December 7, 2025
Saw a blooming sunflower on our walk this morning and Uno got a little excited.
Invasion of The Gotcha Goobers!
One of my least favorite aspects of owning a history magazine are the semi-frequent swipes at our veracity, or, put another way, the verbal attacks on our authenticity. Case in point: this snothead kid came after Marshall Trimble over some inane claim by the owners of the Birdcage Theater which Marshall repeated in his column and this Gotcha Gang Kid attacked Trimble's bonafides and ended it with an attack on us with this precious bromide: "and you call yourself a history magazine!"
As my friend Allen Fossenkemper puts it: "The Gotcha Gang members are probably half right and half crazy." That's a big Amen, from all of us in the history trenches.
We are dedicated, fallible professionals. When the dust settles, history is about understanding change. That is not as easy as it sounds. All that said, I love what Margaret Atwood says about criticism like this: "One glance from my baleful eyes and strong men weep, clutching their groins, lest I freeze their gonads to stone."
Coming Soon from Boze Studios. . .
The Night Man
Back in the late sixties a 19-year-old budding writer I knew took an overnight shift at a lonely Route 66 gas station so he could have some quality down time to work on his writing. It didn't go like he thought it would. On the writing front, he knew pretty fast he was raking a dead fire. He grew frustrated and depressed and he told me by the third night he began to write down his impressions of the odd customers who seemed to get odder and stranger, as the shift wore on. And, it wasn't just the weird customers, he confided to me, the closer to dawn, the creepier everything became.
But the strangest encounter he had was with a Show Girl from Vegas. Or, at least that's what she told him she was when she came in the lube room without a stitch on.
"What do I have to do for a tank of gas?""I prided myself on seeing things others ignored or refused to see."
—The Nightman
If I had a dime for every history thing I repeated that I found was false...
ReplyDeleteI'd have quite a few dollars.
So I changed my tone a lot when talking to historians who contradicted what I knew to be true.
Most of them are more than happy to answer, "how did you come to this conclusion that runs against the common narrative?" if you ask nice.
Every once and a while I've even had a question that sent them back to their research.
But there's no need to be a jerk or confrontational (ie gotcha!) about disagreements.