Past & Present

The Washington Post has a story looking at the legacy of the civil war in El Salvador as we approach 15 years since the peace agreements. Thanks to Patrick for pointing this out.

Does anybody need a reminder that we are not over Vietnam, now thirty years later? A new piece of evidence is the quantity and quality of emotion that is erupting in response to Jane Fonda’s presence at the D.C. anti-war rally Saturday. You can see it in many blogs. I am sure many of these posts will cover for those younger than 45 or so the one act by Jane Fonda that defines her for many, which is her visit as an opponent to the Vietnam War to Hanoi in 1972. There she spoke on a radio program about her opposition, and posed at an anti-aircraft gun installation. She has since expressed regret for participating in that photo.

I am sure the topic of Jane Fonda and her visit to North Vietnam will also take up beefy chunks of the airtime on radio and cable television programs tomorrow as well. I marvel at how selective this recall of Vietnam is in the preponderance of news chatter over the last several years. A few shreds of that experience are amplified, and even distorted, such as the mantra of how soldiers were spat upon at airports when they returned from service. See here for research that rebuts that image. Meanwhile, so much else about that war and that time remains unspoken.

My estimation of this bare-knuckles political brawler is dragged down more by his involvement in the 1954 Guatemala coup than by his admittedly sleazy work for Richard Nixon.

In an interview two years ago, Hunt talked about his CIA work to overthrow the left-leaning, democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman.

Hunt: He was in power then, yes. But his wife was by far the smarter of the two and sort of told him what to do. She was a convinced communist. … I waited for orders [from Washington]. A couple of [CIA and military] officers came down to join me, and it became apparent that there was going to be an effort to dislodge the communist management [laughs] of Guatemala. Which indeed happened. We set up shop and had some very bright guys working against Arbenz, and the long and short of it was that we got Arbenz defenestrated. Out the window. [Laughs]

A conflict covered today on page 1A of the New York Times (may require log in) pits a historian against a public artist. Caught in the middle is the legacy of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass. The artist plans to make a concrete image of a quilt, to accompany a statue of Douglass, that refers to the idea that some antebellum quilts contained coded messages to help fugitive slaves elude capture.

The memorial’s link between Douglass, who escaped slavery from Baltimore at age 20, and the coded designs has puzzled historians. . . It’s “a myth, bordering on a hoax,” said David Blight, a Yale University historian who has written a book about Douglass and edited his autobiography. “To permanently associate Douglass’s life with this story instead of great, real stories is unfortunate at best.”

My own teaching and research is removed from the topic of U.S. slavery and the abolitionists. But it is fascinating to find these conflicts, whatever the historical matter, between a vision of the past expressed by folks in the arts and the version of the past accepted by historical professionals.

This reminds of the more common conflicts ignited by the type of artists known as filmmakers when they put out films set in the past. I just saw Apocalypto, and let me tell me, first of all . . .