Criticus

Posted: Monday, July 21, 2003

Criticus

Revisionism 101

— G.B. Tennyson

G.B. Tennyson has been threatening to write a column denouncing professional sports in general, but his hand has been stayed by the thought that people who shoot other people in order to steal their Air Jordans would seek him out in vengeance. Besides, he would exempt from censure thoroughbred racing, Alpine skiing, tennis, the Tour de France, and Roller Derby.

About Business Pulse — Printer Friendly version

Though the word itself is of early twentieth-century origin, revisionism is as old as history. Indeed, in a very real sense, all history is revisionism; otherwise we would never need more than one account of anything. To be sure, there are different kinds of revisionism. Initially the term was used contemptuously by Marxists for any idea or treatment that sought to modify the party line. It was broadened to mean a revised attitude to any previously accepted political situation, doctrine, or point of view. By the 1960s, especially in the United States, it was applied to any sort of revised attitude to

previous ideas or accounts, not solely to politics. Today there can be revisionism of everything from literary opinion to biography, and there usually is.

Much revisionism is of the sort based on the emergence of new facts that must be taken into account — a corrected date, newly discovered documents, modern forensic evidence, and the like. Then there is the sort that supplies no, or very few, new facts but looks from a different perspective at what has been known and draws new conclusions from it. At the farthest extreme this can mean the total reversal of previously received opinion. And then there is what I can only call instant revisionism. This is well illustrated by the behavior of politicians who insist that they didn’t say what we heard them say and by the current breed of interpreters of facts known as spin-doctors. This latter, along with the term “spin” as applied to interpretation, is of very recent origin, from the 1980s, deriving apparently from the spin that pitchers may put on a baseball, although cricket fans were talking about spin and spin bowlers as early as the 1850s. They just didn’t apply it figuratively to other activities.

Revisionism and spin often tell us as much about the revisionist and the spinner as about the subject of their interpretations. Take, for instance, the recent rash of revisionism in Germany regarding the conduct of the Allies in WW II and the immediate aftereffects of Germany’s defeat. There has been a spate of books and articles about these matters, and what they say collectively is that more than fifty years after the end of the war, Germans are ready to confront, no longer only their guilt, but now also their sufferings and even to argue that the bombing was, shall we say, a case of overkill and oftentimes vicious vengeance.

The most noted of these recent studies is the weighty (591 pages) Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940-1945 [The Burning: Germany in the Bombing War 1940- 1945] by Jšrg Friedrich, published in 2002 and by April of 2003 in its twelfth printing. This is a painstaking and painful account of the devastation wrought by the dropping of more than a million tons of explosive and fire bombs resulting in the death of more than 600,000 people, mostly civilians, vastly more than the highest estimates for Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined and immensely more than the deaths on British soil from the Battle of Britain and the later V2 rockets. Fried- rich notes that the appalling cases of Hamburg and Dresden are well known but not so the cases of cities like Pforzheim, Dortmund, Darmstadt, Krefeld, Kassel, and numerous others of no strategic consequence. These he details as well as the loss of thousands of archival papers, incunabula, books and whole libraries — in all, the loss of more than eight million volumes from public holdings and an unknown number in private hands.

Friedrich, born in 1944, writes from research, not from memory, whereas another revisionist book draws on both. This is Klaus Reiner Ršhl’s Verbotene Trauer: Die vergessenen Opfer [Forbidden Mourning: The Forgotten Victims] (2000). Ršhl was born in 1928 in East Prussia and, as a teenager at the end of the war, fled from Danzig to the west in a cattle car as the Russians swept through on their tour of rape and pillage of a barbarity that Criticus shrinks from illustrating, expelling fifteen million people and leading to the loss of the eastern third of German territory. Ršhl’s book is less fact-filled and very much shorter than Friedrich’s and also more forthright in its criticisms of the notion of endlessly extended guilt to subsequent generations of Germans, while Russians, Chinese, and even Cambodians are, unlike Germans, never indicted as a people for their genocidal and mass murderings. For that matter, Ršhl considers both Churchill and “Bomber” Harris guilty of war crimes. Harris it was who, with Churchill’s blessing, masterminded the carpet-bombing of cities, including residential areas, as a means of terrorizing the populace into giving up, whereas the American military believed in bombing strategic targets to bring the industrial machine to a halt. In the event, argues Ršhl, the Americans were right and Harris merely a butcher.

Yes, there is no little bitterness in Ršhl’s account, but there is also the human touch based on his own experiences and that of family and friends: his mother gave away her ticket to sail on the Wilhelm Gustloff out of fear of sea travel. That was the refugee ship the Russians torpedoed in the Baltic causing the greatest loss of life in maritime history and now the subject, as Criticus reported in an earlier number, of a book by GŸnter Grass (interestingly, a classmate of Ršhl’s in Danzig) that is another document in this revisionist upsurge.

As if all this were not enough, the leading, and left-wing, German news magazine, Der Spiegel, ran a four-part series in January of this year on the bombing war. Replete with lengthy text and photos of catastrophic devastation and with charts and graphs of the extent of deaths and damage, and (typical of Der Spiegel, which in any given week is more than twice the size of Time or Newsweek) itself the equivalent of a book, this series in a mass circulation magazine signifies that a change has taken place in what can legitimately be discussed and rethought in Germany about the war. Criticus believes also that this change in attitude may well have contributed, among much else, to Germany’s siding with France in the Iraqi unpleasantness, which in turn appears to have contributed to American disenchantment with Germany and the plans to move military bases to eastern European countries. Thus this revisionism is not only interesting in its own right but also consequential in terms of international relations.

From such Haupt- und Staats-Action, as the Germans called a kind of heroic tragedy, we move to some PickelhŠringsspiele, or Pickleherring Farces, types of boisterous low comedy, by turning our attention to some revisionisms that look to be kissing cousins to political correctness. Those of you who watch major televised horse races will, in recent years, have noticed that at the Kentucky Derby when the band and the fans sing “My Old Kentucky Home” and the words flash across the screen, the second line reads “’Tis summer, the people are gay.” As every schoolboy used to know, the original line by Stephen Foster reads “’Tis summer, the darkies are gay.” One can imagine the discomfort of the revisers in having two troublesome words in a single line. They easily dropped “darkies” but had to retain “gay” to keep the rhyme with “day” in the fourth line. What is not evident unless, like Criticus, one has a copy of the full text is that the song is being sung by a displaced black remembering the good old days. It even appears that the singer has been sold down the river, for he is in stanza three “in the field where the sugar-canes grow,” which can scarcely be Kentucky, which is why the chorus of “Weep no more, my lady” says they “will sing one song for the old Kentucky Home, / For the old Kentucky Home far away.” Of course, only the revised first stanza and the chorus are sung today.

Moving on to the Preakness, we see a more extreme version of dropping offending lines. The Naval Academy chorus strikes up, the words run across the screen, but all that is sung is the third stanza of the total of nine that comprise what its author subtitled “A Patriotic Song.” That author was James Ryder Randall writing, from New Orleans, “Maryland, My Maryland”, a song designed to stir his fellow Marylanders to join the Confederacy. It begins: “The despot’s heel is on thy shore,” the despot being Abraham Lincoln who had dispatched federal troops to Baltimore to suppress the movement for secession. Virtually every stanza expresses a sentiment troublesome today: “Dear Mother! burst the tyrant’s chain .... Virginia should not call in vain!” “From hill to hill, from creek to creek-- / Potomac calls to Chesapeake” “She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb-- / Huzza! She spurns the Northern scum!” The reason that stanza three is still tolerated is that it, as part of an historical roll call, summons only the memory of Maryland’s role in the American Revolution, which is still, barely, an acceptable aspect of history.

Back with the darky problem we find Stephen Foster at it again with the official state song of Florida, his “Old Folks at Home,” better known by its first line “Way down upon the Swanee River.” In fact, Foster, as he so often did, wrote the words in what was called Negro dialect and put them in the mouth of a displaced black man yearning for the old plantation and in the chorus singing, in the original, “All de world am sad and dreary, / Eb-rywhere I roam; / Oh, darkeys how my heart grows weary, / Far from de old folks at home.” Interestingly, Foster had never even seen Florida or the S[u]wanee.

Like Foster, the yet more prolific (700 songs to Foster’s 200) and, I believe, greatly underrated James A. Bland wrote chiefly for the minstrel shows so popular in nineteenth-century America. And like Foster, Bland wrote in Negro dialect. Unlike Foster, Bland was himself black, born at Flushing, Long Island, in 1854, but educated mostly in Washington, D.C. He is best known for what has since been repudiated as the official state song of Virginia by being kicked upstairs with the title “State Song Emeritus.” (I believe the search is still on for a replacement. Criticus predicts it will be anodyne.) Bland’s song is “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” and, like “Maryland, My Maryland,” is, for slightly different reasons, more or less irredeemable, considering that the last two lines of the chorus read “There’s where this old darkey’s / Heart am long’d to go.” On top of that, every stanza has some no longer acceptable content, such as references to working “so hard for old Massa” and yearning for that future time when he’ll meet “Massa and Missis” on “that bright and golden shore.” “There we’ll be happy / And free from all sorrow, / There’s where we’ll meet / And we’ll never part no more.” In other words, the slave is longing to be reunited with Master and Mistress in what appears to be plantation heaven.

Bland was not writing autobiographically, for he was only nineteen when he wrote “Carry Me Back,” and he was never a slave, though he did write the song on the banks of the James River near Williamsburg, Va. It landed him a job in, equally segregated, Washington, D.C., with a leading minstrel company, and he went on to write many more popular “Ethiopian melodies,” as they were called by Stephen Foster and the famed Christy’s Minstrels. The best known today of such songs by Bland are “In the Evening by the Moonlight” and “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers.” The first of these two was performed by Bland in Washington, D.C., for a meeting of the Canvas Back Club, which later became the Gridiron Club. Said to be in the audience were Grover Cleveland and Gen. Robert E. Lee, which is a nice fancy, but Lee died ten years before the song was written. Those who were there would have heard the original verses in dialect, the chorus of which runs: “In de ebening by de moonlight, you could hear us darkies singing, / In de ebening by de moonlight, you could hear de banjo ringing. / How de old folks would enjoy it, / They would sit all night and listen, / As we sang in de ebening by de moonlight.” The verses in the stanzas are even more disturbing to most modern ears, containing such sentiments as “Aunt Chloe” sitting and telling “de Picanninies stories / And de cabin would be fill’d wid merry coons from near and far.”

Even by Criticus’s time the words had been somewhat cleaned up, so to speak, in that they were usually confined to the chorus and rendered in standard English, although not otherwise appreciably altered, (well, yes, they changed “us darkies” to “the darkies”) and we would sing them on hayrides and around the campfire. Since then, they have been revised further, so that one version has “the people” singing, another has “the young folks” singing, and the official version for scouting has “campers” singing and even replaces “old folks” with “campers.” One doubts, however, that even these sanitized lines will ever be sung at the Gridiron Club with an American president and with or without the greatest general of the century in happy attendance. As for dem golden slippers, don’t even think of putting them on to walk de golden street.

Having come from historical revisionism to politically correct revisionism, there would seem nowhere left to sink to. But Criticus has found an issue that is bound to offend yet more readers than those who think the Germans got what they deserved and those who think all songs with politically incorrect language should be banned. This one joins revisionism with political correctness with feminism with that most sacred of all American cows — professional sports.

Constant, and probably all other, Readers will know of the recent publicity circus surrounding Annika Sorenstam’s participation in the Colonial Golf competition in Fort Worth, Texas, the easiest, we hear, on the PGA tour, which of course is a men-only tour. From the instant it was known that a woman would compete with the men the media went into overdrive. Annika appeared to have won the tournament even before it started. And when her two days of undistinguished play ended, she was still depicted as a winner.

A huge color photo of her on the green appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Times above the oxymoronic headline “Miss- ing the Cut, Sorenstam Wins.” The sports section of that paper on the same day seemed dedicated to her with a string of eight small photos of “The Many Faces of Annika” above a large photo of her completing a swing amid a crush of viewers and an inside sports page devoted entirely to the tournament with yet another large picture of Annika making a birdie putt and a small picture of some Swedish supporters holding encouraging signs. This was run parallel to a two-column shot-by-shot account of her every move. And none of this even touches on the television coverage, which was equally excessive and equally reverential.

Frankly, however, all this was from any objective view utterly absurd. It was indeed a Dr. Johnson dog- walking-on-its-hind-legs sort of story. The fact is that Annika did very poorly indeed. She tied for 96th place, coming ahead of only eleven other players. Had she played under a different name and disguised as a man there would not have been one column inch devoted to her. She has demonstrated once again the profound athletic differences between men and women, which feminism and its willing fellow travelers in the media keep trying to deny.

The facts are plain to any objective observer: men are better at most sports than women. Men like sports more than women do, both as participants and observers. The most successful, popular, and lucrative sporting events are, with few exceptions, ones involving male players. That this is so should no more be a cause for concern than that grass is green. Of course you can for a time spray-paint it a different color, which is figuratively what the feminists seek to do in general and were seeking to do in particular with Annika Sorenstam, who looks more and more like a dupe in this caper, especially when one notes that afterwards Annika said, “I’ve got to get back to my tour where I belong. This is ’way over my head.” Quite.

In spite of all that, the egregious Martha Burk, she of NOW and the Augusta National charade, had the chutzpah when Annika failed at the Colonial to say it was “unacceptable” that the Bank of America which sponsored the Colonial and benefited from Annika’s participation (evidently by the larger turnout and viewership) should tolerate having several of its officers and directors be members of Augusta National. I propose that the National Organization for Men, if there were one, should silence this wretched beldame and lobby for the repeal of Title IX which has done more harm to men’s collegiate athletics than separate golf tours has ever done to women golfers.

Understand, Criticus has nothing against women’s sports or women in sports. Many women genuinely enjoy both playing and watching sports, and should certainly be allowed and even encouraged to do so. Moreover there are a few sporting activities that women do better in than men and that in some cases even outdraw men in the same events. One is figure skating, another is gymnastics. Tennis is close on their heels. I think it has to do with natural grace and suppleness.

Amid all the concern expressed that Annika and other female athletes do not gain the huge endorsement contracts that men do, one is moved to ask when was the last time anyone saw a male figure skater or gymnast plugging a product on television, as opposed to, say, Peggy Fleming, Dorothy Hamill, Mary Lou Retton, or Kathy Rigby? And are the sisters Williams from the tennis tour unknowns in contrast to, say, Lleyton Hewitt and Gustavo Kuerten? As far as all this goes, however, why should I or anyone give the fabled tinker’s dam — even if we could find a tinker and a dam (it’s a discarded piece of bread once used in soldering) — for the financial glories of already overpaid athletes? Let them, Liberace-like, cry all the way to the bank.

Before you ridicule these sentiments as male chauvinist counter- revisionism, let me say that I had rather watch Chinese women’s ping-pong than men’s professional basketball. The two are in fact rather similar: the ball goes from one end of the court or table to the other, and then back again. Over and over and over ....

CPRSearch

Advanced Search