Author: Ophelia Benson

Oh good, another piece of Imaginative History, or The Case of the Peekaboo Evidence. Not unlike the Clonaid festivities last week, when the ‘Raelians’ announced the birth of the first cloned baby, but when invited to provide DNA evidence to support such a surprising claim, came over all bashful. There is a good deal of sly wit in Natalie Danford’s Salon piece about retired Admiral Gavin Menzies’ claim that the Chinese sailed to America seventy years before Columbus. It was a shrewd move, for example, to rent the lecture hall of the Royal Geographical Society as the place to announce his ‘discovery’. And publicity does do the trick: there has been so much attention that Menzies’ American publishers have advanced the date of publication by five months. Danford talks to three experts in the field who are unimpressed or plain skeptical of Menzies’ claim, and she wonders why a serious publisher like Morrow ‘didn’t question these unorthodox research methods or the veracity of the statements Menzies has built on them’. The executive editor Danford spoke to resorted to speculation on motives rather than answering the question.

Wachtel theorized that skeptics are threatened by Menzies’ attack on the status quo: “People don’t like the basis of their fundamental knowledge to be challenged, and we all know that in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”

Ah. That explains it then. Because people don’t like their knowledge challenged, therefore bizarre claims based on shaky or no evidence are true. Interesting argument.

But of course we like this kind of thing. Think The Education of Little Tree. Think of the ‘Chief Seattle’ speech, that was actually written by a Hollywood hack. Think of Black Athena, and The Goddess, and The Gentle Tasaday. Think of Tacitus’ wildly romanticised version of the Germans, people he’d never laid eyes on and knew nothing about, but used to vent his hatred of ‘decadent’ Rome. No doubt the Chinese arrival in America in 1421 will soon be on the curriculum of many a school.

Is it a possibility that music can impact on culture in such a way so as to affect people’s behaviour? Apparently not, at least not if the music is rap, the behaviour violent, and you agree with Viv Craske, editor of Mixmag and would be sociologist. To suggest such a thing is “racist, out of touch and bigoted”. But Mr Craske is a little confused. On the one hand, he claims that “if gun crime is up 55%, it can’t be down to music in any part” (he didn’t elaborate on whether it might be down to music in some part if gun crime is up say 54%). But, on the other hand, he doesn’t accept that guns are fashion accessories for everyone (so that’s cleared that one up then) “but rather for the kind of person who is brought up in a culture who believes that’s the right thing to do.” Right, Mr Craske, but obviously a culture which cannot have been influenced by music in even the smallest way…

Anyway, in Mr Craske’s view, all this is stuff and nonsense, because if music were powerful enough to contribute to gun violence, then it would be used by governments. And there we all were thinking that governments have been using music for millennia…

Well, those silly Victorians, you know, of course they thought about sex every instant of their lives just as we do, but they wouldn’t admit it, the nasty hypocritical creatures, but we’ll fix them, we’ll just make a lot of movies and tv shows based on 19th century novels and if the sex isn’t there we’ll just damn well insert it! So to speak. There is an excellent article on this subject in the Boston Globe today. In it Abby Wolf reports, among other things, that child sexual abuse was featured in a tv drama based on Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, a feature that is entirely absent from the novel. This is one reason not to see movie or tv ‘adaptations’ of novels and expecially of novels that were written more than about five minutes ago. They just can’t get it right. All those Elizabeth Rs and Shakespeare & Lady Violas and Queen Margots having gleeful free-spirited fearless consequence-free sex on ten minutes’ acquaintance or less (Margot grabs the first man she sees on the street and they copulate against the nearest wall, implausible behavior for a 16th century princess, I would have thought, even a French one). We just can’t believe that they really were more inhibited than we are, and for good reason. We also can’t believe that they just weren’t as interested as we are, because we take it for granted that we’ve got it right and they had it wrong. But as Wolf says, ‘That we see sex wherever we see Victorians may say less about them than it does about us and the way we see things now.’