The Cookie Jar
Staying dry on the island of conclusions
The person in power determines reality. Another version of this is that history is written by the winners. The first is present tense, the latter past tense. Sometimes, someone comes along to rewrite history years, decades, or centuries later. Philippa Langley and her work on Richard III is one such example. She is ‘fascinated by the tales we don’t tell and why we don’t tell them’. Me too.
It is also at the heart of my work as an historian. There are tales we don’t tell and reasons we don’t tell them. Most of the reasons, it turns out, are baseless. Sometimes it is simply a matter of jumping onto the island of conclusions in the middle of a sea of knowledge and staying put. Challenging the resulting assumptions, the island perspective, can be dangerous work and, if done properly and thoroughly, damaging to one’s reputation. (For example, see the Shakespearean Authorship Question.) That lurking threat can keep one silent for decades.
Assumed conclusions are much easier to believe than fully fleshed out fact. They require no evidence to sustain them. The Dothraki response to all questions about Dothraki beliefs is ‘It is known’. They do not entertain enquiring minds. No further explanation is needed. (If you need to brush up on your Game of Thrones memes, I can’t help you today.) Worse, assumed conclusions gain power through repetition. This is one of the tenets of propaganda. Say the big lie enough times and it is assumed to be the truth. Today’s political rhetoric comes to mind.
Or as Mark Twain said, ‘the truth has no defense against a fool determined to believe a lie’. Do children have a defense against adults determined to believe the worse? If an adult jumps into the island of conclusions, what is a child’s defense - especially if repeated enough times even if only silently?
Children struggle to tell their stories — much to their frustration. They are not experienced swimmers in the sea of knowledge.The parent-child dynamic shifts through the generations but persists. Physical size has much to do with this. Bigger tends to be louder and mightier and louder and mightier tends to be better at exercising power: The power to control the narrative, to write the history, and propagate false assumptions. The will to live on an island in the middle of a sea of knowledge.
About ten years ago, my mother pushed a half-glass of mango lassi towards me saying, ‘finish the rest of it. You’ve always been a bit greedy’.
Silence.
Me: ‘How so?’
‘When you were in first grade, you left school, came to the house and ate the cookies from the cookie jar on top of the fridge and thought you could get away with it. You were so greedy for the cookies that you didn’t wait till school was over.’
‘Didn’t the school call you? I was sent to the principal’s office with my friend and I explained what happened. Didn’t they tell you?’
Silence.
My Story
The local public school was three houses down the street from us. It was a new development on the edge of a small border town. The normally barren land was even more so as the developer prepared to build more houses. The school playground was dirt. There were metal jungle gyms and not much more. The boys ran around in packs of a dozen playing war. The girls colonized the jungle gyms. Occasionally, two or three quieter souls would use the heels of their shoes to scratch out a pretend house floor plan and play at domesticity. I split my time between these last two and avoided the running packs of short G.I.Joes.
On the day in question, one of my friends was being teased by the warrior boys. She was trapped on the jungle gym surrounded by second-grade testosterone wannabes taunting her. The bell rang ending recess and everyone dutifully returned to the building. Except me and my friend who was in tears. Furious at the injustice of it all, I took my friend by the hand and marched away from the school towards my house. When we got inside (the doors were never locked and no one was home), I used the step stool to bring down the cookie jar from atop the fridge and set it on the counter. My friend’s tears abated with every bite. After a couple of cookies, the phone rang. We didn’t answer it of course but we took it as a message to head back to school.
When we got there, our teacher, Mrs. Gunther (lord knows how I remember that name) escorted us to the principal’s office. I don’t remember much more than sitting in an uncomfortable chair and confirming the details of our escape from playground tyranny.
When school was over, I returned home where I was further interrogated by my mother. While my little first-grade self believed I had done the right thing standing up and consoling my friend, the grownups at school and home, made it quite clear they disapproved. Apparently, first-graders aren’t great at covering their tracks - there were cookie crumbs around and I hadn’t put away the step stool. Then again, I thought I had done the right thing standing up for a friend and consoling her. From a six-year-old perspective, there was no need to cover my tracks. I had done the right thing. I was swimming in the sea of knowledge.
When I first invited my friend to leave the playground and come to our house for some sugary cheer, I was confident my mother would have approved of me sticking up for my friend. After returning to school, it was clear that I was missing some calibrating information on what was and was not important to grownups.
‘So all these years you’ve thought of me as greedy?’
Silence
‘I thought I had done the right thing. For me, it wasn’t about cookies. It was about my friend.’
‘Oh. Well, I’ve always thought of you as greedy.’
Returning to Twain; ‘a lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes’. Or, in this case, lies can travel through decades unrecognized by those closest to them. And continuing to mix my metaphors and references: In The Phantom Tollbooth, Milo decides, ''From now on I'm going to have a very good reason before I make up my mind about anything. You can lose too much time jumping to Conclusions.” Apparently even a lifetime.
You are the most generous, kind, considerate person I know!