Dalva by Jim Harrison

have no value except to the very few who care about such matters.
    I’m only bringing this up at an unsuitable time because it made inroads toward ruining a fine dinner (bouillabaisse) and raised a kind of anger in me similar to that I felt over the violated boy. Before dinner I had a few private words with Ted and he quickly decided to have Andrew look into the scarred uncle who was apparently shadowing me. But at dinner Ted openly spoke of Ruth before Professor Michael, which upset me and I chided him. Ted likes to imitate the acerbic wit of Gore Vidal, which can be raw, amusing, even revealing, but ultimately of limited use. A certain nasty aspect of Michael’s otherwise delightful character arose halfway through the main course. It came in an oddly circuitous manner through a commenton the movie Amadeus, which Ted loathed as inaccurate and insulting. Michael spoke of the uses of history at length, larding his talk with enough of the anecdotal to keep the layman (sic!) interested. I spotted the gist well before he got to it: to wit, I was in defiance of a grand tradition of scholarship by not turning over the goods to a lover but virtual stranger. I gulped my Meursault and was guilty of a barely controlled explosion: history in his terms was utterly self-serving and no one had a right to know what he was looking for. Everyone was dead, and everything that followed in political terms was the equivalent of spitting on the memory of the dead. I said, You seem to think that if you don’t tell someone, nothing has happened. I won’t allow you to paw over these people for historical novelty or whatever. You will put a dress of your own designing on them like a circus poodle.
    â€œThat’s ethical mandarinism,” said Michael, a term at which Ted gave a gasp of pleasure. “You think you’re the keeper of the Grail and no one deserves to know what and why the Grail is.”
    â€œNot at all,” I said. “We are no longer the same people who could have made critical decisions. We have become a totally different people, a different country. What you call history avoids any valuable concern for people. The essence is the mythology that allows us to conquer the native populations—actually over a hundred small civilizations—and then to make sure that their destiny becomes one of humiliation, a day-by-day shame and defeat, and what’s more, we can feel right about it because they are drunken Indians.”
    â€œBut I want to show how the myth worked.” He was getting irate now. “And you’re preventing me.”
    â€œWe all know how it worked. You’re merely the boy who wants to take the back off the clock. You don’t even want to be a mechanic, you just want to watch.”
    â€œYou’re reaching a bit, my dear.” He was trying to slow me down. “If I’m the mere voyeur, who are these supposed mechanics?”
    â€œI mean Congress, Washington as a whole. My uncle Paul used to say that they ought to run an open sewer in thousand-yard pig troughs through the Senate, House, and White House to remind these folks what and who they are.”
    â€œAmusing, but what does it mean? Before you get too folksy why don’t you admit your position is essentially feminist? You’re a woman, and by some sort of dull-witted extension you identify your womanhood with these defeated people. . . .”
    â€œThat’s what I mean!” I interrupted so loudly I heard Andrew stumble in the kitchen. “You sit there scratching your dick under the table in a state of total unwitting identification with the victors. Your weapon is your doctorate in history which you suppose entitles you to open all doors. I don’t identify with anyone. Indians are Indians. Blacks are blacks. Women are women.”
    Now Ted was desperate to enter what he probably thought was sheer fun, at least an alternative to record-business talk. “Teddy Roosevelt