Dressing Down Revisionist Historians

From a Drawer in the Bureau of Indian Affairs

When one commits to maintaining a relatively-daily blog, it is often a challenge to come up with a topic that won't take an entire day to compose. However, on occasion the sun breaks through the clouds, and the topic appears to fall from the sky as if by design. Today is one of those occasions.

A friend posted this image on his Facebook page today.

Link to Source

My friend is the baritone of Hot Air Buffoons, a comedic barbershop quartet that features four fairly-large men whose repertoire includes parodies about eating food in large and/or indiscriminate quantities.
I mention this to explain the culinary tone of my response, which follows:

The soundtrack to the Youtube slideshow linked below comes from Waiting For The Electrician or Someone Like Him, a 1968 LP (yes, a vinyl record) by The Firesign Theatre. 

It serves up an excellent piece of biting satire. That comment alone should make you hungry to watch it.

But there's more on the menu.

I think you'll find that "Temporarily Humboldt County" is the perfect main course to follow the visual appetizer you posted.

Bon appétit!

Link to Source

Note: I don't know who created the video, but the title is incorrect. It should read "Temporarily Humboldt County," not "Temporary."

The Backstory (for those who care about such things)

I own a copy of Waiting For The Electrician or Someone Like Him, and I played Temporarily Humboldt County in class when I team-taught social studies years ago. I had often thought of using it here, but I didn't know quite how until a bit of happenstance compelled me to write this post today.

For several weeks Time Warner Cable has been running an ad that features a young woman on her wedding day. Her friends look for "something old" for her to wear. They rip a DSL modem from the wall and hang it around her neck, explaining that "There's nothing older than DSL internet." At that point, former Pittsburgh Steelers coach, Bill Cowher, appears in the doorway dressed in a Time Warner uniform and carrying a present. He tells the bride-to-be about Time Warner's cable-internet package to which she replies, "I've been waiting for this day my whole life."

The cadence of her voice and that sentence hit me upside the head. It flowed exactly like a phrase I remembered from Temporarily Humboldt County. I suspect that my wife got sick and tired of me muttering it  each time that commercial aired (and, as Time Warner Cable subscribers, it happened many, many times).

You can hear the phrase that played in my cranium at 1:27 - 1:30 in the video and again at 3:22 − 3:25.

When I saw my friend's post, I knew I had to reply somehow with Temporarily Humboldt County. A Google search revealed the video, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Epilogue and a Teaser

I saw and took a photograph of this picture at the Denver Art Museum in 2007. I include it here because it seems to fit in with today's theme.

I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”

-- John Wayne

I've done some research regarding the implied charge of racism leveled at John Wayne by the caption on the image. So far the results have been mixed, falling primarily into opinion pieces written by partisans from both sides of the question.

Although he never served in the military, and all of his heroic acts were performed on movie sets, John Wayne is considered by many to be an American hero. Perhaps I'll explore the topic of heroism in a future post.