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Old Posted Mar 3, 2013, 8:42 PM
tovangar2 tovangar2 is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2012
Location: West Los Angeles
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Quote:
Originally Posted by GaylordWilshire View Post
Must we always dredge up anachronistic political angles suggesting ancient atrocities, tovangar? I don't think the "Mission" theme was the slightest bit odd for a marketing scheme ca. 1900 in a place called Los Angeles.... Biggest mistake for amateur historians is to apply the cultural norms and expectations of today to the past.
The point was that the circa 1900 "Mission" nonsense led the two-time Pulitzer-Prize-winning San Jose Mercury News to identify mid-Victorian Plaza Church as "dating back to the late 1700s" in 2013. Can't we have our actual history while also examining our fantasy history and the reasons and justifications for it, plus the harm it's done, which is, of course, part of history too? Or must we continue to sweep everything under LA's now-alp-like carpet? Once people aren't allowed to think about one thing, they can't really think about anything.

One of my main interests in noir is as a way to decode to the present. Trying to understand the ongoing privatization of our water supply, involving the Resnicks and others, for example, would be much harder without knowing about Owens Valley. The same forces are at work. What's the value of knowing history unless one attempts to apply that knowledge (however "amateurishly" in my case) to the present?

I did not mean to offend GW. I just thought it was interesting.
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