| Monday, November 20, 2006 |
19:04 - I like stories
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Last night on the History Channel, they showed "Desperate Crossing", a badly-acted but well-written dramatization of the story of the Mayflower Pilgrims. They billed it as "the untold story" of the first Thanksgiving, something that struck me as rather odd—while I remembered learning plenty about it when I was a kid, nobody really says anything about it anymore. Maybe it's because it's only a children's story these days. Or maybe it's because people try to hush it up. I don't know.
But after it was over, and it concluded with an upbeat and optimistic message about how cultures at odds can make use of their common interests and learn to make good things come even from tragic and misunderstood beginnings, what occurred to me was that there's probably a large part of the nation that would label this show as being hopelessly biased Eurocentric propaganda simply because it did not depict the Pilgrims as monsters or dwell for the last half-hour upon the fate of the Indians in subsequent centuries.
Well, y'know, I enjoyed it, and I learned a great deal. Just as with the makers of the public-service films we all learned to mock with 20/20 hindsight, like "Duck and Cover", I find myself thinking of how I'd have gone about simplifying the story for easy and effective consumption—and I can't think of too many better ways to do it. The pith of the Thanksgiving story as I learned it, back in the 80s, with rosy-cheeked paper-cutout characters winking at me from some storybook, was apparently true enough to the facts that the History Channel's version served mostly to fill in the gaps, not to explode any deeply-held myths. I'm sure that's precisely the problem some people would have with it, that it paints too rosy a picture of an event that was probably steeped in bloodshed and intolerance and diabolical Calvinist piety. But you know, it wasn't a whitewash. It portrayed all the actors as human beings, each muddling along as best he could, according to impulses and desires we all can relate to. And at least for a while, the result was a mutually beneficial inter-cultural alliance the like of which has seldom been seen again.
If the message they want to leave us with is that regrettable misunderstandings between alien groups can actually be resolved with enough patience and mutual honesty, then I'm prepared to consider it one worth finding some inspiration in.
UPDATE: Related thoughts from Brummbar a year ago. Definitely worth revisiting. In fact, remembering it and the article it discusses is probably why I was so taken with this History Channel show in the first place.
UPDATE: That the reason why the Pilgrims were allowed to settle was due to the fact that the local tribe at Plymouth had in the past five years been depopulated by a European-derived plague and needed allies against their neighbors was indeed a major plot point in the History Channel show; but what wasn't was the angle that the Pilgrims spent the first year in Massachusetts being communist. With all the success that usually comes from it.
Via Anthony and Bernadette.
UPDATE: Don't people ever get tired of saying stuff like this? I mean, doesn't it ever get old? Doesn't it occur to people that maybe they just might be saying something they might have already heard somewhere before? Like in a million fourth grade science fair projects and supervised neo-history reports?
Aren't people like this supposed to be the creative and original ones?
Gaah!
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Brian Tiemann
