There's so much lore
This week, we explore the nature of history as story, the death of the monoculture, how a 1990s song can lead you to unexpected magic, and some other things.
Welcome back, friends. As always, I hope you are well. Keep washing your hands. Stay home. So let's get to it, shall we?
The Story
I have any number of theories as to why history teachers get a bad rap in the general public. Perhaps it was the sense that for many years, history was where schools stowed the football coach if they weren't teaching PE. Maybe because history was seen as just names and dates, and that's boring. I have so many parents tell me at parent-teacher conferences that they hated history when they were in school, but now they love it. It will happen at least twice per conference session. My current theory is that it's tough to teach middle school and high school students how to have perspective because you really can't have perspective until you're older. You can try, but you really don't get it. Heck, I didn't even really get it until I was in my 30s, and it is my job to understand history and explain it to other people.
I think one of the spots where history education doesn't always live up to its potential is that we often fail to tell the stories in history. History should not solely be narrative because narratives often need to leave critical facts out for storytelling. That said, it is a shame that too often, we ignore one of the oldest traditions across continents, cultures, and peoples. Storytellers were venerated for their skill and for the critical role that they served in their communities.
I think this was part of the appeal of Hamilton. Lin-Manuel Miranda made as his core thesis of this production the notion of "Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?" The telling of our stories is often out of our control, but it is worth knowing that people want to hear them. People understand narratives. Heck, it's why fiction exists!
But there's not enough narrative in the modern U.S. History class. I think that is due to the sheer breadth of what has to be covered. Think about how much history we've added since 1945, to pick a time when schooling sort of started to resemble what it does now. If you look at the state standards for any state, there's a lot to cover and not a lot of time (and that's under normal circumstances. Glances furtively at, well, everything.) I understand this approach, standards are a political minefield, and everyone wants to feel like their particular slices of history are on the list, because there is a genuine fear that if it's not listed, it's not covered because it won't be tested. That is unfortunate, but it happens more often than you might think. There is not always a lot of time for historical storytelling.
When I decided I wanted to become a teacher in my sophomore year of college, I shared this desire with my dear friend Catherine. Catherine's understanding of the world has always been steeped in a broader understanding of traditions and culture than your average person. For as long as I have known her, she has always had this sense about her that is ineffable but simultaneously comforting. She made me promise, promise in a way that I felt the weight of generations upon that promise, that I would never forget to tell the stories in my classes, that I would never lose sight of why people need those stories. I have done my very best to honor this, even when it hasn't been easy because I know it is the right thing to do. I don't have the best voices like an elementary school teacher would in a read aloud, and it has taken me a long time to learn pacing and pausing, but like any skill, one gets better with practice.
So during this time of uncertainty, one thing we need more than ever is to tell the stories. Share the stories. Even an audience as small as your household can benefit from learning our own stories and histories.
Three Channels, One Stream
One of the more exciting things about being a late GenXer is that I have a foot in both the culture of the Baby Boomers (because media was primarily focused on selling to them. How many 60s songs still show up in commercials aimed at our older Americans after all?) and that of the Millennials. It doesn't mean I fully understand either one or embrace all parts of it, but I do think that it has lead me to an exciting realization. My age cohort, (which I dubbed Gen X&Y in a previous piece I wrote) those of us who graduated high school in the 1990s, have a strange coexistence where you remember your frustrations with dial-up life, but you're grateful that social media did not exist when you were in high school or college. But one of the other things that late Gen Xers are the last to understand was the monoculture.
Television, even in the days of 1990s cable, was still very much a three-channel thing. You had your big three stations, maybe a fourth when Fox came along, and then your local UHF channels. From these stations, collectively, we got a lot of television shows, some good, some OK, a lot mediocre. One of the worst things you can do to ruin your childhood is to go back and watch episodes of a favorite cartoon from the 1980s. They rarely hold up. At all. But between those shows, perpetual reruns, and a whole bunch of movies from the past, if one wanted to, one could get a sense of what had come before, what the boomers had watched and seen. Radio has a similar vibe. Even with the formats of radio stations, one could get a good sense of the significant cultural rocks upon which Boomer culture had been built. MTV would serve as a similar touchstone for early Gen Xers, but the idea was that there was a limited universe of songs, of shows, or movies.
This scope actually served those of us who enjoyed pop culture trivia in the late 1990s were well served by this. There was an acceptable answer space that made up a canon for something that did not have a formal canon—writers framed within a reasonable answer space built on a common culture. Even as early as 2003, there was speculation that pop culture trivia would fracture because there was just too much stuff to ask about and no real way that anyone could cover it all. That was probably a bit too dire, there are still widely popular things, but it's not easy to narrow things down and say, "this is what we're going to ask about." I also acknowledge that the broader world of the popularity of things that did not appeal to the core audiences of quiz bowl two decades ago. We're actually better at this than we used to be, though nowhere close to where we need to be.
But I wonder if Millenials will feel the same bridge between their pop culture and the pop culture of Gen X and the Zoomers. There's so much out there, and the fracture is too widespread, I think, to have those shared moments in a way. But perhaps not. How many high schoolers have discovered Friends on a streaming service the way that Gen Xers discovered M*A*S*H on UHF channel reruns? There will be connections. It just may take a little longer to see them.
Playing Possum
Today's 90s music selection came from my hitting shuffle play on my 1990s Look Backs playlist and seeing what came up. The song that began playing was "Watch the Girl Destroy Me" by Possum Dixon, the third track and lead single from the band's 1993 self-titled album.
(Is it a compliment or an indictment that I felt like this video was just lost footage from The Ben Stiller Show.)
So the usual protocol here is I now go to the Wikipedia article on the song and give you a bunch of interesting things about the song. Except the song doesn't have a Wikipedia page. So to pull back to the band's page, we learn that Possum Dixon named themselves after a suspected murderer featured on America's Most Wanted and that frontman Rob Zabrecky worked days as a mail clerk while building a following on the LA coffeehouse scene.
"Watch the Girl Destroy Me" peaked at #9 on the Alternative Chart in 1994. (Here's a neat article that broke down one very jampacked week in that chart 20 years later.) Possum Dixon would go on to be mainly a one-hit-wonder, despite working with Ric Ocasek as a producer on their third (and final) album.
So I could probably wrap things up here, except, I took one more step in the Wikiwalk, and clock on Rob Zabrecky's page. I'm so glad I did. Here are three facts about his post-Possum Dixon career I found fascinating:
Zabrecky has been doing magic at the Magic Castle since the mid-1990s. He has a mentalist act that Penn and Teller, on an episode of Fool Us called, mostly, not terrible. Or you could look at the fact that "In 2011 and 2012 he was voted 'Stage Magician of the Year' by the Academy of Magical Arts at the Magic Castle. In 2014 and 2015, he was voted 'Parlour Magician of the Year' by the same organization."
Zabrecky is a skilled auctioneer, trained by Bonhams auction house (known then as Butterfield & Butterfield) during the late 1990s.
Zabrecky has also become a regular actor on television.
Always make the extra click on your Wikiwalk!
Barker Randomness
I think it's OK to be afraid because, more often than not, we are fearful of something because we are worried about losing something. Maslow's hierarchy of needs probably comes into play. I don't have a lot of psychology training to further this notion. I've dealt with my thinking on fear in a previous essay I wrote to the SHS Class of 2015. I think a lot of that applies here. So keep trying to control that which you can, and we'll hope for better days ahead.
Thank you.