I didn’t expect to live this long. Nobody my age expected to. I grew up in the 1960s, when we practiced hiding under our school desks in case of a nuclear attack. Even in second grade, all us kids knew perfectly well that a desk wasn’t going to save us. I mean, those 1960s desks were made of heavy-gauge sheet metal and some heavy crap approximating wood, but come on.
I don’t remember that we joked about it, but it was there. We lived in Connecticut, where they made submarines, helicopters, and jets. We were ground zero. And even in second grade, we knew it.
But kids compartmentalize very effectively. There might be planetary eradication lurking somewhere around the corner, but Mom put Oreos in my lunchbox today, so we’re good. But longer term, I wonder what growing up with that kind of experience has done to what I think of the world.
Yesterday’s episode was about the singular art show that brought European modern art to the US, in 1913. One of the things that made modern art “modern” was that the artists were trying to rethink how they saw things. How they thought of the world. The change they saw, up until 1913 or so, had to do with machines and speed and motion. Marcel Duchamp’s painting Nude Descending a Staircase was an attempt to show motion of the subject in a single image, much as the Cubists like Picasso and Braque were trying to show the motion of the artist, as they viewed the world from different perspectives. And the absurdist Dada movement was trying to play with the idea of art itself. Up until about the time of the Armory Show, at least (see yesterday’s post for more info).
I’m not an art critic, and it’s not something I know very much about. But I’m fascinated by the idea (which I think comes from art critics) that the art of any given era is a representation of how the people of that era see the world. What their concept of humanity is, and our place amongst everything else. What we’re for, and what the effects of us are, and might be.
World War I changed the tone of modern art. After around 1913, the idea that machines were generally helpful, beneficial devices had to be balanced with the knowledge that machines could also be made that slaughtered humans at a staggering scale. Then in the late 1930s and mid 40s, it happened again. And WWII was capped off by an event that echoed very loudly in the childhood of children of the 1960s; atom bombs had really been dropped on people.
We expected they’d probably be dropped on us, too. The adults were telling us so, right? But luckily it didn’t happen, and hasn’t yet, so I’m still here and so are you. And what I’m thinking about is the world events that resonate so much that they change the way people think about the world. What events like that happened on February 18?
First of all, there are vast events that it seems like the whole world notices and reacts to. But any given person might be just as affected, if not more so, by a smaller, local event that meant a great deal to them at the time. One event that might have had an effect like that for some happened on February 18, 1735. There’s no surviving record of who was in attendance or whether any of them chose a career, or even an avocation after what they saw, but that was the day Flora, or Hob in the Well was performed in Charleston, South Carolina. It was the first opera ever staged in North America.
February 18, 1885 might have changed some people’s thinking too, because that was the day Mark Twain’s book Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published. It was a condemnation of racism, although because it used stereotypes and slurs, to some people it seemed that it was, itself, racist. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been in print ever since its first publication, so you have to think that maybe some people may have found that their world views were different after they read it. Those are mostly private, internal moments of evolution though, and it’s rare that we hear about them.
Learning something completely new about the universe we inhabit could certainly qualify as perspective-altering, and that happened on February 18, 1930. Clyde Tombaugh was an astronomer working at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona. He wasn’t peering through a telescope; he was examining photographs. He was actually looking for something specific: “Planet X,” which had been predicted by Percival Lowell to be somewhere farther away than the planet Neptune. Photographs were the way to go because the images of the stars would be just dots, but anything like a planet would be a blur because it was moving. And sure enough, Tombaugh discovered Pluto. The solar system, at least, got a little bit larger that day.
This day in history also served to reinforce the incipient paranoia of all of us ‘60s kids, of course, because it had been February 18, 1955, that the first of a series of open-air tests of nuclear weapons took place in Nevada. It was called Operation Teapot, and the fallout was a real thing where we lived because of prevailing winds. There were some weeks where we weren’t supposed to drink any milk because the fallout from tests was irradiating the fields where the dairy cows grazed. I can’t remember whether we listened to the warnings, though. I quite enjoyed drinking milk back then. At some point my world view shifted, though, and I don’t like the stuff any more. I don’t know why.
Maybe it was because I heard about Elm Farm Ollie, who, on February 18, 1930, became the first cow to fly in an airplane. She was milked during the flight, too. It seems to me now that if I had heard about it, I might have ended up liking milk even more, but the mind is a fickle thing, after all, and many things can’t be explained except by invoking luck or chaos.
That’s what Richard Petty, the famous racing driver in the NASCAR stock-car series, must have concluded on Februrary 18, 1979. He was in third place in the Daytona 500 race, trailing Donnie Allison and Cale Yarborough. He didn’t have any chance of winning what would be his record sixth victory in that race, because it was the final lap. Still, third is nothing to sneeze at, and there’s always another race. But then, with the finish line in sight (it was always in sight because NASCAR races are held on oval tracks) Yarborough and Allison crashed into each other. And out of nowhere, (well, OK, out of third place) Richard Petty was first across the finish line and first to ever win six Daytona 500 races. It was also the first NASCAR race shown on TV in its entirety, from start to finish. I’m pretty sure I watched that race on TV, too. But I can’t find anything in my world view that seems to stem from it. Although maybe, just maybe, that’s why I’m mentioning it here? Hard to say.
That’s the thing about the things, vast and tiny, local and remote, that kick your world perceptions off their tracks and help you rethink everything. It’s just hard to say what causes what. Minds are fickle things, after all.
