The Bamboozler who Came to Dinner

Photo from Farm Services Adminstration

I have a neighbor who reads a lot of history books. I have always suspected that he only reads them so that he can impress dinner guests with the newest “truth” he has discovered in the pages. Usually, it is enough to just let him go on about whatever he is reading, but every once in a while his evening lecture deserves some discussion that goes beyond his selected text. We all know, and try to avoid, someone who reads a book, a magazine article or visits a website and immediately awards themselves an advanced degree on the subject, but their stories are still important when they are balanced by multiple perspectives. Admittedly, my bias for avoiding that single version of the historical record motivates my thinking, so when he hijacked the dinner conversation to lecture on his current reading about the ancient Egyptian library in Alexandria, his text moved right into those ideas that make Story Chip so important.

Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness

A very interesting week for the laws of marriage and the legal status of alternative lifestyles produced a very interesting moment for the importance of story telling and remembering our cultural history. The discussion of Proposition 8 in front of the Supreme Court produced one of those moments when words and what they mean became the focus. The word for the week was marriage as both Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act sought to define the word, not in use but in the eyes of the law. The legal definition of words and the common usage of words are frequently at odds but the process of changing the meaning in the courtroom differs from changing word meanings on the street only in who listens to the appeals. In law, we have judges, while in common use, all of us sit on the court. The stories that we tell become the anecdotal evidence, the very core of how we change our usage of words and what they mean on the street and in the courts. In the middle of the arguments on California's Proposition 8, Chief Justice John Roberts said, “If you tell a child that somebody has to be their friend, I suppose you can force the child to say, ‘This is my friend.’ But it changes the definition of what it means to be a friend.” The Chief Justice made it very clear that words and their meanings change in unintended ways under the influence of both legal cultural actions.

Terabytes of Dolphin Oral History

If you are not a regular listener of NPR's “All Things Considered”, you have never experienced the “gotcha” moment when you suddenly realize that it is once again April Fool's Day and the staff at NPR has put together another wonderful piece of audio that shows that we are all a little gullible when we trust the source, or we accept that truth is always stranger than fiction or just that the fun of laughing at yourself is the tastiest. My own favorite, was a number of years ago when the subject was the economic and physical danger of producing maple syrup. I was doing fine until they started talking about maple trees spontaneously exploding injuring or killing sap harvesters.

This year's treat is close to our hearts at Story Chip. If you run a web site that collects oral history, you listen intently when you hear about a group that is recording dolphins stories about serving in the United States Navy. Some might not even notice that the sorrow over not being able to collect the memories of the “rescue bunnies” causes more laughter than genuine remorse. Our thanks to everyone who refrained from sending us an email suggesting that we add these great stories to our archive. Also our thanks to those of you who fell into the annual NPR extravaganza and are enjoying the reminder of your humanity. Finally, thanks to NPR for another job well done. Sorry we cannot embed the new story, but here's the link.

Memories are made to be broken

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I found a perfect illustration for the existence of Story Chip, right in my own writing backyard. Several years ago I wrote about my experiences on the day in 1963 when President Kennedy was assassinated – my own where were you when Kennedy was killed - one of those events one never forgets. We see them in our memories as video, crystal clear, no doubt as to the accuracy of those memories, etched in the stone of our gray matter.

Madison Elementary School

In my recounting of this memory I knew to be wholly accurate, I wrote of being in school in Arlington, Virginia. The father of one of my classmates was a friend and colleague of then Vice President Johnson. I wrote of how this man’s son Lyndon, and others, were the first to be released from school that day in order to protect their families or to assist those in deeper grief than those not close friends or associates of the President. I knew this to be true, factual and beyond dispute.