Pete’s Dragon and the Most Alarming World of Child Abduction…with Music!
When you’re a kid, you don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about the historical basis for the narratives in the fantasy films you grew to love. It’s all about the anthropomorphic Robin Hood figures, talking parrots and genies, flying beds and walking suits of armor, an astronomically large collection of Dalmatians, or a magical cartoon dragon who roasts apples for his child companion. That describes much of my early experiences with Pete’s Dragon (1977), which saw Disney attempting to recreate the live-action-and-cartoon musical magic some thirteen years after Mary Poppins. It’s a film about a little boy and his magical dragon, about a small New England seaside town, about larger-than-life hillbilly villains, and about familiar Disney things like the power of family (even found family) and even the “value” of children. Value would normally have an obvious meaning here. Something like “hey, we should listen to kids because what they have to say matters,” for example. And Disney certainly has that here. Pete (Sean Marshall), the lively redheaded boy who is taken in by lighthouse keepers Nora (Helen Reddy) and Lampie (Mickey Rooney) gets his fair share of moments to remind the adults around him that what he thinks does matter – though other adults, such as the strict and draconian schoolteacher, Miss Taylor (Jane Kean), find little of value in the words of children. Yet, it’s the other value that I found particularly shocking upon rewatching the film for this feature.
Donald Trump is a Fascist, and It’s Time We Stop Pretending Otherwise
The U.S. military has begun appearing on U.S. streets in response to protests against police brutality and murder. The president has threatened more aggressive action, and fears abound about whether Trump can use the Insurrection Act to override the Posse Comitatus Act (an 1878 law that limits the president’s ability to deploy the military on U.S. soil). Meanwhile, in his latest tantrum, Trump has issued an executive order to attack the lawsuit protections granted to social media companies under his false belief that a notification of a fact check on a publicly available tweet constituted censorship. Lawsuits challenging the order have already been filed, and we wait now to see what will be the next step in the increasingly unhinged rants and flails of a president who too often seems to live in an alternate reality. In all of this, I’ve pondered a question I asked my students in a college writing class in 2017: is Donald J. Trump a fascist? Throughout the semester, they read non-fiction and literature ranging from Umberto Eco’s “Ur-fascism” to Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here to better understand what fascism is and the influence it had on U.S. culture. Back in 2017, the answer was a definitive “no, but.” No, he’s not a fascist, but he is an authoritarian. No, he’s not a fascist, but his behavior is unsettling. No, he’s not a fascist, but we should still be concerned. The question is one that the nation has struggled with since Trump’s election. There’s a good reason for that: fascism is, for most U.S.-Americans, an ill-defined concept. Much like the phrase “science fiction,” most of us are only equipped to identify it when we see it, and even then, not very effectively. I sought to combat that in my fascism course, and I’ll turn to some of that knowledge here to once more consider that infamous question.
“Finding Hope”: The History Reading List
Not too long ago, I announced a little project called “Finding Hope in the Histories of the United States.” I set as a goal to begin with a series of general histories of the United States to see if understanding the full line of this country’s history can change how I understand the concept of “hope.” And now that project can finally begin! For the past few weeks, I’ve been waiting on the books I selected for the project to arrive. More particularly, the first two books in the chronology (listed below and shown at the top of the image). All the others got here in record time, but for some reason, the books I needed to even begin took a little extra time. But now the wait is over. Here’s the magic reading list for the first phase of “Finding Hope”:
It Didn’t Happen Like That: On the Dimensions of Historical Accuracy
If you’d asked me a year ago if I cared all that much for historical accuracy in fiction, I might have told you that it didn’t much matter to me at all. Historical accuracy, I might have said, is an argument too often used to complain about creating more inclusive television programming — complaints that are themselves often historically inaccurate or overly focused on racial or gender assumptions rather than the stories themselves. Today, that still largely holds true. I still think too many people use the phrase to complain about diversity initiatives, and I still think our primary interest as everyday consumers of fiction should be the narratives instead of obsessive hyperfocus on how perfectly a series presents its designated period. However, the more I find myself immersed in period dramas in television and film, the more I’ve begun to nuance my perspective of historical accuracy. I blame part of this on my tendency to look up historical information as I watch. Frequently, this leads me to the knowledge that what I’m watching likely doesn’t resemble the real history. In the worst of cases, it has filled me with annoyance because often the fictional history is far less compelling than the actual history. In the best of cases, it renews my curiosity in human history, which leads me to buying new books to read.
Project Announcement: Finding Hope in the Histories of the United States
Hope is hard to come by these days. The pandemic continues to take lives by the thousands, the U.S. political system is (at best) totally broken, Americans left and right hate one another and seem frequently incapable of agreeing on even the most agreeable things, and the various aspects of Civil Rights have not been realized. For many Americans, it all seems…hopeless. These are the same feelings I’ve experienced since 2016 on an almost daily basis. There’s this never ending sense that we live in a dystopian nightmare for which there is no end in sight. This is not helped by endless news cycles of terror and apathy and political punditry, by our social media cycles of misery, or even at the local level of politics. Hell, my small town made the news for being one of the first cities to vote to ban refugee resettlements. But is it really that hopeless? Is hope truly dead, or is there a a trend of hope throughout U.S. history that we’re ignoring? I’d like to find out.
A Not Quite History: The Great Courses’ “The History of Ancient Egypt”
For the past week, I’ve been listening to a series of lectures from The Great Courses on the history of ancient Egypt, which I must have grabbed on an Audible sale many moons ago. The series is presented by Dr. Bob Brier, a notable Egyptologist and mummy expert. I say notable because much of his popularity stems from his extensive popular work with mummies, including reconstructing tombs for museum exhibits, reproducing the Egyptian mummification process, and other mummy-friendly things; he also has some 30 years of experience “in the field.” Given that the presenter of these lectures is most notable for his popular work, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the lectures themselves are packaged accordingly. Yet, in listening to these lectures, I found myself wondering about those credentials. An ardent fan of ancient Egypt and apparent mummy expert Brier certainly is, but do these lectures represent someone who could be called an expert of ancient Egypt’s history? The answer is “not really,” and I don’t know if that’s due to The Great Courses’ educational philosophy (this is my first TGC experience) or Brier’s insistence on a casual, heavily anecdotal, and meandering series of lectures. Whatever the reason behind it, I have to say that I have been greatly disappointed in this series. I assumed going in that I would get a comprehensive history of ancient Egypt with at least a degree of scholarly depth, but overall, the lectures are devoid of what I’d call “useful material.” Indeed, I don’t know that I’ve learned anything I couldn’t have easily picked up by reading the wiki page (Brier’s personal anecdotes aside), which to me seems to decrease the value of these lectures as a “history of Ancient Egypt.” Mind you, Brier is noticeably enthusiastic about his subject; indeed, it’s clear from his voice and anecdotes that he absolutely loves ancient Egypt. Yet, that enthusiasm, for me, doesn’t translate to a history of an entire culture.