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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2911 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 16, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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So, what are you reading?

Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything has raised expectations, but it remains to be seen if it will fulfill them. So far they have tried to reconsider the Enlightenment in light of discussions missionaries had with the natives of the New World, on the assumption that the records of these discussions are sincere and not just European uses of "Indians" as characters to project their own subversive beliefs.

The topic of indigenous influence on what we call western culture has been on my radar ever since I read Felix Cohen's brilliant 1952 paper Americanizing the White Man. Normally I would consider these kinds of things to be proto-woke nonsense, but Cohen immediately struck me as a man of intelligence, dedication and nerve, so it has stayed with me. He posited that core American traits existed before the settlers ever came:

As yet, few Americans and fewer Europeans realize that America is not just a pale reflection of Europe - that what is distinctive about America is Indian, through and through. American cigarettes, chewing gum, rubber balls, popcorn and corn flakes, flapjacks and maple syrup, still make European eyebrows crawl. American disrespect for the authority of parents, presidents and would-be dictators still shocks our European critics. And visitors from the Old World are still mystified when they find no peasants on American soil. But the expressions of pain, surprise and amused superiority that one finds in European accounts of the habits of the "crazy Americans" are not new. One finds them in European reports of American life that are 200 and even 400 years old. All these things, and many things more important in our life today, were distinctively American when the first European immigrants came to these shores... Something happened to these immigrants. Some, to be sure, remained European, less hungry, perhaps, but equally intolerant and equally submissive to the authority of rulers and regulations. But some of these immigrants became Americans, tolerant and neighborly, as strong and self-reliant men may be, and for the same reason disrespectful of all authority. To such Americans, a chief who forgets that he is a public servant and tries to tell other people what to do has always been an object of ridicule.

Cohen goes on to describe what he sees as native contributions in various domains including democracy, agriculture and sport. I have also found it amusing that he mentions " the golden tan of an Indian skin" given that arguably the most famous trait of Donald Trump is that he is orange.

I've been reading, and am most of the way through Fifty-Three Days on Starvation Island: The World War II Battle That Saved Marine Corps Aviation. It's decent I guess. I'd say it's kind of two types of book combined into one.

One type, and the type IMO it actually works at, is as a series of short stories about the air battles between the "Cactus Air Force" on Guadalcanal in WWII and the Imperial Japanese forces. This is in the early days of the war, when American forces were mostly few in number, poorly trained, poorly equipped, and going up against the the cream of the crop of experienced Japanese veterans. The forces end up fairly evenly matched overall, and the stories are exciting. The Americans sometimes take a beating and sometimes dish one out, depending on the details of how well equipped they are at the moment, what tactics the Japanese use that particular time, the weather, etc.

The other type is as a coherent overall story with characters that you care about and who have a narrative. I think it fails at that. There's just too many people, coming and going at random times. There's brief individual stories about some of them, but I don't feel like I remember any of them in particular, or understand them or really care about them in particular. Major issues get brought up as a huge problem, then just forgotten about.

Of course, I still respect their sacrifices and all that. I just don't think it works narratively. It does make me understand a bit more why so many more compelling but fictional war movies keep the focus excessively tightly on a small group that suffers relatively few casualties during the story, even if that isn't really that realistic.

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