They say there are only six basic building blocks or themes behind every story ever told.

Some storytellers know this, others don’t.  The ones who realise this usually try harder to bring something new or surprising to the table.

When it’s done cleverly, like in the Coen Brothers retelling of a 2,500 year-old story by Homer in “O Brother Where Art Thou?”, it can be great.

Unfortunately, Hollywood seems to be giving-up on any artistry in its recycling of the same ancient stories, hoping that CGI and franchise familiarity will be enough to keep the money train on the rails.

Virtually every single film in the Marvel Universe is a bad version of the early medieval classic “Beowulf“, which itself betrays elements of even more ancient traditions.  Even “European” folk tales like Cinderella have roots far, far deeper than many imagine, having often arrived in Europe via the various Silk Roads from the east.

I was feeling nearly as old as Beowulf this week when I realised that it is five years since the abysmal THIRD iteration of “Charlie’s Angels“, over twenty years since the second, and just short of half a century since the original TV series with Farrah Fawcett, Kate Jackson, and Jaclyn Smith – a show which made a fortune for Wella Balsam shampoo, red swimsuit manufacturers, and hairdressers skilled in the “feather cut”.

It’s also 25 years since “The Blair Witch Project” was widely thought to be reinventing the horror film genre with its faux documentary approach.

But of course this style of film-making had already been done way back in 1972, with the drive-in movie cult classic “The Legend of Boggy Creek“, which centered around the search for a Bigfoot-type creature near a small town called Fouke in the swamplands of southwest Arkansas…

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Director Charles B. Pierce channelled Truman Capote‘s documentary writing style from “In Cold Blood” (about real monsters among us) into a B movie about barely-glimpsed, maybe? real monsters hiding around us.

The wider cultural impact of this film on conservative America is hard to overstate, mainly because there has always been a tension at the heart of America’s relation with wilderness – poised between fear, wonder, and exploitation.

The story trope of hairy wild men is ancient and universal, but particularly potent in a nation so new to its colonisers that it was possible for newcomers to believe that almost anything might be lurking beyond the next ridge, hidden in the undergrowth of a dark ravine, or skulking at the back of a hidden cave.

North of the swamps around Fouke and Boggy Creek lie the Ozark Mountains of Southern Missouri and Northern Arkansas, which are in a way the westernmost extension of southern Appalachia.

Most people forget that when the slaveholder and frontiersman Daniel Boone pushed through the Cumberland Gap in 1775 – making way for a torrent of settlers and precipitating disaster for indigenous peoples – he himself never settled-down until reaching Missouri.

Thousands of Kentuckians and Tennesseans would do likewise, with many eventually settling in the Ozark Mountains.

We should not picture Missouri or Arkansas as trackless wildernesses at that time, however often Americans claim to have “tamed” the west.

These lands were certainly wild by today’s standards, but they had already been long settled by indigenous tribes, the French, and then for a while, Spanish peoples. There are still a few people alive today around Old Mines, MO. who speak the so-called “Paw-Paw French” dialect brought there during the 1600s from French Canada.

And these were not just a few hunters and trappers and traders. There were actual towns like Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Fort de Chartres, Saint Philippe, and Prairie du Rocher (all on the east side of the Mississippi River in present-day Illinois), with Ste. Genevieve on the west side of the Mississippi River in present-day Missouri.

Indeed, the very word “Ozarks” probably derives from the French “aux Arcs“, which is short for “aux Arcansas“, meaning “at the place of the Arkansas” – the Arkansas being the French name given to the indigenous Quapaw people.

Part of the reason many Appalachians chose to settle the Ozark Mountains is exactly because the best arable bottom land along along the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers was already taken – long before the first English speakers arrived.

But there is another reason so many Appalachians sought out the backwoods of the Ozark Mountains…

Anyone who has followed this blog and podcast for a while will know by now that the most remote parts of Southern Appalachia were settled by multi-ethnic peoples trying to outrun the color caste system in states back east.  Because mountain land is hard to farm and difficult to access, it had two things going for it as regards mixed-ethnic underclass communities.  One, it was cheap (and in many cases free) to those wlling to squat it.  Two, with the law scarce on the ground, mountains offered a sort of refuge for people hoping to just be left alone with their own people.

So just as happened in Western Virginia, Eastern Tennessee and Kentucky during the late 1700s, Arkansas and Southern Missouri became destinations for displaced indigenous and mixed-ethnic peoples during the early 1800s.

Branches of Melungeon families like the Collinses migrated to the Ozarks during this time.

In fact, so many mixed communities ended-up in this region that they gave their names to landmarks like Portuguese Point, overlooking the Gasconade River.

Regular listeners to our podcast will already know how “Portuguese” had become a complex signifier for various “not quite white” people in early colonial America.

Those willing to do some serious digging will discover that many Ozark people descend from Smiths, Scotts, Harmons, Shumates, Oxendines, Benenhaleys and other families with Jewish, Romani, Lenape, Catawba, African, and even Arab ancestors.

Put it all together – remote mountain places, bears and wild cats, people with unfamiliar customs and of unusual appearance, people with a desire to avoid mainstream society – and it’s little wonder that embellished tales of hairy wild men have existed in the Ozarks region for generations.

Long before “The Legend of Boggy Creek“, there was the “Blue Man” of Spring Creek, in Douglas County, Mo., for example.  Here is an excerpt from The Springfield Republican in 1915:

“…Douglas County farmers were searching for the ‘Blue Man of Spring Creek’ who was seen after an absence of four years. The Blue Man was…first seen in 1865 and described as ‘unmistakeably human, though resembling a vicious animal…with long black hair’ covering his ‘blueish black skin’. The first recent sighting was six weeks prior, when Oc Collins, who was said to have taken part in a raid of the ‘Blue Man’s’ den four years earlier, lost two lambs and came upon their pelts in a hollow two miles from his house. Since then, others had seen him, noting that his hair was no longer black, but gray, and that he was not as robust as when first seen in 1865…”

Now we might be inclined to laugh, and to wonder if these Ozark mountain folks had been overindulging in their own product while minding their stills in the woods.

But here’s the thing.  There were mixed-ethnic families in Southern Appalachia since the late 1700s who carried a recessive gene which was expressed whenever a male and female carrier of the gene had children.

This recessive gene caused a blood condition known as methemoglobinemia.  The main visible symptom of this blood disorder?  Blue skin.

The idea of a blue-skinned descendant of Appalachian settlers of the Ozarks of southern Missouri surviving as a livestock-robbing, shunned backwoods hermit is profoundly depressing, infinitely sad, and terrifying at the same time.

Mainly because it is a far more plausible explanation for the surviving “Blue Man” folklore.

The folk stories we invent in order to varnish a dark reality are always the scariest.  Look up the historical theories behind fairy tales like The Pied Piper, and shudder…

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This has been a long post, so we’ll circle back around to pop culture’s habit of repeating itself with fluff like Charlie’s Angels.

Or to be more precise, let’s forget the actual show, and look at someone involved in the show.

Jaclyn Smith, who played “Kelly Garrett” in the original Charlie’s Angels TV show, actually got her first break as an actress in Charles B. Pierce‘s follow-up to “The Legend of Boggy Creek” – a film called “Bootleggers“, set in the Ozark Mountains.

Jaclyn Smith‘s father was the son of recent Russian Jewish immigrants.

And Wikipedia, as usual when actual research is lacking, notes Jaclyn Smith‘s mother as having Scottish, Welsh, Irish, and English ancestry – without citing a source.

Jaclyn Smith actually does (unusually for most Americans), have some “posh” English ancestry going back to the slaveholding Farrars of colonial Virginia. And some apparently Scottish “Urquhart” ancestors.

But for some reason, as is so common again and again and again in American history, her maternal links to descendants of pirates and privateers, and to what appear (on the basis od DNA) to be colonial era German or German-Jewish “Hartsfield” or “Hartzfeld” slaveholders, receives nary a mention.

They say there are only six basic building blocks or themes behind every story ever told.

But the biggest thing behind most stories, is the story we are trying to hide.

#history #legends #movies

 

 

 

 

 

 

As expected, this blog and podcast is beginning to be noticed by “white” Christian nationalist ideologues.

I find myself conflicted trying to decide whether the people commenting from this ideological position should be ignored or blocked.

It is beyond laughable that anyone with deep roots in colonial-era America would use iconography associated with medieval Germanic Europe as their “identity” – Scandinavian runes, Viking imagery, tattoos of St. George crosses or pathetic weightlifter-inflected fantasy artwork depicting Frankish crusaders, Saxon warlords, and Norman knights.

The National Socialists of 1920s and 1930s Germany loved this sort of thing, with composers like Richard Wagner being much admired for offering an artistic pseudo-backstory of ancient Germania and Scandinavia – full of “pure”, but utterly imaginary ancient folk legends.

Explaining the difference between the fake concept of “race”, and population groups, nationality, ethnicity, tribalism, and culture is so complicated that I started this podcast.

In order to claim an “ethnicity”, surely a person should be able to demonstrate one or more things:

Immersion within a specific ethnic community’s culture, or at the very least, a majority of ancestors from that claimed ethnic group.

THIS WILL ALMOST NEVER BE POSSIBLE FOR LONG-TIME AMERICANS, BECAUSE THEY ARE A PROFOUNDLY MIXED PEOPLE.

I’ve shared a table above showing the number of ancestors all of us have, as we travel back through the generations.

Can any American seriously claim that half, or even a quarter, of their 8,192 eleventh great-grandparents came from one single culture or ethnic community?

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Before We Were White will offer this public challenge to any self-identified American “white Christian nationalist” who believes they are ethnically or “racially” pure:

If at least half of your family has been in America since colonial times (pre-Revolution), prove that none of those ancestors were people of color.

You will not be able to do it.

You’re not who you wish you were.  And you’re certainly not a Norse or Saxon warrior.

You’re an American with serious masculinity, educational and cultural issues.

 

 

 

This is probably a perfect encapsulation of the political complexities and divisions at the heart of US society.

As early as 1921, 94% of the electricity distributed in the USA was controlled by privately-owned holding companies.

In 1920, wealthy automobile manufacturer Henry Ford had attempted to implement a plan to dam the Tennessee River at Muscle Shoals in NW Alabama for electricity generation (and monopolistic mega profits).

Senator George Norris of Nebraska introduced a bill to congress to block the plan, believing that private-owned businesses should not be trusted with vast infrastructural projects affecting hundreds of thousands of people.

Although the bill was passed, it was vetoed by the president of the day, Herbert Hoover.

It might be correct to see this as the first great stand-off between Big Business American Capitalism and those who believed that a nation’s natural resources should belong to the nation’s citizens, and should be exploited for the benefit of the many, rather than the few.

By 1934, the USA was five years into the grip of the Great Depression, and a privately-owned version of the Muscle Shoals dam project was dead in the water (no pun intended).

As part of his New Deal for lifting many Americans out of poverty, Franklin Delano Roosevelt constituted the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which would build a series of dams for hydroelectricity generation, but they would be owned by the state – not private companies with a history of gouging consumers.

Outside of Black and indigenous communities, no one was poorer, or suffering more, than the rural people of Southern Appalachia during the 1930s.

Much mountain land was exhausted due to poor farming practices.  Produce prices were at rock bottom.  Average income was about $639 per year (less than $12,000 in today’s money).  Families surviving on less than $200 a year was not uncommon.

The Roosevelt administration reasoned that in the face of such abject poverty, the public revenue generated, and the new jobs created by the TVA in nearby towns, would more than compensate poor mountain folks for the loss of their land under water.  And in many cases, the government was right.  Jobs WERE created, and better farming practices were introduced.  But there was one little fly in the ointment.  Free choice.

Using the legal principle of “eminent domain“, small farmers who had farmed, hunted, danced, and raised families in these hills for upwards of 150 years were forced to sell-up, often for prices below market value.

All of this is history in the public realm.  The one part of this story never told in history books or scholarly articles is the fact that many, many of the impoverished people of these regions were poor in the first place because they were the mixed-ethnic outcasts of colonial society.  The very reason they had sought out the most remote hills and hollers was to find a measure of freedom – freedom from bonded servitude, freedom from wage slavery, freedom from race laws and bigotry.

Just freedom.  Or the closest thing to freedom available in this world.

I’ve heard it said that Australian aborigines removed from their ancestral lands in times past would often begin to slowly “fade away”, literally dying from a loss of freedom and connection to the land.

Something similar must have surely befallen the over 125,000 Southern Appalachians who were forced to say goodbye to their farms and mountain communities between the 1930s and 1950s.

Many well-educated people today try to understand or explain why some of the American underclasses often vote “against their own interests”.

On the one hand, there is a government which had enough power to take away the only things they ever had – a home, a community, pride, and self-reliance.

Anyone who comes along blaming “Big Government” for their trans-generational troubles is likely to get a hearing.  Anyone who speaks of bootstraps and hating a hand-out is also speaking the right language.

Unfortunately for the sons and daughters of Appalachia, the people “speaking their language” today are the same b**tards who once controlled 94% of the electricity supply in America.

For some sections of America, there’s no winning.

#tennesseevalleyauthority #appalachia #bigbusiness #beforewewerewhite

 

This post is going slightly off-piste for a sociology and history website, so my apologies.

It is now utterly clear that social media platforms throttle the visibility of users/writers who post things not matching a certain “preferred” model.

Mentioning certain political “situations”, such as the attempted ethnic-cleansing taking place in Gaza, will result in a death-vise throttling.

Posts considered too long to keep a modern audience scrolling endlessly (or mindlessly?) will also result in limited visibility.

Posts matching the “preferred model” should be one or two sentences long at most, with a photo/image included.

Even better, posts should be short (very short) video clips, showing things like “They rescued this injured kangaroo. One year later they released it back into the wild. Ten years later they check on it and it gives them a hug.”

It is difficult enough trying to find an audience for awkward and complex historical truths.

But just this month, Facebook/Meta sent me an email informing me that everything I have written and shared over the past ten years on their platform will be used to “train” their upcoming AI “product”.

I am told that I am free to object, but this objection will not necessarily mean that my objection will be respected.

I am mindsick, heartsick, and soulsick with this headlong rush into oblivion, in which a few technocrats seek to further enrich themselves and concentrate unimaginable power in the hands of a tiny technocracy.

Power made off the backs of the real blood and flesh human beings who actually CREATE.

This graphic was made for all of the fellow creative souls out there.  If any of the points made resonate with you, please share.

For my part, I’ll be girding my loins for war.

#ai #theludditeswereright #handsoffmywriting #handsoffmyresearch