About ten years ago, I read Tony Horowitz’s book, “Confederates in the Attic.” I remember it that at the time, some CW reenactors were upset at the book because they felt it made them look eccentric and a little silly. I didn’t think it was all that bad. After all, I know that I am eccentric and probably more than a little silly. While Horowitz poked fun at the reenacting community at times, it never seemed mean-spirited. At that time, I was doing CW exclusively. In 2001, I got into WWII reenacting and I remember hearing that someone was doing a book about that aspect of the hobby. So a few months ago, I heard of “War Games”, an examination of twentieth century reenacting and reenactors by a scholar named Jenny Thompson, and I thought “oh, that’s the book they were talking about.” (I usually am a few years behind when it comes to books.)
I ordered the book from Amazon and eagerly awaited its arrival. When I opened it I was immediately struck by the negative tone of the review excerpts on the dust cover. A critic named Henry Allen notes that Thompson reports on “these quarrelsome and oddly self-loathing people,” and an anthropologist named Mark Leone says, “she shows us ordinary men who lead partial lives where their emotional emptiness is met through camaraderie in playing army. An empty America is the result.”
Not a good way to start out. Not only are we self-loathing, but we are apparently responsible for everything that is wrong with America. Considering that we are numerically a very small group of people, I would have thought that at least the crooked politicians and the gang-bangers would have come in ahead of us!
Undaunted, I plunged into the book. The author wrote the book as her Ph.D dissertation at the University of MD. As a result, it is well-organized and heavily annotated. The author spent seven years ‘researching,’ which including insinuating herself into various reenacting organizations and making friends with numerous members, while distributing and studying questionaires. While she covers WWI reenacting in some detail and touches on Vietnam and Korean groups to a lesser extent, her main focus is on WWII, particularly a GI unit, the 4th Armored Div.
The result is a year-by-year critique of the hobby as seen from her perspective. While she does give lip-service to the benefits that it gives to participants, she inevitably comes back around to the negative.
Every blemish, every zit that she notices on the face of 20th Century reenacting is laid out for the reader. Thompson particularly dwells on reenactor politics and the quarreling that goes on among people in the hobby. The guys with whom she spends time never seem to enjoy an event. They constantly bitch and complain about everything to the point that you have to wonder why they do it. (I have known people like that and have wondered the same about them. But in essence, some people just seem to like to complain and they probably do it at home about their neighbors and co-workers as well.)
She notes racism and sexism as problems in the hobby. Yes, these things do exist, just as they do in society and just as they do in other hobbies. But there are plenty of reenactors who don’t have these attitudes as well. She gives a lot of space to the male-dominated aspect of the hobby and offensive bawdy humor etc. If she thinks this is unique to reenacting, she has evidently never walked through the service bay at her local auto dealer or had a drink in a biker bar.
In fact, one of the weaknesses of this work is its insistance that the culture of reenacting is fundamentally different from that of other hobbies and subcultures and beyond that, is unsavory as a result. All subcultures have their own unique flavor, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that those flavors are distasteful.
In the end this work fails because Thompson can’t move past the baggage she brings with her. She sees things she doesn’t like about reenacting and moves to the assumption that these things exist because of reenacting. Reenactors are damaged goods with unsatisfying lives to her. When one has a normal existence outside the hobby, they seem to be the exception. God forbid anyone live differently than the prescribed Yuppie lifestyle. I think she probably intended to be even-handed, but usually when she says something good about reenacting, she has to end the section with something that makes her upset or angry.
Overall, one has to question the ethics of doing something like this to people with whom you have made friendships. These are not celebrities with public persona’s or, conversely, tribesman somewhere out in the Amazon rain forest. These folks in the book will read it and live with the result of their lives being made public. When people pour their heart and soul out to you, does that justify doing an axe job on them just because they signed a disclaimer? Doing so to advance one’s academic career or to sell a few books seems particularly crass.
Maybe the difference between Tony Horowitz and Jenny Thompson is that Horowitz is a Civil War buff to start with, so he had one foot in the hobby in the beginning and ends his tale with affection. I sense little affection in Thompson’s work. In the end, the book is interesting as a cautionary tale about dealing with the media or interviewers in general. Also, since it does expose every imaginary flaw about the hobby, at least the reader can learn what not to do.
Overall, Jenny Thompson never really understood reenactors because she never had what a friend of mine has called ‘the hook’ for reenacting. She just never got it.
So one last thought for the guys on the dustcover, whom I mentioned earlier, as well as Ms. Thompson. To quote Mark Twain:
I believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades, and that it has no real value–certainly no large value…However, let it go. It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden.
– Mark Twain’s Autobiography
Enjoy your next event!
Jim
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