Patriots Act Day

Monday was yet another state holiday! Which means today acts as a Monday schedule, which means I again don’t have school. I feel very blessed that I randomly moved to a state that apparently has more state holidays than any other state in the union. I can’t believe how many days off we get. I think we have the absolute minimum number of school days you are allowed to have and still be an accredited university, which is fine by me. Anyway, it’s “Patriots’ Day,” a holiday that I assumed was a joke the first couple of times people at work referred to it. Not a joke! It refers to patriots like Thomas Jefferson or whatever, not, like, members of the Michigan militia, which is the first thing that I think of when I hear the word. We don’t get a lot of the Revolution stuff out West. We get more small-r-revolution stuff from creepy survivalists who mostly just hate black people. And certainly there are no state holidays for them (knock on wood).

The other thing you don’t get much of in the West is fancy hotel/restaurants in swanky liberal towns named after one of these patriots who specifically famously committed race-based genocide, at least, not that I know of. This restaurant, and the town it’s in, are named after the first person to suggest intentionally giving Native Americans blankets infested with smallpox. Here is an excerpt from one of his letters on this subject:

P.S. You will Do well to try to Innoculate the Indians by means of Blankets, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race. I should be very glad your Scheme for Hunting them Down by Dogs could take Effect, but England is at too great a Distance to think of that at present.

Charming! And yet, the town is named after him, a million roads and schools are named after him, the fancy restaurant is named after him. He is one of the local high school’s MASCOT.

This is one manner in which the west coast/east coast culture shock makes itself felt. The equivalent of this on the west coast, I think, would be something like a very fancy restaurant right in downtown Santa Fe called “The General George Custer Inn” or something; it’s unthinkable! Right? Maybe I am wrong and such a place does exist. Is there a “Custer, Utah” or such? Maybe, but is it a swanky progressive liberal paradise? This I would find harder to believe but again I could be wrong. But it just seems like if you lived long enough ago, even full-on genocide isn’t enough to topple you from Founding Fathers status levels. Custer is recent history compared to Lord Jeff; and in the West all there is is recent history. I guess? Things in the east fade away or seem mythically long ago/distant because “our” history here stretches so much further back than it does in Oklahoma? So more can be forgiven. Like how we find the story of Scheherazade charming or something even though it’s literally a story about a dude who graciously decides not to murder his wife because she entertains him more than his other wives have.

Then again, nobody hates anybody as much as everybody hates women, so there’s that. It’s such a profoundly unifying underlying sentiment we ought to base our entire society on it! OH WAIT

But enough about me

It’s just interesting how much older the history is here. Every type of history. The relationship with the past feels different, less raw and present than it often does out west, at least to me. The “mountains” here are these small, gently-rounded hills. They are impossibly ancient–the Rocky Mountains of my youth are jagged teenagers in comparison. For a long time I assumed the “Mount Tom” everyone here referred to must be far away until I finally realized it’s this little sloping hill you can walk all the way up in about 25 minutes in sandals. There are “old growth” forests here that were actually chopped completely down by the colonists; enough time has passed that they’re old growth again! And also the violent, horrific, shameful human history of this area is further back in time than it is in, say, Arizona. So maybe it feels shrouded in myth; the blood and guts and suffering is distant, like when you read about the siege of Troy or something. In the West the sense of living in someone else’s land is very present, or it was in the places I grew up.

Then again, again, I guess we are all perfectly comfortable with things being named Washington and Jefferson, even though those people bought/sold/raped/murdered other human beings while writing their treatises on equality. Damn, this earthly life is mysterious as hell

Anyway, its Patriots’ Day, which specifically celebrates the Battle of Lexington, I believe, which is some Revolutionary battle I am sure I learned about in 3rd grade and then never thought of again one single time in my life. I definitely learned about the Revolution in school but it felt very distant and general; it didn’t feel like something even my teachers were very interested in. I learned much, MUCH more about some of the Native American cultures of the West than I ever did about the Revolution. I definitely knew more about smallpox blankets than I did about the Battle of Lexington but I bet here it is the opposite, although who knows? I should ask one of my friends with kids.

I wonder how much of this vague personal sense I have of the west/east difference is founded in reality. I’m sure part of my exposure to native history wasn’t necessarily a “west” thing generally but was more due to the fact that I grew up in a tiny hippie town in which it was not uncommon for dreadlocked white people to do peyote ceremonies out in their own tipis and claim to have communicated with a Navajo man named “Blackberry” who lived 300 years earlier and who was now doling out marriage advice from the Spirit Realm (true story); I’m just documenting a difference that I was totally unaware of until I moved here. The native peoples stuff felt like the cultural history that was important to my teachers and the people in my town and the chambers of commerce in the area etc. etc. Here, at least from what I have seen (which is not much–I’d be interested to know what actual schoolchildren here are taught about the region–if anyone reading this grew up in new england let us know what you were taught about local native history!!) there doesn’t seem to be a ton of awareness of regional native cultural history. Even though I know that those cultures still exist here, of course. But honestly, the idea of a restaurant in my hometown being named after the smallpox blankets guy is just absurd; someone would burn it down. The very idea would not even occur to anyone.

Anyway, here it seems to be the Revolution itself that is the very present history. Here the arrowheads and pictographs of my childhood are replaced by colonial artifacts that are everywhere. Here it’s like “oh guess what, my husband and I just bought a little house and are renovating it” “oh congratulations” “Yes it’s lovely, and we’re putting in an organic garden out back. It’s a pain though because George Washington used to live in it so we aren’t allowed to change the floor plan” “Oh bummer. Wait, what??”

“That rock you are tying your shoe on is where Paul Revere sat to catch his breath after his famous ride.”
“What?? Why isn’t there a plaque or something”
“Oh everyone knows that”

“This Urban Outfitters used to be where Benjamin Franklin would bring his whores”
“[cries single tear of pride]”