Let's All Vote on the Truth

Watching the movie "Exodus," made in 1960 brought me back to that person who exists now only in memory, my 12 year old self.  That twelfth summer of my life I read Leon Uris's novel and was swept away in romance, anger, redemption and hope. The story of the Holocaust, reinforced by newsreels showing the concentration camps, stories in Life magazine, TV shows showing the good hearted American troops liberating Auschwitz, all established the truth of the Holocaust in my mind.

Everyone around me agreed that had happened. Eisenhower had invited news photographers and movie makers into the camp because, as he explicitly said, he wanted nobody to ever be able to deny what these camps were. Eisenhower was a soldier and while I remember him as a tottering old grandfather, he must have know what soldiers know: there are always lies about war and why we go to war and what happens when we do. 

A version of the truth

The movie disappointed me, because it began after the Holocaust, as the Jews tried to escape Europe for a new start in Israel, and the best part of the novel was all the detail about the concentration camps, the "why" of the exodus. The movie focused on the "what" happened when they tried to get into what was then Palestine, and the "why" was treated only in speeches.

Ari Ben Caanan in the flesh

But now, reading a curious book called, "Eichmann Before Jerusalem" I am struck by the passages about the magazines, weeklies and newspapers run by Germans, Austrians and others in the immediate post war years 1945-1960, just about the time when we were seeing "Exodus" and "Catch-22" and "The Naked and the Dead" and "The Young Lions" and Life magazine and Time and documentaries about the Nuremberg trials in suburban America. In a publication called Der Weg, which was apparently a favorite of former Nazis, a very different story was promulgated and elaborated.

Eichmann on trial

By this telling, Hitler knew nothing of the death camps, isolated as he was and preoccupied with the war. The concentration camps were the idea of German Jews who were horrified by the tide of assimilation among German, Austrian Jews, and these Jews wanted a homeland in Palestine for world Jewry, and so they launched the Holocaust, using high Nazi officials like Eichmann, who may have secretly been a Jew himself--didn't he look Jewish? So the camps, the transportation network, the rounding up of Jews in France, the Netherlands, Poland and Germany were all a Jewish plot. And, by gum! It worked! Look at how the Jews got their homeland!

Oh, that Jewish plot!

These formulations reminded me of that tour guide at Fort Sumter, who insisted the Civil War was a war of Northern Aggression, and all about States Rights and not about slavery at all. In fact, he pointed out, the only slave owner in that room at Appomattox was Ulysses S. Grant, not Robert E. Lee. If that didn't prove it, well, then I don't know what would.

Grant was actually not that dressed up

Of course, a little googling undid this pundit: Lee in fact did not need to own slaves because his wife owned 189 slaves, who he ruthlessly pursued and punished whenever one or two managed to escape. Reading about Lee's treatment of his wife's (and in reality, his) slaves demolishes this image of the saintly Lee.  
As for Grant, he did own a slave once, but he could not abide the reality of slavery and freed that slave within one year.

The Trump of his day

There is another side to the Lost Cause which emerges fitfully--the practical imperatives wrought by keeping an army in the field. As the union army approached Richmond, every male capable of holding a gun was rounded up and thrown into the lines. The myth that the Union army was a rag tag bunch of Negroes, recent immigrants who were forced into service or who were hirelings bent on plunder while the Southern soldiers were all true believers defending their homeland looks pretty thin we you read the memoirs of James Longstreet, Lee's steadfast lieutenant general.

As vicious a slaver as ever was

Longstreet writes Lee repeatedly about the necessity of looting the gold in the Richmond bank and wherever in the South they can find it, to sustain the war effort as Southern brokers and farmers are unwilling to accept Confederate currency and the rich aristocrats who hold that gold have got it because of what the army is willing to do for them and they ought to be willing to give it to the army and if not, it should be "impressed," i.e. stolen.
When Jefferson Davis left Richmond, he left with wagon loads of gold.
And even before the final days, within the first years of the war, wagon loads of Confederate gold were being waylaid, stolen and diverted by Southern bandits and Confederate soldiers.
The "Lost Cause" is that soothing marketing which responds to all the bad press slavery has got over the years, depicting happy slaves (who just loved Scarlet O'Hara) and a wonderful world of chivalry, glory and gentility disrupted by mongrel bandits from the North envious of Southern cotton wealth. Slavery was simply a gentle custom which supported cotton farming. And the slaves were taken care of like children and way better off than they would have been being eaten by lions or starving in Africa.
Lincoln, of course, who actually lived in 1860 and had seen it all first hand, who did not want to make the war about slavery because he thought it was a losing argument, politically, even admitted the war had been about slavery all along, and he came clean in his 2nd Inaugural address:
"These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war."

History, of course, is one long argument. 
But how can an essential truth, that the Civil War was, ultimately, about freeing the slaves, even if a majority of the Union soldiers (and certainly their generals) were indifferent--the driving force raising the armies in the North was animated by abolitionism and without the abolitionists there would never, could never, have been a war at all--how could that truth be so widely denied and sustained, even today?
Because "The Lost Cause" appeals to people. It's a cotton candy truth, that tastes so good, even if it's basically sugar vapor and because there are enough sources of dissemination, it can be sustained in the population.

There is a difference between "historical truth" and "scientific truth."

There is that old joke about the prostitute who asks a client his name and he tells her "Santa Claus, if you want to believe it." And after they have sex, she tells him, "In a week or so you'll notice a rash. It's syphilis. But you can call it hives, if you want to believe it."

You can call it "hives"

Before microscopes and the concept of micro organisms, when the Black Plague hit Europe, the only explanation for it was "God's Will." And there was an institution in place--organized religion--which could promulgate this explanation. So God's vengeance against those who denied the Church's truths was the prevailing truth.

You cannot wish away the Black Death

Science, however, is about doubting, organizing experiments to prove things and developing technologies to see things which human senses and perception cannot immediately perceive. It was not until 1890 that a man trained by Louis Pasteur, Alexandre Yersin, was able to capture the causative organism of plague, to see it under the microscope and even to raise anti sera against it, to be used successfully in an outbreak in what is now Vietnam.  Until then, the truth was "God's wrath." Just because you want something to be true--that God punishes sinner with plague--does not actually make it true. That much science has provided us.

Trump would have executed these 5 innocent adolescents 

There are times when we vote on the truth because we do not have better options.
A man is accused of rape and murder and a jury hears the evidence presented against him and the  jury is persuaded because of testimony, because they don't like his looks or because they want to get back to their jobs and homes. 
But later, we get DNA testing and it turns out juries and courts often get it wrong and we get the Innocence Project.  And we are all made uncomfortable, because after all the elaborate rules of evidence, after the man or woman in the black robe, sitting up high on the polished wooden bench behind the impressive woodwork, pronounces sentence, it turns out they were all fools, all wrong and the real rapist/murderer is living free, while the wrong man is sent off to prison.

Mass marketing of truth does some weird things. Dennis Burkitt, a renowned epidemiologist, the first doctor to show that a virus could cause a malignancy--Burkitt's lymphoma--gave a famous lecture in London in 1973, in which he postulated that the reason bush people of Africa did not get colon cancer, dental carries, hemorrhoids or colonic diverticulae had to do with the large amount of fiber they ate in their diet. This got taken up by the American food industrial and marketing complex and measurements of "fiber" in various foods were made helter skelter and lo and behold! It turns out Fruit Loops have enough fiber to qualify as "high fiber" food and can be marketed as "heart healthy." Fruit Loops!

Hero of sorts

So what makes for "truth" in a mass society, with mass communications, social networks and a population which has never been rigorously instructed in how to determine the truth, i.e. on how to question the "truths" presented it? 

Volume, repetition and penetrance. 
Fox News, Trump Daily Tweets, Hannity, Limbaugh, Moscow Mitch McConnell. Republican 'talking points." Same tune, repeated often enough. Truth.

Trump's version of a war hero: Eddie Gallagher

Watching TV, listening to the radio, even when most of my stations are NPR--we have 4 NPR stations in New Hampshire--I still can estimate that 90% of what I hear is simply wrong.  Truth may be eternal in some ways, but it is rare. And it is not imperishable. You may think you know that Donald Trump lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million, but if you hear often enough, from enough sources, that he won by a huge landslide, the biggest in history, eventually, you will believe it.

Woman Walks Ahead: Susanna White's Unseen Meteor

The Phantom, in fairness, needs to warn the reader of his soft spot for Indians, American Indians, or, as they are politically correctly called, "Native Americans," a term which gives the Phantom dyspepsia.

This means the Phantom has watched "Little Big Man" and Daniel Day Lewis in "Last of the Mohicans" and "Dances with Wolves" so often the CD's are beginning to complain, and sometimes simply refuse to play.

It should also be known the Phantom understands these representations of the American Indian and his culture are Hollywood's version.
Once, driving through the Four Corners area, across an Indian reservation, the Phantom encountered actual, present day American Indians who were either openly hostile to his presence or remarkably kind and welcoming, but in either case, were not at all the Hollywood Indian tribe he had previously come to know and love.

In college, the Phantom got into anthropology and loved ethnographs--descriptions of cultures by anthropologists who tried to see an alien culture through scientific eyes, which is to say, objectively, and anthropologists got into endless arguments about whether seeing another culture "objectively" is even possible.

Beyond that, the Phantom tried to read "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee" but got so angry at the US government he could never finish it.

And whenever he can find that rare book which depicts what American Indians were actually up to, he has read and re read it: "Empire of the Summer Moon," (SC Gwynne) being one of the rare examples. 

Books like this surprise you, and feed you new knowledge: Did you know, for example, the Comanche language had no word for "surrender"?  This may explain why Comanches fought to the death every time.  The idea of surrender was simply so foreign to them, they could not wrap their head around it.  But when you think about it, the notion of surrender is somewhat peculiar: If you find yourself in a fight with a mountain lion or a buffalo, no one  is likely to "surrender." And the life of the Plains Indians was a struggle no different when they clashed with other human beings than when they hunted animals. It was always a fight to the death.

So when the Phantom started watching "Woman Walks Ahead," he was halfway won from the outset.

Another concession:  The Phantom watched this thing from his treadmill, which is how he watches most things now. (No sense just sitting in a chair when you could be moving.) Watching from the exercise bicycle allows the Phantom to hear all the dialogue without the noise of the treadmill, but this movie was a treadmill movie, so it's possible the Phantom was not in an ideal position to judge.

Catherine Weldon

On the other hand, if the movie could overcome the noise and distraction of the treadmill, it must have something going for it.

Briefly, the story follows a winsome woman portrait painter from Brooklyn, New York, Catherine Weldon, recently widowed, who decides to paint a portrait of Sitting Bull, who was among the chiefs leading Indians against Custer at the Little Big Horn.  She has felt herself under the thumb of male domination her whole life and this is her expedition to go forth boldly where others have feared to tread.

Along the way out West, she encounters leering men who assume a woman traveling alone must be of dubious morality and she fends off the clumsy and sometimes violent approaches by men on the railroad, and at the fort town on the Indian reservation. She finds the Indians better behaved, for the most part, than the white settlers who revile her as another one of those East Coast liberals who have never suffered at the hands of the savages.

Catherine Weldon's portrait of Sitting Bull

The writing is restrained, but forceful and her character is admirable without being strident. The case for the Indians is succinctly but effectively made.

But listen to the reviewer of the New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis:
"Less as a historical record than a fish-out-water-romance. Albeit one that gets no more physical than a desperate cuddle."

Catherine Weldon 

The Phantom does not know much about Ms. Catsoulis, but he can see her problem here: She is assigned to see too many movies, and her first impulse is to categorize the movie and then to judge how well, within the confines of the genre chosen, the movie has succeeded.  She is offended that the standard expectation of a white woman falling in love with a noble savage does not result in a steamy bedroom, or in this case, tepee scene. This movie just will not behave. 

She is not the only reviewer unimpressed by a movie which refuses to do the standard thing. Rotten tomatoes is replete with reviewers who say things like:

"The good intentions it carries out to the plains don't make up for the tentative falseness at its center, a hero who could herself benefit from a portraitist's clear vision."
--The Village Voice

What is this reviewer talking about?  As if Catherine Weldon, the actual woman on whom this movie is based, must have had a clear vision before embarking on her expedition. Is that not what exploration is all about--not having a clear vision but being open to new experience?
And others, from "reputable" sources:

You leave Woman Walks Ahead thinking the truth would have made a much better movie. Full review

Peter Travers
Rolling Stone

The problem with Woman Walks Ahead is not that it doesn’t stick to the historical record — which most of us didn’t know anyway. It’s that what it does present is so blandly tasteful. Full review

David Edelstein
Vulture

The Phantom was left wondering: Did these reviewers see the same movie he did?

Each seems to try to hold this work of art to standards they think appropriate:

1. Biopic: Does it faithfully represent Ms. Weldon and her life and struggles?

2. Romance: Does she seduce Sitting Bull or he her and are the love scenes steamy enough?

3. Politically Correct Statement: Does it do what Dances With Wolves did in ennobling the Plains Indians?

Quanah Parker

The story of Ms. Weldon, as told by Wikipedia is far more florid, one might say, lurid, than the story in Woman Walks Ahead, but this movie is not a portrait of a life as Rembrandt may have done it, but more what Picasso or Van Gogh might have seen.

The essence of a woman who felt crushed by the strictures of being a woman in American society  comes through elegantly. As she says, clearly enough, her war is against being relegated to "insignificance." This is a woman who wants to make of her life something meaningful. Sitting Bull tells her she is the only person who can give her life meaning and who can know it when that happens.  Theirs is a romance not so much of the flesh but of spirit.

This is not "Dances With Wolves."  Clearly, its creators were very much aware of that movie and did not want to settle for simply a feminist version of John Dunbar.  Of course, there is the feature of an American white who sees something noble and worthwhile in the Indians, and who sees the unvarnished treachery, hate and racism of the white nation which aims to annihilate the Plains Indians.

Every morning, as he gets on the treadmill and begins surfing through the menues on Amazon Prime and Netflix, alighting on one movie or another, the Phantom is impressed by how many movies have been made, but more than that, he is stunned by how many truly awful movies get made.  Thus, the need for reviewers to sift through all this rotten chaff becomes apparent.

Someday, maybe artificial intelligence will do this.

But every once in a while, the Phantom stumbles across a movie spurned by the reviewers, who, it must be admitted, are often the classic "C" students, or, worse yet, the "A" students who got into Harvard, Yale or Princeton by being buttoned down and conventional.

When they run across something different, they dismiss.

These are the people who would have spurned Van Gogh, who would have never bought a painting by someone who was simply so much better than the other painters of his time, so much better than any reviewer, he simply floated above their mediocre brains in a stratosphere of his own.