The Band Played Waltzing Matilda

And now every April I sit on my porch
And I watch the parade pass before me
And I watch my old comrades, how proudly they march
Reliving old dreams of past glory
And the old men march slowly, all bent, stiff and sore
The forgotten heroes from a forgotten war
And the young people ask, “What are they marching for?”
And I ask myself the same question
And the band plays Waltzing Matilda
And the old men answer to the call
But year after year their numbers get fewer
Some day no one will march there at all
Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda
Who’ll come a waltzing Matilda with me
And their ghosts may be heard as you pass the Billabong
Who’ll come-a-waltzing Matilda with me?

The function of memory on historical narrative is something that is near and dear to my heart. On a more general level I am also interested in the ways that historians, with their educator hat on, interact with the general public. Basically, I’m a “public history buff,” so this week’s readings were right up my alley. (Despite my disdain for the word “buff”). I especially liked anything and everything having to do with the controversy over Onate’s statue.
Both the “civic warlords and the foot soldiers of the present” (From “History Hits the Heart (232)) do make a habit of collectively dredging the rivers of time looking for the fragile vestiges of their identities. (That’s my well-written sentence for the day). This is a common enterprise and one that fascinates me, tea-baggers, DAR, and founding fathers included. Both sides seem to cast their “ancestors” In a mold of suppliers of progressive technologies which made New Mexico what it is today. Another fact that I find fascinating is the ways that these smaller pools of collective memory are piped into larger circuits of national identity—here I am specifically thinking of the references to George Washington and Adolf Hitler.
Violence also seems to be a cool talking point for people involved in these debates. On the surface it would seem to connect modern activists and the people whom they claim to speak for. We can fight just as well as you can, or so they seem to think. But the past is a different world, as we seem to come back to. The things that are meaningful in the here and now are not always the same, despite a similar veneer, as things with the exact same name. I think few, though some, of the people who vehemently argued for or against the Onate statue, would publically maintain such polemical positions in the face of the events they’re arguing over.
So I guess this is a nice place for my own reflection on the Conquest and this class. What does the Conquest mean to me? It is certainly an exceptional event, but by the same logic that makes it exceptional, I think that any number of other events, in and of themselves, might also be exceptional. In a broader context, both spatially and temporally, it takes on a greater significance. The meeting of the two worlds seems important to me at for at least what we can learn from it. Perhaps there are some lessons here if we ever do meet extra-terrestrials, but my instinct is that if we ever do, it will either play out in a completely different way or one that is strikingly similar. (Writing this does make me wonder the literary influence of the Conquest on the genre of sci-fi.) There also are some lessons about history in general. Things can seem the same and be strikingly different. The past is a valuable tool for the present. I’m running out of steam at this point, probably because of my current fixation on “a-papering” but am glad that I got to take course on such an important time period. Important precisely because of the controversies brought out by this week’s readings. I wish I had nothing else to do for a few weeks but think about the Conquest. Perhaps I might come up with a better blog post.

Sorry for the lack of enthusiasm….but I’m just not feeling it today.