It's out there; everywhere I look. Every blasted magazine, newspaper, guidebook, handout, museum, billboard, and local newscast has the words plastered across some or another headline. I tried in vain to avoid it for a week, but that was like trying to avoid stepping on poop in the dog park, being runover by a mallwalker, or driving on a street named for a pop culture figure in Bricktown. The fact is I can run, but I can't hide. Because unfortunately it has become my job - my life.
Oklahoma Centennial
There, I said it. I am currently involved in no less than five regular gigs churning out state and local history. I was contributing a quarterly article to a magazine, but now it's monthly. I've been assigned to write 48 short vignettes on state history. Text for bookmarks, displays, statues soon followed. I'm also involved with two large grant projects.
It's only January 6th and already I'm sick of it. I get home from work, head straight for the toilet and puke up Sooner trivia for an hour. Family members bang on the door, "Are you alright, Dad? It smells like Conestoga wagons in there!" My doctor tells me to try and get some rest and lay off the Dust Bowl, "Take a couple of Will Rogers before bed; you'll be fine in a few days." Now my teen daughter won't be seen in public with me because my tirades about how we aren't Okies (the Okies were the weaklings who left!) embarrases her.
It's not like I didn't see the Centennial coming. Being a historically minded guy, I knew all about the semicentennial in 1957 and even lived through the depressing, obscure, trinket-generating Diamond Jubilee in 1982. But in the end, it was as though I had been standing on the curve of a railroad track - you can see and hear the 3:15 out of Ardmore coming, but it looks like it's heading in another direction until it plows you under.
I should be happy to part of all of it in the small way that I am. After all, I love my state and its unique history. We've got to be top ten all-time for state history. We might not be able to challenge New York, Texas, California and Massachusetts, and probably Virginia, but we're top ten. In fact I am happy to be part of it. I just want it to end.
To be honest, this all has to do with bad attitude. Mine. When I was one of a dozen or so people writing regularly it was fine, but now it's everywhere and I don't like sharing topics and even worse, I hate reading bad history. Myths and non sequiturs abound these days, not to mention squeaky clean (i.e. cutesy boring) politically correct revisionism. But, if I were a true Sooner patriot, I'd be excited about the attention history is getting. I would embrace it all and invoke the more-merrier directive. But the sad fact is I'm intensely competitive (internally) and I have that stubborn Gen-X trait of wanting to be a dazzling unique individual. So, there I am, engine of my own unhappiness.
Sigh...I guess I'll just write about land runs, cattle trails, removals, football glory and (ugh) oil until this all blows over like a hot wind in the Dirty Thirities.
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2 comments:
If you run out of topics, read Robert Dorman's It happened in Oklahoma. Interesting stuff. But you probably won't run out of topics.
Hey, you think you have it rough, you don't know, brother. I live in OK and am more than up to my butt in prehistoric reptiles. A guy I know has to write about OK history, but I have to publicize the fact that he's writing about OK history so I not only have to make the history look good, I have to make him look good, too. And I'm from Texas and so have to live every day with jokes (although some folks aren't joking) about how terrible, stupid, greedy, and just generally sub-inbred Texans are. Nuts. The crunchy kind.
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