Revolution and the Word: Introduction

Perhaps unsurprisingly, my favorite bit of Davidson's introduction was her concern with those things that tend to get brushed under the rug in historical accounts, and I loved the example of David McCullough's John Adams.

I should probably start by saying that I haven't actually read John Adams, or seen the HBO miniseries, but I was excited to see a connection between current media representations of early American history, and the texts that claim to provide exhaustive accounts. There is a missing piece of every story, and I think that an important point that Davidson is making here is that it isn't only media representations that twist the facts. Ever mindful of my very limited knowledge of American history, I did start to notice as we read Starr that some of these great American "characters" (Adams, Jefferson, Washington, etc), seemed to have more controversial and conflicting ideas about the way the fledgling country should be managed, and Davidson makes this point all the more clear. Although I didn't watch John Adams myself, I know many people who did, and who lauded it for its authenticity (and c'mon, Paul Giamatti was in it, it's gotta be good) -- which is sort of scary, no? It reminds me of The Patriot or the story of Pocahontas, which we as academics find eye-rollingly inaccurate, but while we cringe we have got to remember that our own history books are altering facts in similar ways, and we should be mindful that we're rarely seeing all sides of anything.

Davidson immediately moves from her John Adams example to describe another problem close to my heart, and one that had me highlighting basically all of page 18:

"Nationalist history casts disagreement as 'anti-American'--as dissent from an assumed, if unarticulated, consensus rather than as an invaluable contribution to a process that is innately and definitionally 'democratic'" (18).

Yep, this bit struck a chord.

And, in fact, I'm having a hard time clearly explaining what that chord is. To simplify the matter probably entirely too much, I could say that reading a text that acknowledges the troubled position of someone who expresses a dissatisfaction with this country is reassuring, because it indicates that the counter-opinion will be investigated along with the popular historical myth of America. I've tried to keep my List of Things I Loathe to only the bare essentials, and calling someone "anti-American" if they voice any opinion contrary to the "American way" is close to the top of that list.

And isn't it a bummer that this passage rings so very true?:

"In considering the rich body of theory and history on nation building, it becomes clear that one of the defining features of Americans is the ease with which we pronounce other citizens "un-American" or "anti-American" for relatively mild protests against the status quo" (18).

So yeah. Not cool, guys.

Honestly, I could go on and on about this for ages and ages and I couldn't do it nearly as effectively as Davidson on pg. 18. The fact that other countries don't seem to share this problem ("The most vituperative British member of Parliament, railing against the prime minister, is still British, maybe even definitively so because of the railing. He or she would rarely be called "un-British" or "anti-British'.") only really makes it more interesting. That Davidson points this out and points it out well, only makes me more anxious to read what else she has to say. I mean, the lady clearly has a point.