Books in Brief
The Morality of Laughter by F.H. Buckley (University of Michigan Press, 240 pp., $35). Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once began an opinion with, “I join the opinion of the Court except that portion which takes seriously, and thus encourages in the future, an argument that should be laughed out of court.”
We don’t laugh enough at silly ideas, says George Mason University law professor F.H. Buckley–and he doesn’t just mean in the law, but also in urban planning, art, and academia in general. In “The Morality of Laughter” Buckley points to the tarps Jackson Pollock used to keep on his studio floor, which sold at astronomical prices. From splotchy art barely distinguishable from paint rags (Buckley also slights cubism, rectangles and circles, and toilet fixtures) to the erection of antihuman box-shaped buildings, bad art and architecture would not have proliferated had people been willing to laugh at it. A too-uncommon instance of corrective public laughter occurred in 1990 when “performance artist” Karen Finley, whose performance was to smear chocolate over her body to symbolize excrement, complained after she lost her NEA grant. The public howled.
“Whether they realize it or not,” Buckley writes, “those who laugh are moralists, for they uphold a set of comic norms.” We laugh, for example, at both misanthropy and hypocrisy, extremes on either side of integrity. Likewise, the virtue of learning is a normal point between the risible extremes of true and false pedantry. In these virtues lies laughter’s conservative tendency, its signal that there is a better way to live.
Buckley also manages a few sly cracks of his own, though his prose tends to overthink its subject. How funny can it be, after all, to lay out the sociology of joke-telling and divide comic vices and virtues into categories? Nevertheless, “The Morality of Laughter” is a useful reminder that a cheery society is a healthy one.
–Beth Henary
In the Hands of the Great Spirit: The 20,000-Year History of American Indians by Jake Page (Free Press, 464 pp., $30). The five hundred years of relations between Euro-Americans and American Indians are controversial of late, mostly thanks to frankly bad scholarship mired in political correctness. But now, with “In the Hands of the Great Spirit,” the former Smithsonian magazine editor Jake Page starts at the beginning to give a comprehensive look at the Indians’ journey from the Bering Strait land bridge to Fox Woods Casino.
The pre-Columbian story in North America is fascinating, particularly the “high society” architectural achievements of the Midwest Mound Builders and the cliff-dwelling Anasazi of the Southwest. Later came the savage geo-politics of the Six Nations of the Iroquois that for two centuries would influence the struggle between England and France for North American dominance. Page covers it all, and, admirably, he does not shy away from the formerly taboo subjects of torture and cannibalism. He also dispels the New Age myth that Indians lived in harmony with the environment, citing many examples of their manipulating it for their own ends.
Once the Europeans arrive, the story is ultimately tragic, of course, but Page chronicles it dispassionately. Along the way are names as familiar as Sacagawea, Tecumseh, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Geronimo. You can read here about the great battles, massacres, broken treaties, famine, disease, and the purgatory of reservation life. But Page also tells the story of the arrival of the horse on the Great Plains and the resulting golden age of the nomadic buffalo culture.
Page remains clear-eyed when writing about Indian life today, observing, “one is constantly aware that the Indian peoples have accomplished more than survival. They have, in many instances, thrived.” Still, life “on the Rez” is one of poverty, political corruption, and a host of social ills, though a few improvements seem to be coming. Jake Page’s well-researched history for the general reader is refreshingly free of victimology–which is exactly what makes the tragedy of its story stand forth so clearly.
–Bill Croke
