For regular listener’s to Dan Carlin’s irregularly released podcast Hardcore History, Dan’s obsession with military history, especially ancient military history, is as familiar to them as the podcast itself.
One aspect of Dan’s obsession has, to say the least, become a point of interest for myself.
When two opposing armies met eachother on the battlefield, did they run right into each other like in Braveheart?
And, also, just every Hollywood movie to depict the scene.
Or was there some kind of stand off?
Not just middle-ages Europe, but further back, Ancient Rome, Sparta, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Ancient Egyptians. Did they all just run into each other?
We don’t know, Carlin laments, because no one wrote it down.
Even if someone had written it down, whether we can trust one or two sources on a subject is an inherent flaw in the genre of ancient history.
“Et meme si ce nest, pas vrai, faut croire a I’histoire ancienne.” (You must believe in ancient history, even if it is not true)
Leo Ferre, quoted by Pierre Briant in intro to ‘From Cyrus to Alexander’
The point isn’t about how we have to trust ancient historians who are untrustworthy because we have no other accounts to confirm or contradict them, it’s that no one thought to write down how two armies attack each other in battle because, by definition, no one whose writings’ we have today, thought it was worth writing down.
A person familiar with war wouldn’t feel the need to describe such aspects of war because they wouldn’t see them as noteworthy, or even really “see” them at all.
It would be like us writing down how to use a spoon to eat cereal.
It wouldn’t occur to us that this was worth writing down. It’s form defines its function and both seem self-evident.
The times of Corona are certainly not the times of the Spanish Flu: a time in which almost all New York Times coverage was focused on the World War, at the explicit expense of pandemic coverage.
And so my favorite example of this situation is December 20, 1918. It’s another day, another typical day at the New York Times with no flu coverage on the front page, pretty much no flu coverage until the last page. And there, wedged in between a very fussy, long story about, like, who owns some cable lines — it’s like a half a page-long story, I don’t even understand what it was about — and an ad for shirt collars, you know, which were a thing then, is this tiny five-sentence story with this headline: “Six Million Died of Influenza.”
Dispatches from 1918
There are a million articles documenting every aspect of the Coronavirus in 2020.
But should a future internet archaeologist be interested in some of the What Was It Like When Two Armies Met on a Battlefield questions of our current age, I thought I would take some time to address both the over-all experience of living in these times, and some of the small observations that might not seem worth writing about, to those who are paid to write about such things.
Taking the Studs Terkel format, throwing in a pinch of the novel World War Z, and for the purposes of remembering what armies looked like when they started a battle on the field, here is,
An Oral History: Interviews from The Pandemic, Month 6
Interviewer: So, it’s month 6, you’re still at home… the streets were quieter?
A hundred percent. It was quiet in those times. An eerie quiet. Especially at night.
I didn’t notice it at first. I wasn’t sure why I felt… tense when I would go out. Then it hit me, only the wild ones were out. The visibly mentally distressed used to be 1 in 100 maybe 1 in 1000 in downtown Minneapolis. Now? Half and half.
I figured most every one who could stay in, stayed in.
Either that, or they were teenagers. And the teenagers were scarier then the guys yelling at ghosts.
Morris Kessler, salesman
Ginger McKenna, housewife
Walks seemed to be the only thing to do. Honestly, open container laws seemed more and more silly. Walking your dog at night in your neighborhood? Everyone should be able to do that while drinking some wine.
Going to a store felt dangerous. Everywhere was tense. You didn’t want to get too close to people and didn’t realize how close you had always been getting to people while shopping. And before they mandated masks indoors by law… it felt politically tense to be around people without masks.Sure you could order groceries via some delivery services but that was just paying a poorer person to risk their life for you.
Butch Coolidge, boxing trainer
Television at the time?
It was weird to even see groups of people together like that, like it takes you out of the movie or the show you’re watching just to see people being close to eachother.
Maggie Pistone, jeweller
You went back to the bars right when they re-opened?
The few times we went to a patio we couldn’t relax enough to have fun.
Small backyard gatherings around a fire were fun but after a few months you realized…they weren’t quite as fun as they should be, or used to be.Talking close to someone, hugging them, going inside their house (laughs), sitting on a couch (more laughs), not peeing in yards (raucous guffaws)...
It turns out, these things make life a lot more fun, or more relaxing at least. Like, even with your friends you couldn’t totally let go.
You’d be being yourself, having a good time…you go to do something you used to do, like move in close, and you would jerk back. And that would remind you of the virus, and that would remind you of the politics, and the corruption, and…all of it
Fabienne, pancake artist
Did a lot of the people you knew, socially, get to work from home?
People got to work from home but a lot of them had paycuts and it’s not liked they were asked to do less. After a few months it felt like leadership forgot there was a pandemic?
It felt like there was this pressure to get things done by certain dates that were going to be hard to meet in regular times, much less when everyone is overly stressed.
A lot of our work from home still relied on someone on-site, at some point down the line.
Kareem Akbar, bank teller
More work, less people to do it, being paid less to do it, west coast burning, black people being murdered by police on TV – sometimes there were weeks when 2 or 3 new videos would come out – no sports, no going anywhere, no way to let the steam out… no wonder they burned that police station down.
Tat Lawson, host
Interviewer: not enough space? what do you mean by that?
Ads started coming out within the first few weeks after the NBA shut down, maybe in April?
Like you could tell how long it took companies to come up with a campaign and get it on the air by watching TV at the start of the quarantine.
And every other one was a spoken word poem or song over a montage of people crying or hugging or laughing but they’re in quarantine…it was egregious even for advertisers. Like, “no, we’re not just going to be okay and buy things”
Louise Vargo, librarian
And then..Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and I was like, honestly what the actual fuck 2020?
Jane Williams, locksmith
Interviewer: did you have a “I remember where I was when…” moment for the Virus?
For me that was when the NBA shut down. Basketball is on, I look down, I look up, basketball is over, people are pouring out of an arena, all their backs to the camera, like a wall of humanity leaving public space.
Me and the misses went straight to Walgreens and got…paper towels and toilet paper.
Pete Amadesso, mediator