Tag: history

Bob and Doug McMoquegua


The Wari abandoned Cerro Baúl and all their other cultural sites about AD 1000. Why they chose to leave Cerro Baúl remains a mystery, but they left ample evidence of a planned, if destructive, departure. They cleaned out functional buildings, but ritually destroyed ceremonial buildings, including the palace, temple and brewery.

Final ceremonies, such as a feast at the palace, ended with igniting the combustible parts of the structure. Later, the stone walls collapsed, covering and protecting the remains for a thousand years.

The brewery preserved the most intriguing evidence. Shawl clips found in the ruins showed that elite women were the brewers. In Inca times, Ryan Williams at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, notes that noble women called “virgins of the Sun” are known to have brewed beer…

More at the New Scientist about this now-departed ancient people and their awesome 64-ouncers of beer, shown above.

The Big Kids

I grew up in Southern California suburbia in the 1970s. It was an ideal place to be a kid. I was sheltered from the worst of life but not insulated from reality. There was always something to do, and the weather was always good. I had good schools to go to. And the neighborhood was full of kids, so I always had someone to play with when I ran out the door to find adventure. We had glorious dirt clod wars, made bombs, created entire Tonka truck empires, dug pits, and everything else that was fun.

Like most little kids, I was fascinated by the big kids. Starting at about seven or eight years older than me, they were gods of suburbia: large, loud, rough, authoritative, and frightening. They had long hair, and the older ones rode dirt bikes. They listened to crazy heavy metal music. They knew all the bad words, always had fireworks, wore cool surf clothes, and were big and tan and imposing.

The most impressive part about the Big Kids was that they were all apparently insane. For example, they’d get up on the roof of someone’s house with the heavy metal music blasting and scream at the sky repeatedly. In the middle of the night they would ride their dirt bikes up and down the street in nothing but swim shorts, also screaming at the sky. One time, some of the Big Kids stole another little kid’s bike and leaned it against the tree in front of their house. When he showed up to get it, they shot him a bunch of times with a BB Gun from their window while he sobbed and writhed and ran. I watched from my own window across the street, fascinated and terrified.

The death rate for Big Kids amazed me. The next door neighbors lost two of them, the family three doors down lost one, and I can remember three more just from our street during my childhood. Two others ended up permanently and severely handicapped.

The society of Big Kids was very masculine. The Big Kid girls were mousy and wide-eyed, long hair parted in the center. They were nice to me but totally alien in their teenage world. I remember one girl in particular who had an entirely purple bedroom: carpet, bedspread, walls, even a fuzzy purple toilet seat cover. I was at their house with my parents once staring in awe at her purple den. One of the Big Girls died too.

Not all of them were rough tough crazies. Two of the Big Kids I remember mostly for their cars. One was a paraplegic older brother of a friend’s. He had a ’60s Mustang California Special modified with hand controls that was the coolest thing ever, and he gave me a ride in it so I could see how it worked. Another guy had a VW bug full of CBC radio equipment and drove around talking to people in the bug, which I found ultimately awesome. And three identical tow-headed surfer boys down the street were in a locally famous rock band, and I got to watch them practice in their garage. They were rock gods, and one of them had a Van Halen sticker on his VW squareback.

The Big Kids’ music was dark and scary and fascinating itself. I remember looking at the window display in a Licorice Pizza record store for Blue Öyster Cult’s Agents of Fortune, all weird imagery and craziness, and wondering what it was all about. The screaming sex noises of Led Zeppelin and Van Halen confused and attracted me. To this day my reaction to 70s heavy metal and hard rock is a flashback to those kids with their long hair and work shirts and corduroy pants with the comb stuck in back, howling along to Alice Cooper or something.

Since I was a sheltered little kid, I was unaware of what bound together the big kid craziness, the screaming on rooftops, the shirtless midnight motorcycle rides, the caterwauling music, and the deaths. They were of course all high on hard drugs, mostly heroin and hallucinogens, and drunk. All the time. Of the two kids next door, one died in a DUI motorcycle crash and the other OD’d on heroin and died in the snow in the mountains. The kid at the end of the street flipped his VW fastback on the S-curves under the influence. The girl who died had mixed her heroin wrong that day. Of the Big Kids who died on my street, only one that I remember didn’t die from drink or drugs; he got cancer. All of these things I found out years later.

Looking back on it, those kids were generationally doomed. They were all born within a couple of years of 1960 probably, and hit their adolescence just when the 1970s drugs ‘n’ sex culture was at full blast. At 14 it’s not easy to handle free-flowing hard drugs, no-consequences sex, and pop culture that celebrates total hedonism. Like me, they felt safe and insulated in suburbia. But they’d let in an assortment of incubi and succubi they couldn’t resist.

Victoria Williams wrote a great song for them, because she was one of the Big Kids. It’s called “Summer of Drugs”. When I hear that song I think about those stoner surfer kids shooting up and blasting their 70s rock, and dying.

We were too young to be hippies
We missed out on the love
Born to be teens in the late 70s
In the summer of drugs…

The Raft of the Medusa

( Larger version here )

It’s a famous painting, often parodied or quoted. Months ago I was talking to eyeteeth about it and we started looking up its history. The shipwreck and the painting have a story to tell that’s pertinent today.

After Napoleon was deposed, the French got a new royal government, the Bourbons. Shortly after they took over they sent some ships to West Africa on a colonial adventure. The Medusa carried 400 passengers and 160 crew.

The captain was an inexperienced political employee who should not have been given charge of a ship. He was chosen for his loyalty to the new regime, and was disliked by his crew.

The Medusa ran aground, and Captain De Chaumereys proceeded to fuck everything up. Instead of trying to float the ship free, he abandoned her. Special important privileged people were put in lifeboats, and everyone else was dumped on a raft. The lifeboats were to tow the raft.

Pretty soon the aristocrats in the lifeboats found it tiresome to pull the lesser beings in the raft and cut it loose. Their shipmates were now floating helplessly.

When the raft was found two weeks later, there were 15 survivors out of the 149 who had been abandoned and set adrift. Suicide, murder, and starvation took them. Five more died after their rescue. The French government declined to help the survivors to return home, so the British navy repatriated them.

The attempt at a coverup of this failed; survivors made sure that newspapers heard about it and at least one survivor published a popular book. Géricault was inspired to create the classic you see above, which was praised or condemned according to the politics of the viewer. The government nearly fell, and the captain was found guilty at court martial.

It was clear that some people on the raft had behaved badly (murder, cannibalism, madness). The blame for their degradation was, however, also clear. An arrogant government had given charge of people’s lives to an ignorant toady who had then shown incompetence and disregard for human life. The privileged had been saved and the others left to die.

In sum, the disaster and its aftermath showed the French people the true colors of their government.

We have met the enemy, and it’s us again.

I’ve just finished reading Backfire, by Loren Baritz. It’s a book about the Vietnam War that I saw recommended somewhere here on Livejournal; if you recommended it, remind me.

I grew up in the shadow of my country’s Vietnam War. I was born just as it was starting, and the final defeat happened while I was in grade school. My older brother registered for the draft but wasn’t called. My childhood was colored by a war we were losing, that a majority of the country disliked. As I got older I read a lot about the war. Quite a few people my family knew had been in combat there, too. At least partly because of Vietnam, my country didn’t fight any serious wars for quite a while. We’d fought an unjust war, done it poorly, been beaten, mistreated our soldiers, made ourselves an international pariah, and lied to each other about it. Any suggestion of war made people consider the phrase “another Vietnam”.

Most books about the Vietnam War follow one of a few patterns. There are military histories, first-person journalistic accounts, vast tomes about the social impact in the United States, even more gigantic tomes about the strategies of various Great Men of the time, and rip-roaring military adventures. I recommend reading one of each, since they don’t vary much in quality.

I also recommend reading this one. Babitz treats the war as a disastrous expression of American culture. Our belief in American uniqueness and virtue, the explicitly religious belief that we are a “City on a Hill” that can heal the world’s ills, and a doggedly held belief that everyone everywhere wants to be American are three points that stick very well. Once we’d set out on this project of defending South Vietnam, it was impossible to back out or to admit that we were doing things poorly, because national prestige was at stake. There are depressingly many points along the way where the whole thing could have been stopped — and people in power who did their best to stop it — but the war was a cultural necessity. Everything else follows from this point. The total lack of strategy (one general is quoted as saying “The operations are the strategy!”), ignorance of our enemy, hatred of our allies, bureaucratic idiocy, official lying, and downright insanity of highly placed officials just mark the way that was set from the beginning when we declared ourselves to be the world’s savior.

That’s not why this book was such a gut-punch, though. I knew all of this before from other reading. No, the reason I’ve been so disturbed reading this is that the generals and CIA agents and politicians who fucked this thing up so badly are clearly superior to anyone we have managing our current war. White House staff, military officers, and CIA agents resigned in protest. Senators and Congressmen questioned the war and its conduct incessantly. I realized as I read that I was becoming nostalgic for the uniformed brass and right-wing politicians of 1966.

Because we didn’t learn. The reaction to Vietnam that I described from my childhood didn’t last. Starting in about 1980, the revisionists got to work. A new story was written about the war; It had been won by the soldiers but they were made to lose by our enemies at home: liberals, protesters, craven politicians, and desk-bound soldiers. Our boys could have won it but they were stabbed in the back, and spat on when they returned. A whole new genre of movies showed up: the Vietnam payback flick, in which POWs were rescued or angry vets got to do one right this time and shoot up some Central Americans or drug dealers. And at the end of the decade we had our Anti-Vietnam, the first Gulf War. We fought a set-piece battle against an enemy no one could love and rolled right over him using all the technology that failed us in an unconventional war against popular guerillas. The pride was back.

And now we’re doing it again, but worse. We’re ass deep in a country that hates us, fighting popular guerillas with the wrong weapons just as before. We’re losing and trying to extricate ourselves. We’re committing atrocities and idiocies right and left. But this time there’s no reporting worth reading, because that’s all been shut down. There will be no Seymour Hersh finding My Lai. There’s no draft, because that was unpopular. Therefore this war is fought entirely by the poor and mercenaries, and the great American middle class won’t see their children dead. And the reaction of those in power to the painful lessons of Vietnam is to deny them entirely. We are bringing democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan; the people love us and want us to save them from evil. Any opposition to any tiny part of the war is treachery. There is no dissent within the government or the military. The solution to the problems that ended the Vietnam war is to silence the journalists, muzzle the naysayers in the government, and lie like crazy.

It’s trite and forced to make exact analogies with German in the Thirties; too many parallels are absent, and the culture is very different. But it’s hard not to see that Vietnam was our Great War and our Versailles. The first Gulf War was our Spain. And the current eternal war on Terror and Evil is an attempt at erasing the shame of Vietnam by beating the entire world into submission: a Thousand Year City on a Hill. We didn’t really lose that war before, we were stabbed in the back. And we’re a great people. And we’re going to show the whole world how great we are, and how right we were, by doing it all over again without the distractions of competent journalism, honest officials, a well-informed public, or the shadow of a doubt in this Administration’s mind that we were chosen by God to bring his light to the world.

This book does a good job of telling you why this happened; read it. And hope I’m wrong.