Good essays that explain life in terms of cartoons.
http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b014e8953640e970d-800wi
06/23/2011
Chariots of the Clods
http://www.comicstripoftheday.com/Today's Bug had me right at the first panel. You don't get a lot of space to introduce a topic in a comic strip. This is subtle, yet effective. The jack-in-the-box makes it.
But the insanity of that abrupt intro masks the fact that the strip makes a profound historical argument: Whatever happened to Occam's Razor? Why do we twist ourselves into such pretzels trying to come up with explanations to avoid the simplest -- and thus the most likely -- explanations, which is that ancient people might have been more intelligent and talented than we like to think they were?
Which comes bundled with the accompanying thought that maybe we're not as smart as we think we are.
No serious historian -- no serious thinker -- believes the pyramids were built by aliens. But, for all that we've been talking this week about how much kids don't know about history, it turns out there's a lot we do know about history that doesn't make any sense and that turns out not to be true.
Some of it is merely a case of elevating urban legends to the level of purported history. Somehow, odd stories that crop up here and there get snatched up and put into popular histories, whereupon they become Fact.
For instance, you can read about the French Revolution and that the king was captured attempting to escape France dressed as a woman. But you can read the same thing about Jefferson Davis in some popular histories of the Civil War. And, if you were to gather up all the defeated leaders who were allegedly caught fleeing in drag, you'd have assembled a large tableau of ugly, cowardly women with Adam's apples.
The stories can't all be true.
And, legends aside, there are things about the past that we think we know because we have accepted historical explanations that sound logical but don't stand up to much scrutiny.
It turns out that, if you ask the obvious questions, you'll find that the answers are there, hidden in serious histories that nobody bothers to read.
Example: We were all taught in school that Coronado came to America and traveled around the Southwest looking for El Dorado. Some of his horses wandered off, bred in the wild, and formed the foundation of the wild horse population of the western plains. The Indians captured and tamed these horses and learned to ride them, and this allowed them to hunt buffalo more efficiently.
We were all taught that, and we all accepted it, but hang on a second:
1. How many horses did Coronado lose? How many did he have with him in the first place? And were they horses or were they rabbits that, in the course of a century or two, they were able to spread all the way to the Northern Plains in such prodigious numbers?
2. Why would the Indians of the Northern Plains, far from any contact with Coronado, look at these animals and think, "I'll bet we could ride those!" Wouldn't they be more likely to think, "I'll bet we could eat those!"
If you look into real historical accounts, you'll find that large numbers of horses were sent out onto the plains by the padres at the missions, along with herds of cattle to be watched over by the vaqueros, enslaved natives who, though trained, dressed, re-named and baptized, were in many cases not all that far from their tribal roots.
So here are these two or three vaqueros sitting out there in the middle of nowhere, with a string of horses and a herd of cattle, and up comes a hunting party of non-enslaved natives, who start asking questions about these amazing animals they've got. A little trading and training and swapping follows, and the vaqueros' new buddies go away with a few horses and with the knowledge of how it all works.
And they swap with other nations up and down the country, and, meanwhile, horses are wandering away from all those rancheros in far larger numbers than Coronado could have released in his brief foray around the Southwest.
The next thing you know, horses are so well-established among the Indians that Lewis and Clark head west confident they can simply trade for them once they reach the Mandan country.
And, in fact, not so far from Mandan country, the Nez Perce have established a selective breeding system complete with a registry that goes back multiple generations and have even created a whole new breed of horse, the appaloosa.
This is the opposite of the "Chariots of the Gods" explanation. This is the "It Just Happened" explanation, and it's equally condescending.
Fact is, none of it "just happened." Aliens from Europe did bring the horses in the first place, and passed along the knowledge of how to ride them, but then the Indians figured out selective breeding on their own. Which isn't all that surprising if you go back another thousand years and look into the sophisticated hybridization that had been going on with corn in the Mississippi valley.
Which brings us to the final panel of "Bug," and these bits of historical insight:
1. "Brown" and "stupid" are not the same thing.
2. "Pre-industrial" and "stupid" are not the same thing.
3. Occam's Razor is still pretty sharp.
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