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| Better Send This To The Lab |
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| because it makes no sense at all |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, May 14, 2003. For the past eighty or ninety years I have been writing a book on how history is written that focuses, or rather begins, with the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. I have been engaged in correspondence with an individual who has decided views on the slaughter of General Custer, and lays it at the feet of one of his subordinates, Major Marcus Reno. A new book came out (there are about four books a month published on this battle, if you can believe it) that supposedly revealed that Reno had tertiary syphilis for twenty years before the battle, and this was the reason for his stupidity during the fight. I don’t agree with that analysis, but leave it for now. The evidence presented is that West Point’s hospital supposedly has medical records that show Reno was twice treated for syphilis and that the death certificate shows syphilis was a secondary cause after cancer. Cross examination revealed that secondary cause was not syphilis but a staph infection that was not inconsistent with syphilis being present. This is somewhat less than evidence. I have not obtained the West Point medical reports, which were written about by an organization devoted to destroying Major Reno, but based on my exhaustive readings and experiences I’m willing to bet Reno took the Mercury Cure a few times along with about the entire US Army for what could have been any number of sexually transmitted diseases. The diagnostic abilities of doctors in 1857 could politely be called non-existent, and they had about five all purpose treatments. Tertiary syphilis has highly visible stigmata on the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet, plus insanity, plus inability to stand or function. Reno worked till his final illness for the Federal government, and such an illness would have been noted. Nonetheless, this story is repeated and considered fact by innocents and is slowly working its way into history. Because forensic medicine is such a sexy subject now, it has invaded archaeology and the Custer battlefield has been graced with its charms. With straight faces, people have now proposed that individual rifles and pistols can be traced during this battle because cartridges have been found that match individual guns. The guns that fired said shots are not in the possession of authorities, and there is no proof when the cartridges were fired; could be during that one hour in 1876 or for fifty years thereafter. That Sioux would steal guns and shoot bodies after the fight, that hunters and scouts and mourners and Army would fire guns in salute or drunken reverie over the years is simply dismissed. But the conclusions are slipping into history, and it’s likely as bogus as the Angels of Mons. That otherwise learned and intelligent people should roll up and die before academic credentials and Science is mortifying and very dangerous. People not only don’t question authority any more, they don’t even question the mere image of authority, but sort of hang in that grey area between respect and belief. War mongers do not question the thrill of Dubya’s Rumsfeldian adventure. Peace activists never question the basis of their own tenets. They each have access to statistics and ‘facts’ but they have lost all ability to think. The New York Times, most recent among several major newspapers, has just been forced to admit that one of its reporters, a Jayson Blair, not only was a bad reporter, he wasn’t a reporter at all. He made up stories totally out of whole cloth based upon photographs in other papers; he quoted people who didn’t exist, people who never spoke to him, described journeys to places he’d never seen. There are many things that are scary about this; Blair is black and his editor was black and there was a certain amount of back scratching going on; his top editor was Harold Raines, a guilt ridden white Southerner who has long prided himself on giving black reporters support and jobs. So you can see how racists would love this. Unfortunately for them, there are other examples involving whites doing the same thing, so it falls apart. But it has gotten ugly. But the absolutely worst thing is that nobody complained about the fictional reporting. Not people who weren’t interviewed but were quoted, not other reporters attending sparsely attended events who knew that nobody from the New York Times was there, not editors who had cell phone bills from places that indicated the reporter couldn’t have attended events he wrote about and was paid for and which the paper defended until it could not anymore. This is not new, fraud and pretense have always been part of our self-revered journalists. And the public has not always cared in centuries past, either. In years hence, though, we won’t be able to say that we were brainwashed, or didn’t know, or that it was all hushed up. It was nailed to our foreheads. And we apparently are okay with bad journalism becoming bad history becoming absurd contention if an editor okays it, or Science can be appended to it, and nobody complains. |
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