I've been kind of down recently. Some of it is hormonal, but some of it is also just unemployment blues. My sleep schedule has gone to absolute crap and I'm just not very good at forcing structure on myself. So even though I tell myself, "tomorrow I'm going to do THING!" as soon as I wake up, I'm like, "nah... I'm going to watch 12 hours of crap on YouTube." I'm not seeking advice--I do know of things I can do to help keep myself on some kind of track. I genuinely just need to Get My Shit Together in even a small way. So I haven't felt up to doing much art lately, though that urge has been coming back in the last couple of days which is good!
In other news, my 34th birthday is coming up on March 10th and I wanted to thank![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mrs260 for A) being a generally super-cool human being with an excellent blog and supreme taste in Garashir fanfiction and for B) the very kind gift of a one-month paid membership on DW. Thank-you SO MUCH! :D And, anyone reading, do check out her blog. <3
I don't know what else I want for my birthday, though. J keeps asking me and aside from Rowlet merch of some kind (because I love that sleepy spheroid) I don't know what I actually want. Like, there is no end to the things that I want, in general. I have multiple meticulously organized and prioritized Amazon wishlists. But none of them are things that I really need, so my priority is pretty low on all of it in reality. What I really want for my birthday is a job that I like and no one can just give me that, you know?
Apropos of nothing, J and I went to dinner this past weekend and saw the Lego Movie 2 (which is a bit of mess, but makes up for it in the second half and is extremely fun) and at dinner, J asked me if, as a history nerd, I was retroactively annoyed with how history is taught in schools. I'm American and I grew up in the southeast, so I definitely had to listen to all the bullshit arguments about how the Civil War wasn't REALLY about slavery (it was) and how the relocation of Native Americans wasn't REALLY a genocide (it was) and how racism is over thanks to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr! (it's not.) But I'm not that annoyed looking back because I never took my textbooks all that seriously to begin with.
Some backstory: My family is a family of documentary-watchers. Generally, the drier and less emotional the better. My parents were all about nature documentaries, historical documentaries, science, engineering, biographies--whatever! We just love to learn about the world and if we can do so on the couch while eating dinner, all the better. When I was 4th grade, I started seeing commercials for a Disney movie based on Pocahontas. I knew she was a real historical figure, so I assumed that Disney was making a beautifully-animated documentary and I was OVER THE MOON. Disney?? Making a DOCUMENTARY?! I expressed my excitement to my teacher, the basically perfect Mrs. Carmen, and I think she could see the writing on the wall. She gently recommended that I do a little bit of reading up on Pocahontas before seeing the movie and I grabbed a few different books and I went to town.
Now, I made SURE to grab a few different books because I had already learned an important lesson about media bias in my Laura Ingalls Wilder obsession of previous years. I'd read the Little House books, The First Four Years, West From Home, and even some of Rose Wilder Lane's short stories, but I wanted more. I had to know every detail about this person. So I started reading biographies that had been written about her by other writers--often posthumously. And I learned that each biographer seemed to focus a lot on a different aspect of her personality. One of them tried to paint her as being an irascible tomboy, another emphasized her domestic skills. None of them did that great a job of presenting her as a whole and complex person. Reading all of them, I felt like, gave me a pretty general profile of her that seemed mostly consistent with her Little House character, but it definitely took some work and some real critical thinking.
So I knew that I couldn't rely on a single source for my Pocahontas knowledge. Even at 8, I knew that if biographers couldn't get their story straight about someone who had already written a mostly-autobiographical book series, there wasn't much hope for someone like Pocahontas. So I read a few books about her and then I read some books about the Algonquin peoples and general culture of Native tribes in that region. I dabbled a little bit into reading about John Smith, but whatever. English dude, white guy, there was enough of that going around in my textbooks.
And then I saw Disney's Pocahontas. And... It was not a documentary. The animation was stunning and the songs were great. I loved her character design because who wouldn't love a statuesque beautiful Native woman with That Hair? But everything was wrong. Like, everything. I've had a complicated relationship with that movie ever since. Part of me wants to love it because, of course, the animation and the songs and the raccoon friend, etc. But I HATE IT SO MUCH. Now, obviously, I know now that Disney never intended to make a documentary so being upset that they hadn't is seemingly unfair. After all, they took notable liberties with the fairy tales they'd adapted. But Pocahontas wasn't a fairy tale, you know? Who cares that the Little Mermaid dies at the end in the original story. She's not a real person! She could turn into a unicorn and fuck off into the TARDIS and it wouldn't have made any difference because mermaids, unicorns, and TARDISes aren't real. Making what amounts to being an everybody-lives AU fanfic of an already-existing fictional work is not a big deal. Making what amounts to an AU of someone's life seriously squicked me out as a kid. Especially since that AU egregiously misrepresented the Tsenacommacah, their relationship to the Jamestown settlers, and played into some really gross Noble Savage tropes. (I didn't know what Noble Savage was at that age, but I hated the concept then and I hate it now.)
So basically by the time I was 8, I was thoroughly disillusioned with how the rest of the world depicted historical events and peoples. I'd read books and watch documentaries and come into class and hear a completely different narrative. And I didn't think anything of it because, yeah, if a bunch of Laura Ingalls biographers AND Disney are going to feed me lies, why wouldn't my textbooks? Clearly, media aimed at children was inherently dishonest about historical representation. Why would my textbooks be any different?
But I think now that I should be more annoyed because I don't think most of the other kids I was in school with were reading history books and watching dry documentaries to fill in the gaps, you know? I mean, I hope that at least some of them were. But I know that a lot of people come to some pretty nasty realizations as adults that a lot of the information they'd been fed in school was untrue. What's worse, though, is that a lot of people don't. And, probably the worst of all is that kids aren't really taught proper critical thinking in school. We're just sort of supposed to absorb information (which is often incorrect or misleading) and then regurgitate it in a sanctioned way to pass standardized tests. That's probably the thing that I'm most annoyed about. So many people I know--people I respect and who are otherwise very intelligent and capable adults--still are tempted to believe anything if it's printed because they never really learned how to question.
I maintain that ignorance is not a sin or a crime unless it's willful. Ignorance is merely the state of not knowing and everyone who has ever lived is ignorant of more things than they are cognizant. I'm a smart person and I know a lot of things, but the world is VAST and there is so much about it that, even with infinite lifetimes, I would never be able to know everything. So I am always happy to defer to people who are more knowledgeable than me about their subject, skill, or trade. I never want to glorify my own ignorance. But man... There are too damn many people who do. Knowledge is power. It's critical to know about both the present and the past so you can use that knowledge to inform the future. How many adults out there think that Pocahontas and John Smith had a brief, passionate, love affair? How many people don't know how she learned to speak English? Probably more people than those that think that Civil War wasn't about states' rights to slave ownership which is already a disappointing number of people. And, on the surface, it doesn't really matter. Knowing that "Pocahontas" was just a nickname for her isn't really something that's going to change the world. But, like, make the effort to be curious, you know? And if you know a lie and someone informs you of the truth, be thankful that you've been gifted a little less ignorance instead of clinging desperately to it like a security blanket. Sure! Be skeptical and do your own digging, but don't reject the massive body of evidence-based knowledge just so you can cling to your crumb of supposition.
I don't really have any point to relating any of this. It's just something that's been rattling around in my brain since Saturday. And goodness knows I've got time to think these days!
In other news, my 34th birthday is coming up on March 10th and I wanted to thank
mrs260 for A) being a generally super-cool human being with an excellent blog and supreme taste in Garashir fanfiction and for B) the very kind gift of a one-month paid membership on DW. Thank-you SO MUCH! :D And, anyone reading, do check out her blog. <3I don't know what else I want for my birthday, though. J keeps asking me and aside from Rowlet merch of some kind (because I love that sleepy spheroid) I don't know what I actually want. Like, there is no end to the things that I want, in general. I have multiple meticulously organized and prioritized Amazon wishlists. But none of them are things that I really need, so my priority is pretty low on all of it in reality. What I really want for my birthday is a job that I like and no one can just give me that, you know?
Apropos of nothing, J and I went to dinner this past weekend and saw the Lego Movie 2 (which is a bit of mess, but makes up for it in the second half and is extremely fun) and at dinner, J asked me if, as a history nerd, I was retroactively annoyed with how history is taught in schools. I'm American and I grew up in the southeast, so I definitely had to listen to all the bullshit arguments about how the Civil War wasn't REALLY about slavery (it was) and how the relocation of Native Americans wasn't REALLY a genocide (it was) and how racism is over thanks to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr! (it's not.) But I'm not that annoyed looking back because I never took my textbooks all that seriously to begin with.
Some backstory: My family is a family of documentary-watchers. Generally, the drier and less emotional the better. My parents were all about nature documentaries, historical documentaries, science, engineering, biographies--whatever! We just love to learn about the world and if we can do so on the couch while eating dinner, all the better. When I was 4th grade, I started seeing commercials for a Disney movie based on Pocahontas. I knew she was a real historical figure, so I assumed that Disney was making a beautifully-animated documentary and I was OVER THE MOON. Disney?? Making a DOCUMENTARY?! I expressed my excitement to my teacher, the basically perfect Mrs. Carmen, and I think she could see the writing on the wall. She gently recommended that I do a little bit of reading up on Pocahontas before seeing the movie and I grabbed a few different books and I went to town.
Now, I made SURE to grab a few different books because I had already learned an important lesson about media bias in my Laura Ingalls Wilder obsession of previous years. I'd read the Little House books, The First Four Years, West From Home, and even some of Rose Wilder Lane's short stories, but I wanted more. I had to know every detail about this person. So I started reading biographies that had been written about her by other writers--often posthumously. And I learned that each biographer seemed to focus a lot on a different aspect of her personality. One of them tried to paint her as being an irascible tomboy, another emphasized her domestic skills. None of them did that great a job of presenting her as a whole and complex person. Reading all of them, I felt like, gave me a pretty general profile of her that seemed mostly consistent with her Little House character, but it definitely took some work and some real critical thinking.
So I knew that I couldn't rely on a single source for my Pocahontas knowledge. Even at 8, I knew that if biographers couldn't get their story straight about someone who had already written a mostly-autobiographical book series, there wasn't much hope for someone like Pocahontas. So I read a few books about her and then I read some books about the Algonquin peoples and general culture of Native tribes in that region. I dabbled a little bit into reading about John Smith, but whatever. English dude, white guy, there was enough of that going around in my textbooks.
And then I saw Disney's Pocahontas. And... It was not a documentary. The animation was stunning and the songs were great. I loved her character design because who wouldn't love a statuesque beautiful Native woman with That Hair? But everything was wrong. Like, everything. I've had a complicated relationship with that movie ever since. Part of me wants to love it because, of course, the animation and the songs and the raccoon friend, etc. But I HATE IT SO MUCH. Now, obviously, I know now that Disney never intended to make a documentary so being upset that they hadn't is seemingly unfair. After all, they took notable liberties with the fairy tales they'd adapted. But Pocahontas wasn't a fairy tale, you know? Who cares that the Little Mermaid dies at the end in the original story. She's not a real person! She could turn into a unicorn and fuck off into the TARDIS and it wouldn't have made any difference because mermaids, unicorns, and TARDISes aren't real. Making what amounts to being an everybody-lives AU fanfic of an already-existing fictional work is not a big deal. Making what amounts to an AU of someone's life seriously squicked me out as a kid. Especially since that AU egregiously misrepresented the Tsenacommacah, their relationship to the Jamestown settlers, and played into some really gross Noble Savage tropes. (I didn't know what Noble Savage was at that age, but I hated the concept then and I hate it now.)
So basically by the time I was 8, I was thoroughly disillusioned with how the rest of the world depicted historical events and peoples. I'd read books and watch documentaries and come into class and hear a completely different narrative. And I didn't think anything of it because, yeah, if a bunch of Laura Ingalls biographers AND Disney are going to feed me lies, why wouldn't my textbooks? Clearly, media aimed at children was inherently dishonest about historical representation. Why would my textbooks be any different?
But I think now that I should be more annoyed because I don't think most of the other kids I was in school with were reading history books and watching dry documentaries to fill in the gaps, you know? I mean, I hope that at least some of them were. But I know that a lot of people come to some pretty nasty realizations as adults that a lot of the information they'd been fed in school was untrue. What's worse, though, is that a lot of people don't. And, probably the worst of all is that kids aren't really taught proper critical thinking in school. We're just sort of supposed to absorb information (which is often incorrect or misleading) and then regurgitate it in a sanctioned way to pass standardized tests. That's probably the thing that I'm most annoyed about. So many people I know--people I respect and who are otherwise very intelligent and capable adults--still are tempted to believe anything if it's printed because they never really learned how to question.
I maintain that ignorance is not a sin or a crime unless it's willful. Ignorance is merely the state of not knowing and everyone who has ever lived is ignorant of more things than they are cognizant. I'm a smart person and I know a lot of things, but the world is VAST and there is so much about it that, even with infinite lifetimes, I would never be able to know everything. So I am always happy to defer to people who are more knowledgeable than me about their subject, skill, or trade. I never want to glorify my own ignorance. But man... There are too damn many people who do. Knowledge is power. It's critical to know about both the present and the past so you can use that knowledge to inform the future. How many adults out there think that Pocahontas and John Smith had a brief, passionate, love affair? How many people don't know how she learned to speak English? Probably more people than those that think that Civil War wasn't about states' rights to slave ownership which is already a disappointing number of people. And, on the surface, it doesn't really matter. Knowing that "Pocahontas" was just a nickname for her isn't really something that's going to change the world. But, like, make the effort to be curious, you know? And if you know a lie and someone informs you of the truth, be thankful that you've been gifted a little less ignorance instead of clinging desperately to it like a security blanket. Sure! Be skeptical and do your own digging, but don't reject the massive body of evidence-based knowledge just so you can cling to your crumb of supposition.
I don't really have any point to relating any of this. It's just something that's been rattling around in my brain since Saturday. And goodness knows I've got time to think these days!
no subject
Date: 2019-02-27 09:42 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2019-02-28 09:33 am (UTC)From:But, like, thinking back on my World History classes (I took World History as an honors class and then took again as an elective as an AP class my senior year) for World History, it sure was packed to the gills with Europe. There was some stuff about Egypt and surrounding countries (particularly their relatively contentious relationship with what is now Ethiopia), a little bit about the Zulu, and some cross-discussion about East African traditions that continued in the Americas and that... Was pretty much it for the entire continent of Africa. And, like, OBVIOUSLY condensing the entire history of the whole world for a high school class is a tall order. Stuff is gonna get missed. But did we need a section on the Bolshevik Revolution that was nearly as in-depth as the entire section on ancient Egypt?
North American Native history was apparently not worldly enough because it was barely covered. The Big Three of the Maya, the Aztecs, and the Inca were covered in the most general sense (human sacrifice, Cortes, Macchu Picchu, blah blah) but I wanted to know more!
...this sort of blatant misdirection about history makes it so easy to give rise to the conspiracy theorists and "fake news" mania that is happening now as well. THIS IS SO TRUE. Without learning how to be a critical thinker, it's all too easy not to be one and to just blindly accept whatever "truth" is the easiest one for you to swallow. If you can just glory in your ignorance and wrongness, then you don't need to be critical about your own history and your own involvement in the present.
Pocahontas
Date: 2019-02-28 02:24 am (UTC)From:Re: Pocahontas
Date: 2019-02-28 09:15 am (UTC)From:SHE'S SO DAMN PRETTY, THOUGH. As annoying as the "white people interpreting Native spirituality" message as "Colors of the Wind" is, the animation in that sequence is some of the most beautiful 2D work Disney animation ever did. I can't, in any good conscience, really call it a good movie, but what it does do well, it does exceptionally well.
Like, part of me loathes "The Greatest Showman" because I don't know what the FUCK that was, but it sure wasn't PT Barnum*. However, pretty much every song on the soundtrack is an absolute banger. What's a girl to do?
*I know, I know. He's supposed to be a circus magnate sort of loosely inspired by PT Barnum, but his name in the movie is PT Barnum and they totally warped his actual relationship with Jenny Lind who HATED him and HIS NAME IN THE MOVIE IS PEE TEE BARNUM. If you're going to do a Dreamgirls version of circuses at least have the courtesy to call him, like, JD Garnum, you know???
I promise I'm not a total stick in the mud about most things. I'm not one of those people who instantly hate movies based on books because the books are better. Sometimes the books aren't! And even if they are, I can at least appreciate that they're very different artistic approaches to the same story.
But real person fic occasionally heebs my jeebs even when the writer isn't being handsomely financially compensated for it.
real person fic
Date: 2019-02-28 05:31 pm (UTC)From:I saw a movie on DVD a few years back, The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, based on a real woman's life and one of the things that impressed me on the commentary track was the director clearly explaining which parts of the story really happened and which happened in a different order and which bits she chose to leave out for dramatic effect.
Too many films have no respect at all for the subject.
Re: Feeling Down
Date: 2019-02-28 06:08 am (UTC)From:Re: Feeling Down
Date: 2019-02-28 09:35 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2019-03-02 04:43 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2019-03-03 12:09 am (UTC)From:Unfortunately, because of paywalls on academic journals/publications, it can be really hard for the average joe to access information right at its source. I think the commodification of academia and, by extension, the commodification of knowledge is at fault for so much misinformation. And it helps perpetuate this dangerous myth that the GOP has been nursing for years that being educated is elitist. University costs have soared to the extent that at some colleges (like Evergreen, here in Seattle) have had to actually cut tuition costs because of enrollment decline. So it's harder and more costly for people to get into colleges and universities which is usually the most efficient way to get past academic paywalls or to be encouraged to read actual academic publication in general. It's a dangerous cycle and one that benefits very few people--and only in the short term, since those are only personal financial benefits.