The past presses close to the surface on the island of Hawaii, the southernmost in the archipelago, the one they call the Big Island. In 1985, during the first of what would be many trips to this massive volcanic isle, I toured its wild northern coast in a tiny bubble of a helicopter. On what seemed a whim, but probably had to do with the calm clarity of the day, the pilot decided to swing out to sea and fly alongside the pali, a stretch of vertical cliffs that rise 2,000 feet above the surf. Pointing to a hole in the face of the sheer wall, he shouted, “I can’t hang here long, so look sharp.” Inside, stark white against the tropical red earth, I saw a pile of skulls and rib bones, a burial cave untouched by the centuries. That kind of abrupt historical jolt, I have since learned, is to be expected on the geologically youngest, but, very likely, the historically oldest, of the Hawaiian chain.
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January 2011
New technologies don’t always lead inexorably toward the future. Lately, they’ve also been opening doors through which we can step straight into the past. One such door has let us experience a part of the childhood of our parents; another has led to the world premiere of a revolutionary 1920s musical milestone; a third—and most remarkable—opens out to a tour across pre-Revolutionary Russia, exactly as if it were all there today.
Even the relatively recent past holds mysteries we can never penetrate—just look at any book of jokes from more than a half a century ago. And until recently anyone under 60 in America was utterly perplexed by the idea that the children of an apparently simpler time—our parents—had amused themselves by pushing around on kick scooters, those old playthings that were essentially wood and metal skateboards with a vertical pole at the front. They were almost as unfathomable as that earlier fad of rolling a hoop with a stick. Then in an instant scooters were new and all around us again. Technology made it happen.
Just as every cloud has a silver lining, so disasters always have a redeeming feature. Because of the Titanic, no major ship has struck an iceberg since. That most famous of disasters produced a slew of reforms, all of which made the sea a much safer place. Business and financial disasters, too, have led the way to fundamental reforms that have made the capitalist system, as a whole, safer and more productive. The collapse of thousands of banks in the Great Depression resulted in a banking system in which not one depositor has lost a cent of insured funds since 1934. The failure of Samuel Insull’s over-leveraged electricity empire in the early 1930s led directly to new rules governing holding companies.
Secret military tribunals, from which there is no appeal, are imbued with the power to order the secret execution of non-citizens, the suspension of habeas corpus for suspected terrorists, and the abrogation of attorney-client confidentiality. War has often brought about dramatic changes in the American mood, some of them magnificent, others not so pretty. Many people, this writer included, ardently support the current war against terrorism, but are not willing to suspend our most cherished civil liberties, no matter what the current mood.
It has been said that of all the screen interpretations of the complex events leading up to the siege and fall of the Alamo, the most influential have been John Wayne’s (in his 1960 film The Alamo ) and Walt Disney’s. Of the two, Disney’s is the more widely seen and remembered. After all, Walt Disney inspired a Davy Crockett craze; John Wayne’s clunker brought it to a close.
It is not true that Davy Crockett was forgotten until Disney Studio’s Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter aired on ABC (which coproduced the episodes with Disney) late in 1954. But the old bear hunter turned congressman turned cracker-barrel philosopher had slid into something of a down period. He had been the subject of perhaps two dozen feature films before Disney, but most of them had been made in the silent era. The closest thing to a recent major movie had been Davy Crockett, Indian Scout , with George Montgomery, in 1950.
Readers who enjoyed this issue's article on Hawaii but are unable to make it to the Big Island can get a taste of the experience by visiting the Stamford Museum & Nature Center in Stamford, Connecticut, for Ukulele Fever: The Crazy That Swept America (through May 26;
One sign of spring that’s at least as welcome as a blooming crocus is the annual flowering of baseball books. This year’s crop includes Breaking the Slump: Baseball in the Depression Era , by Charles C. Alexander, perhaps the most distinguished living baseball historian (Columbia University Press, 353 pages, $29.95); Perfect: The Inside Story of Baseball’s Sixteen Perfect Games , by James Buckley, Jr. (Triumph, 256 pages, $24.95), with a foreword by Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky, who pitched one of the 16; and The Baseball Almanac: Big Bodacious Book of Baseball , by Dan Schlossberg (Triumph, 384 pages [softcover], $14.95), which is not nearly as cutesy as the title would suggest.
The New York Public Library recently acquired a copious archive left by the novelist Jack Kerouac, including, according to an announcement, “two sets of more than one hundred handwritten cards that allowed Kerouac to play a fantasy baseball game of his own invention.” The mass of Kerouaciana, ranging from manuscripts and diaries to his harmonica and railroad lamp to “seventy-two publishing contracts,” will be added to the NYPL’s Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature. There the author will find himself in distinguished company alongside “Kerouac’s literary and spiritual forebears: Emerson, Thoreau, and, above all, Whitman.” While it’s hard to imagine Thoreau playing baseball with marbles, toothpicks, and an eraser no matter how much time he had on his hands, Whitman would no doubt have joined in with gusto.