Davey Crockett Goes to Florida
By Timothy P Holmberg
People of a certain generation (mine) will remember going to Disney Land with a ticket book in our sticky hands, our eyes wide and mouths agape. Across from Pirates of the Caribbean (still the park’s most popular attraction) bobbing in the “Rivers of America” were Davey Crockett’s Explorer Canoes.
Stanzas of The Ballad of Davey Crockett wafted in the air, woven together with the thick aroma of popcorn and taffy. The canoe ride opened in in 1971, and like much of Adventure Land, it omitted or massively distorted historic details of the American “frontier”. Instead, it imparted a version of Americana and “history” that was about as mentally nutritious as the cotton candy rotting kids teeth. Even then, I think most kids realized that the experience was only a bit less fantasy than the rest of the park’s attractions. But, it was all we were given, and so it settled into fact in the absence of other narratives.
The truth about Mr. Crockett is not the one implied at Walt Disney’s park, of course. Crockett was a slave owner, and went to Texas to foment a rebellion and land grab in the Texas Revolution. He likely died by execution following surrender to the Mexican Army. But the American Ego wasn’t going to stomach that, and, like so much of our history, truth was replaced by fictions that lionized white manly men (sans any of the difficult details). Instead, we got our selves high on the notion of Crockett valiantly holding off those darn Mexicans in an ill fated last stand at the Alamo (lost cause narrative?).
This is pretty much the type fraud that Ron DeSantis is hoping to foist on Floridian children as he proposes eliminating diversity and inclusion programs in Florida’s school curriculum.
DeSantis has realized that he can ride his “war on woke-ism” to electoral victory, maybe even the White House, without ever really being called a racist. He hides, of course, behind the notion that somehow critical race theory is crowding kids brains with useless, guilt inducing information that won’t help them get a job (as a cog or sprocket in an Amazon warehouse). But unless your kid is in law school, they have about zero chance of ever knowing what critical race theory really is (much like DeSantis himself).
What lay underneath all of this posturing and pandering is a deep seated insecurity in this country. One that is a manifestation of the very racism that many protest is a stain long ago scrubbed from our country. If not by the emancipation of slaves and desegregation, then surely by electing Barrack Obama as president. “How can we be a nation in the grips of racism if we elected a black man as president?!?!”
Well, by attempting to deny our true history. Because a nation no longer in the throws of racism has no need to hide from an honest reckoning with its past or examination of its present.
As a kid, I wanted to slip into those canoes and all the adventures they evoked (I still have never gotten to ride those damn things). But as an adult, looking back, I know that as fun as they looked, they did a wrong to everyone. They told a lie (even if only by omission). And that lie was repeated, expanded and celebrated. Nostalgia keeps some from my generation from acknowledging that lie. We like it, and “who is harmed now that all those people are long since gone?”
But we really know that answer. “He who does not learn from history is doomed to repeat it.”
DeSantis wants us to repeat history. Especially if it wins him elections. And he is willing to use not just black, brown and native peoples, but women, and the LGBT community. He is the one seeking to indoctrinate kids and turn school curriculums into some nostalgic fiction. One that never even really belonged in Disney Land, much less a classroom.
The better parts of American history are are often written about people DeSantis wants to keep invisible. The gay general that served as Washington’s most brilliant strategist. The native American language, nearly erased by our own genocide, that helped us win against the Nazis. Hundreds of figures who quietly saved America from itself on the slim hope that this nation might live out the soaring language of its founding documents. Not by erasing or excluding. And certainly not by resuscitating false mythologies about Columbus or Davey Crockett.
The irony is that the same company that once sold false and hurtful stories of our nation’s birth, is now facing the wrath of an adult child governor raised on Disney’s own mythologies.
Timothy P Holmberg is a Marine Veteran, and former Staff Reporter with the Gay & Lesbian Times and San Diego LGBT Weekly. He has written on many social justice issues and continues to write independently.