them free. To her credit, she never tried to use that to rationalize what she did.

Also to her credit, she did disclose early on. And when I met her, she was a huge supporter of racial equality, labor rights, women’s rights, temperance – the very model of a modern major Progressive Era progressive, even for a progressive of the era.


That’s what I kept telling myself, as I obsessed about it over and over again and tried to square it in my head.

It wouldn’t have affected my decision to be sired, I can tell you that much. I might have asked to be switched, so Charles could sire me instead (I was just friends with both of them at the time, and there wouldn’t have been a conflict of interest).

He’s done his own share of unethical things, but most of them fall into the category of: ‘he was poor and desperate and starving to death, and while no society on Earth ever legalized what he did, most juries would be lenient.’ At this point in my life, I’m not much better.

Charles didn’t do much socially sanctioned evil. Not even in Byzantium. During the Enlightenment, he was a liberal on the Jeremy Bentham level and more. As for Cathy – yeah.

Jeremy Bentham: a product of his time.

Given my own attempts at being the very model of a modern major Progressive Era progressive, I tried to tell myself that ‘those were the times.’ Yep. I was going through a huge period of self-education at the time, and that probably only made it worse. 

Shockingly, Cathy didn’t actually agree with me, and was somewhat disturbed by my opinion, as she is by any modern person who makes the same argument. I just dismissed that as her being extra redemptive: not, you know, correct.

Yes, what she did was horrible – but should I really be putting early 1900s standards on 1700s people? I mean: here we were living in a time of great social and technological progress beyond what the people of the 18^th century could even have comprehended. I mean, look at us – we’re on the verge of getting the vote, we’re showing the Robber Barons who’s boss, we’re conquering the vile specter of drunkenness – we’ll be in a utopia before we know it, and any point in history is going to pale in comparison.

Of course our standards would be better – that’s what supposed to happen. History is, of course, the process by which we get better and better morals and learn from the mistakes of the past, and should we blame the people who couldn’t have known better and managed to suffer them for us?

Yep, that was pretty much what I convinced myself, well into my forties.

Then people started saying the same things about the Progressive Era.

Circa 1912

I still remember the day in the 1960s when I got into an argument with a then-modern feminist about the Suffragette Movement and the bastards that tried to stop us.

Her: Oh, Lyddie. You can’t judge those guys by modern standards. You shouldn’t hate them for what they did – you should understand that they did what they did because it made sense in their time.

Another anti-suffrage cartoon, showcasing the conservative position on the issue.

Bear in mind, anyone who calls me ‘Lydia’ or some variant is a member of the vampire community, human or non, because that’s only my Masquerade name and has never been my legal one. She did indeed knowingly say this to someone from the Suffragette Movement. In fact, here’s what happened next:

Me: Yeah? I sure hated ‘em then.

Her: Well, I guess that’s okay; you’re actually from those times.

Me: But I can’t hate ‘em now?

Her: No.

Me: So when was I supposed to stop hating them? 1920, when we got the vote? 1930s? 1940s? Does this shit have a half-life?

Apparently, yes.

In my culture, we call this phenomenon ‘historical apologism.’

That’s okay. Nowadays, people do the exact same thing to the 1960s. Sometimes.

Sometimes the 60s were those crazy liberal times when everyone was all crazy and liberal. Sometimes they were those terrible times in that primitive conservative dystopia where no one was crazy or liberal. Other times, they were those nobler conservative times when everything was as it should be: ten years of conservative nostalgia.

I know, that used to be the 1950s. It still is, mostly, but now it seems that the 1960s are making that transition. Just in time for the 1950s to fade out of living memory. I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.

As far as living memory goes, people who were children in the 1950s certainly don't count. 

Trigger Warning

I expected this phenomenon to level off at some point during my lifetime. Not a chance. I at least figured the 1980s were untouchable. No one’s going to say that the 1980s were a time before liberalism, when, among other things, professors who sexually harassed their students couldn’t be held accountable for their actions.

Then someone said that to Naomi Wolf. About her own experiences being harassed by a college professor in the 1980s, I might add.

Naomi Wolf: historical figure from an earlier age. Who is currently living.

What amazes me the most is that those people were probably under the impression they were being sensitive and enlightened.

Oh, but don’t worry. It’s happening to the 1990s too. Yes. The 1990s. Any conversation about the homophobia in movies in the 1990s, and some people will be falling all over themselves to talk about how you can’t blame people from the 1990s – everyone was homophobic back then!

Yes. Gay marriage was a hot-button issue in the 1990s and a major topic of national discussion, but somehow, if someone was homophobic in the 1990s, it was the decade’s fault and not theirs.

I can’t wait to see what won’t be someone’s fault two decades from now. I can’t wait to see someone defend Bush and Cheney. I mean, geez: that was five whole years ago – it’s totally a separate era completely out of the bounds of contemporary moral judgment, right?

Well, I fully expect and predict that it will be in twenty years. 

God knows, Bush may beat us to it.






Image links in order of appearance:

http://www.likecool.com/Looking_Into_the_Past--Projects--Gear.html.
http://willcountyhistoricalsociety.org/civil_war.html.
http://whynoteight.wordpress.com/2010/08/10/pioneer-day/.
http://www.nwhm.org/online-exhibits/progressiveera/peace.html.
http://utilitarianphilosophy.com/jeremybentham.eng.html.
http://www.radford.edu/rbarris/Women%20and%20art/amerwom05/suffrageart.html.
http://www.radford.edu/rbarris/Women%20and%20art/amerwom05/suffrageart.html.
http://www.jewishjournal.com/hollywoodjew/item/mad_men_comes_out.
http://www.nndb.com/people/454/000117103/.
http://terrenoire.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-is-this-man-smiling.html. 

There are countless stories about immortals, Vampires, and long-lived fantasy races. How many stories are there about human centenarians?

http://www.silverwhistle.co.uk/fanfic/ficpics/ElvenWallpaper.jpg.

Really, how many honest-to-gosh, non-supernatural centenarian humans are there in fiction? You’d think Hollywood would’ve gotten the memo about humans living longer. No one’s interested in stories about centenarians? Or is that just what Hollywood thinks?

I wonder. I get people asking me questions about the 1950s through the 1970s. And not just vampire questions, either. And I’m just sitting here wondering if they ask their grandmothers or, well, mothers the same questions. Sometimes, yeah – they’ll even relay their grandmother’s stories to me, which is great. Other times, well, it’s hard not to be cynical.

How often are older characters ever protagonists? When you do see centenarians in fiction, they’re usually played for laughs – as are most older characters, even if they’re under sixty and therefore barely twice the age of much of the audience. Look at Grandpa swear, because older people don’t do that. Hilarious! Look at Grandma have a sex drive, because older people can’t have that. Hilarious the second! Look at Gramps forget things and walk slowly, because memory problems and the systematic loss of your mental and physical faculties is really goddamn fucking Hilarious, isn’t it my fellow young person?

Okay, occasionally they mix it up and give us a psychotically evil old person like Mr. Burns, but that's not what I call progress. If they're not giving us Mr. Burns, it's Grandpa Simpson.

The Simpsons sometimes tries to make up for it with a few sympathetic nods to the plight of American old folks and some Lisa Speeches. I'm talking Golden Years Simpsons, here, too. Guys, that doesn't work if you're laughing at Grandpa, too, and you treat him as 'Generic Old-Shaped Old Person Representing all Old People.' 

Even Titanic does that a bit. In an early scene with 101-year-old Rose, she forgets a social encounter that happened a few minutes ago - which, of course, her granddaughter condescendingly reminds her of. And earlier, before Brock Lovett talks to her, he gets reminded to: ‘speak up; she’s kinda old.’


http://www.cornel1801.com/.

Sigh. If she needs you to speak up, she’ll tell you. Don’t start by barking at her – she’ll know what it means. And Brock urges her to tell the story – the movie, basically – by saying ‘anything you can remember, anything at all.’

She snarks back: ‘Do you want to hear this or not, Mr. Lovett?’ (Ha - I'd have been tempted to say: 'well, I was on the Titanic - and it sank! True story.')

And then – fast forward to the end of the film, when all the characters are hanging on Rose’s every word, after she’s told this story at the level of detail any historian would weep for.

They hear about Rose the Younger, the bold, witty, Progressive-era girl who wanted more out of life, and they start seeing her again in the present. And we the audience see her too. They give Rose a sense of humor and a wealth of wisdom and depth that older characters should have, and she becomes a person with a rich and interesting life story instead of the ‘very old goddamn liar’ they reduced her to at the start of the film.

I’ve been there. God, I’ve been there. For my people, talking about our history is like Pinocchio syndrome: we become real. It makes us real, and it makes history real.  

I love that. And I love how the Titanic characters go from seeing the sinking of the Titanic as nothing but an excuse for collectibles and trivia questions to seeing it as a real event affecting real people. (God, especially Brock, who calls Rose his 'new best friend' after he infers that she must have the Heart of the Ocean if she really was on the Titanic. That's right, Brock: beg the disaster survivor for the valuables she secured the night she watched thousands of people die. 'You lived through a hurricane? Did you bring me some loot?' At least he got better.)

I love the way the film almost effortlessly conveys that this is what history was – historical people were not aliens with incomprehensible motivations, and had romance and sex and drives and ambitions that steered them right or wrong, in this case literally. It’s so great to hear that, in an era of anti-presentism and ‘historical relativism’ – which usually translates to ‘history is really hard to understand, so we give up.’

My people are hyper-aware of our place in history. It’s a huge part of our culture. And we were partly founded by Enlightenment people from circles that were just as hyper-aware of the past and the future. But most people you meet just aren’t, whatever time period they’re from. They live for today, and that’s where they stay.

Rose and Gloria Stewart single-handedly elevate Titanic from just another disaster movie with a big ego, an ungodly budget, and special effects that'll look impressive for about ten years, and will be unintentionally comedic in forty. Hell, it's one of the only disaster films that actually shows one of the survivors years later and gives any thought to the long-term. At least for a little while, it stops being just another film exploiting an historical catastrophe and becomes an historical commentary.

chasingthefrog.com

It could have done a better job at being that. Mr. Andrews and the Unsinkable Molly Brown, played by the excellent Victor Garber and Kathy Bates, should have been co-protagonists if they really wanted to make the film a first-rate historical drama. But as a fictional account of fictional people’s historical love lives in interesting times, it succeeds much better than most, and better than I ever would have anticipated.

chasingthefrog.com.

I love Gloria Stewart’s quote: “When I graduated from Santa Monica High in 1927, I was voted the girl most likely to succeed; I didn’t realize it would take so long.” I hear you, Gloria. I love that she was the only Titanic cast member who was alive when it happened, and lived to be 100-years-old herself (RIP). Hollywood society even gave her respect and admiration in the only way it knows how: she got nominated for an Oscar and she was voted into People magazine’s ’50 Most Beautiful People in the world’ list in 1998.

In an industry that treats people like fashion trends, casts out any forty-plus woman who isn’t Meryl Streep, and has had more influence on the modern youth obsession than air-brushing, Gloria Stewart’s story is a breath of fresh air. Her biography is pretty damn interesting, too.

flapperdays.blogspot.com.            


She helped found the Screen Actors Guild and, in 1936, the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. After getting stage roles in New York, she opened a successful art furniture shop, got some of her oil paintings into the permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum, then got some of her professional-grade bonsai trees in the Huntington Library Japanese Garden permanent collection – and this was all after re-marrying and while raising a daughter. Gloria returned to acting in her sixties – when most women’s careers are long over – and got to be the oldest person ever nominated for an Academy Award at age 88. Meanwhile, she was writing fine art printing books, one of which is in the permanent collection at the J. Paul Getty Museum. She was still acting at the age of 94, and made her last appearance in film at age 100.

I wish she had gotten to see the Titanic Anniversary.

allvoices.com

Titanic, for all its flaws, gave us a great centenarian character and treated her, and the historical event it was depicting, with at least a modicum of respect.

One great thing about historical relativism is that it works just as well on the present and recent past – you can use it on 1897 just as easily as 1997. Titanic was made in a time period that’ll be remembered for (among other things) its ageism. And I might have to defend non-ageist 1990s people the same way I defend liberal 1912 people from generalizations like ‘those were the times,’ while acknowledging that we have made progress and the culture really has changed. After enough time has gone by, all citizens represent their eras, and all fiction becomes historical.

For all these reasons and more, I declare Titanic the movie ‘fair for its day,’ and can’t wait to look back at it in relief for how far we’ve come.

http://i.usatoday.net/.