Convergence
In which Bryan, Chris & I become “nefarious cancel culture cretins”
Welcome to The Experiment, where our little book has become a soldier in the culture war, and Jill Charlotte Stanford, no relation, has a great story about my uncle and Ginger Rogers.
Yes, that Ginger Rogers.
As always, we suggest things to do (get a few small wins every day), read (Noah Smith on “America’s Scarcity Mindset”), watch (Bo Burnham’s brilliant INSIDE), and listen to (Bryan Burrough forgets the Alamo on Fresh Air).
But first, do you know what was brilliant about Richard Linklater’s movie, Boyhood?
Linklater’s 2014 movie got more attention for how it was made than what I consider its real brilliance, and that’s how the timeline incorporates the audience into the story. Linklater is fascinated with filming time. His Before trilogy and Dazed and Confused created the impression of occurring in real time. In Bernie, he cast real people from the story into its retelling, which made the movie feel like it was happening in the moment.
But in Boyhood, which should rightfully be considered his masterpiece, he depicted how times moves at different speeds, slowly in youth and quickly later in life. This enables Boyhood to pull off the impossible: The narrative moves at different speeds and in different directions for different characters depending on their age, converging at the climax when the Patricia Arquette mom character and the Ellar Coltrane son character share a moment that is for her an end and for him a beginning.
What makes Boyhood quantum filmmaking is how the timeline of the narrative leads to and then incorporates the audience. It starts at a dreamy pace as a boy stares at the clouds, picking up speed tick by tock as the story gets closer to present day and the boy reaches adulthood. The cultural signifiers, such as Harry Potter movies, tell the viewer that the story is getting closer to the timeline of the audience.
“This is the place where the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, and where Texas patriots made their last stand at the Alamo,” Trump said, adding, “the beautiful, beautiful Alamo.”
In this way, Linklater positions the viewer at the end of the narrative arc. If you watched the movie in 2014, you didn’t know how the story was going to end, but you knew when it would: 2014. Seeing the movie when it first came out created the sensation of the story headed right at you in time. When the mom and son’s timelines met at the end, they also converged with the audience’s timeline, and the audience becomes part of the movie.
This is similar to what is happening with Forget the Alamo, though I want to make clear that I am not comparing our book to Linklater’s artistry. All we did was write down what really happened back in the day, how the Alamo myth was created, and how we’re still fighting about it today. The book took the action up to Donald Trump’s last State of the Union, when he evoked American heroes to buttress his America First rhetorical ramparts.
“This is the place where the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, and where Texas patriots made their last stand at the Alamo,” Trump said, adding, “the beautiful, beautiful Alamo.”
More recently, our adapted excerpt in Texas Monthly brought the story up yet closer to present day, right up to George P. Bush’s announcement that he had broken ground on a museum and was planning to run for Attorney General, which he publicly announced about two weeks after our story went live.
The book entered the story it had until then been telling.
A week after that the book entered the story it had until then been telling. Texas Republicans had already been inveighing against Critical Alamo Theory by legislating the ludicrous 1836 Project into existence. Those timelines converged, and our book about the Alamo became an actor in the public discussion of the Alamo.
I’m not saying that the book only introduced information that changed the narrative’s direction. The reporting that there are significant doubts about the provenance of the Phil Collins Texana Collection have already changed how officials talk about a future Alamo museum. And I hope that our efforts to drag the historical scholarship of others into a popular spotlight will have an enduring impact on how Texans understand their origin story.
What I’m saying is that the book is being treated not just as a collection of information but an actor with agency, in this case a threat to the foundational story of Texas. A writer for One American Network falsely mischaracterized the book as a “a new initiative called ‘Forget the Alamo.’” A state lawmaker, citing the Time article Bryan and I co-wrote, tweeted, “Our Texas exceptionalism is a threat to their radical agenda, which is exactly why we must fight to protect our sacred history.” And another legislator running for the General Land Office, which oversees the Alamo, piled on. “As your next Land Commissioner, I'll ALWAYS protect the Alamo & our Texan heritage by NOT allowing anyone to tell us otherwise,” she tweeted.
Because this is the Alamo, facts not in alignment with the Heroic Anglo Narrative must be ignored, disputed, or twisted, and so it was with the 1836 Project, which would promote Texas patriotism by providing state history pamphlets to Texans when they get their driver’s licenses. (I am not kidding. This is a real law now. Yee. See also: haw.) As was obvious to all, the 1836 Project is Texas’ trollish response to the 1619 Project, the New York Times series on slavery’s impact on our country’s basic structures.
But a story about the creation of the 1836 Project casts it as a response less to that than our book, which was published well after the bill creating the 1836 Project was even introduced. In this retelling, the 1836 Project was intended “to help counter what Republicans describe as an onslaught of critical-race theory and woke revisionist history.”
The iconic Alamo has become a target of progressives seeking to reframe the siege, not as a last stand for freedom but as a struggle over slavery, with the doomed defenders on the losing side of both the conflict and history.
Promoting that interpretation is a widely reviewed book released June 8, “Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth,” which was #1 on the Amazon bestseller lists Thursday for Mexican History as well as the History of the Southwestern U.S.
Like the earlier New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which attempts to reframe the American Revolution as a war in defense of the institution of slavery, “Forget the Alamo” argues that the fallen heroes of the Alamo were not heroes at all.
In the political world, the Alamo exists mainly as a creation myth and not a long-neglected historical site or, heaven forfend, an actual historical event. Attempts to deal with the site or to better understand the history, both of which Forget the Alamo deals with, inevitably come into conflict with the myth, which explains why the book is perceived as an attack on the Alamo itself, which for them is a patriotic abstraction.
That’s the only possible explanation to an email that Allen West, the chairman of the Texas Republican Party, sent out last week commemorating Flag Day by calling on Texans to defend the Lone Star State against three “nefarious cancel culture cretins,” namely me, Bryan, and Chris.
It is time for us to defend the Texas Republic against this leftist onslaught. This assault against The Alamo by these three individuals is exactly why we need monument and historical marker protection in Texas. …
Texas is not about where you came from, or where you were born. It is about a spirit, an indomitable rugged individualism that was not birthed from a myth. If we are to preserve the Constitutional Republic we call America and its flag for generations, we must first answer the call of defending the Texas Republic, and its Lone Star.
I mean, party on, Garth. If you say it’s not really about a place but a spirit but not a myth but also a belief system represented by symbols, I’m not sure you’re really selling the idea that it’s not a myth.
And I could go into Lt. Col. West’s involvement with alleged war crimes involving the torture of an Iraqi policeman whom he believed knew something about an assassination plot against him. And I could tell you about a motorcycle accident West allegedly believes was an assassination attempt orchestrated by Governor Abbott, allegedly, which is allegedly why West is guarded by a protection detail of ex-Navy SEALs, allegedly, which the Texas GOP pays for. And if this, which I heard from Texas Republican politics, is true, then it might be why Lt. Col. West can see a book as a threat. Maybe the pen really is mightier than the sword, allegedly.
Even more than selling books, our highest ambition for the book was that it might make having an honest public discussion about the Alamo more possible. We never imagined that it would be seen as a clear and present danger to the self-image of Texans, which heretofore has easily withstood all manner of embarrassments and scandal. Put another way, if your belief system can’t withstand the existence of a book, maybe the problem isn’t with our book.
Click here to buy your dad a copy of Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth.
How we’re getting through this
Revising the Titans
Getting a few small wins every day
Learning how to present to C-suite
Bracing for the “Great Resignation”
Exposing kids to Black people early in life
Considering changing professions entirely
Thinking of leaving our jobs (not me! promise!)
What I’m reading
Laura Meckler: “Can honors and regular students learn math together? A new approach argues yes.” - More of this, please!
There were strong objections at first, said Pete Bavis, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction. He recalls one parent warning of “bright flight,” a term that struck him as “about as racially coded as you can get.” But he said complaints fell away once the program was underway.
“Once we proved we could implement this, we were off and running,” he said.
Neal Pollack: “Forget the Alamo Rewrites the Texas Myth: A entertaining deconstruction of the ‘Heroic Anglo Narrative’” - another good review
Once all the culture-war hubbub over Critical Race Theory and antiracism clears, documents like ‘Forget the Alamo’ will remain to set the record straight about our history. It’s a book that probably couldn’t have existed even 10 years ago, but here it is now. Like Tom Hanks writing about how we should teach the history of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre in school, the authors have done their part to advance the historical narrative.
Noah Smith: “America’s Scarcity Mindset” - We could have more of the good stuff if not for capitalism
But the crazy thing is that America seems to be falling back into this scarcity mindset. Only this time, the shortages are almost entirely of our own creation.
What I’m watching
Did you miss our Forget the Alamo chat for Politics & Prose with Jehmu Greene? Here’s a link.
If Bo Burnham isn’t a genius, I’m not sure what genius looks like. Inside, his pandemic time capsule, is bonkers good.
What I’m listening to
Bryan Burrough forgot the Alamo on Fresh Air.
The soundtrack to Bo Burnham’s bit of brilliance holds up.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you my theme song for the Summer of 2021: “Pool Hopping” by the Illuminati Hotties.
The Go! Team, already an unregulated mood elevator, has put out a great summer song, “A Bee Without Its Sting.”
Jon Bap is an experimental soul artist from Dallas. “Don’t Run Into The Dark So Quick” is his best-performing song. Pitchfork’s review at the time—the song is from 2016—nails it.
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Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself is out from Penguin Random House. There is no better way to support this book than to order a copy.
“Republicans Hate It!”
Nothing like negative publicity from the right places to boost sales.
Congratulations on the best seller results.