Going back...

This morning, thoughts of going back have been flickering in my head...and more specifically, I wonder about going back in time. This week's New Yorker brings an article about Charles Van Doren, and his version of The Great Quiz Show Scandal. Stuck in my mind are scraps about the incident: a story in Life magazine, accompanied by black and white photos of variously depressed and disappointed grown-ups; a grade school lecture about cheating; and some TV commentary about our national moral rot. But mostly I remember myself, up in my room, bored with the whole business, and sneakily listening to rock and roll on my plastic clock radio, wondering what any of this had to do with me. I tried asking myself if I would have cheated on a quiz show if offered lots of money. I didn't think I would. On the other hand, I didn't think I'd ever be on a quiz show, so the quandary I posed was half-hearted to begin with. Reading Van Doren's article just now, I have a reflexive temptation to ponder our collective innocence back then, since past decades always seem dominated by naive ideas and populated by laughably stupid people. It's fatally easy to forget that any dusty historical period was actually complex, ambiguous, and in technicolor.

Some years ago, when we vacationed in Louisiana, my husband and I went over to Bayou Teche to visit a plantation called The Shadows. Just as we got there, a tourist bus pulled up and disgorged about twenty chattering elderly ladies from New Jersey. Because they all seemed full of piss and vinegar, my husband and I were disposed to like them, but our disposition almost instantly turned to hatred. As we trooped through the plantation house, the ladies kept up a loud running commentary, one nuttily contrary to historical fact. In the kitchen, as we all stared at a table well scarred by carving knives, one of the women announced, "That's from their swords. Not many people know it, but back then everyone cut up their bread with their swords. That's why they always wore them." "No they didn't!" my husband stage whispered. As we padded on towards the master bedroom, another woman remarked brightly, "You know, George Washington spent a lot of time in Louisiana. He wasn't tall like you read in books. Oh, no. George Washington was a short little fella. Maybe five feet tall, tops." "Make her stop doing that," my husband hissed at me. "I don't think I can," I said. "Then let's get out of here," my husband said, "I hate revisionist history." I edged backwards and tried the door behind us, only to discover it was locked. Seeing me rattle the knob, our guide said, "We have to do that now: lock each room as we go. People were stealing things out of the rooms." The group looked over at us curiously, and I almost emptied my purse right there, just to show I wasn't making off with a candelabra.

Later, my husband asked, "How can people do that? Just make crap up. I don't get it." I figured it was a rhetorical question, so I didn't answer. Anyway, I didn't have an answer. I like history and grew up in the DC-Virginia area, surrounded by lots of it: houses, graveyards, and battlefields. I don't know what it's like to have an empty place in my brain where a real fact should reside. Perhaps if I was seventy-three and from the pineywood flats of New Jersey, I'd announce that back in the day, everyone cut their food with swords. I don't think so, but it's like the quiz shows, you can't know unless you've been there.

On the other hand, I'm with my husband on revisionist history. It's annoying to hear pronouncements about hippies, Vietnam, Nixon, and the greatness of the Reagan years, when you were actually in the pudding. Besides the factual side of history, there's an emotional side too. When I sat up in my hot little room, listening to Bo Diddly on the clock radio, I was engaged in an act of overt middle-class-white-girl rebellion. Listening to race music was chancey stuff. However, I was only conscious of liking rock and roll. I didn't know I was part of something bigger, something that would flare up and catch fire in the sixties.

But that's another story altogether.