How Buffy, Stephen King and Greta Gerwig Answered Some of My Biggest Questions About History
Spoiler: It’s Not The Answers You Might Expect
In November of 1999, not long before Thanksgiving Buffy The Vampire Slayer aired one of its many brilliant comic episodes: “Pangs”.
I’ll briefly set it up. Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and her best friend Willow (Alyson Hanigan) are in their freshman year at Sunnydale University. They’re trying to deal with the issues of going to school on a Hellmouth but they’re also teenagers and Thanksgiving break is coming up. Willow, who has a very liberal education (when she’s not studying to be a practicing Wiccan) has very clear perspectives of the reality of the Thanksgiving’s we celebrate and the reality of them. Buffy acknowledges it, but she also wants to have a nice family dinner because her mom is visiting her relatives. She spends much of this episode going into overdrive about preparing a Thanksgiving dinner for everybody while deal with the most recent ghoul of the week.
Now at the start of the episode Xander and his construction crew engaged in a groundbreaking ceremony for a new library at Sunnydale University. While they did, they unearthed what was essentially an old ritual site for the Chumash tribe (I don’t know if this is a real indigenous tribe or one that Joss Whedon and his colleagues invented for the series). By doing so they released the spirit of a warrior spirit who begins to slaughter the people he blames for his tribe’s genocide, starting with a priest and moving on. One of the best jokes in ‘Pangs’ — and there are many — is that Buffy Summers, who can beat the crap out of demons and vampires twice her sides on a weekly basis, is paralyzed by something far greater — white guilt. She spends much of the episode facilitating about trying to find a way to defeat this horrible, murderous demon — who by this point has infected Xander with syphilis — without, you know, hurting its feelings.
This plays out hysterically throughout the episode on almost every level. Giles, who despite some of his modern impulses is somewhat of a product of Britania, is particularly dry in so many of his reference particularly when he refers to the Chumash as Indians:
Buffy: Giles. We refer to them as Native Americans.
Giles: Hard to be behind the times. Takes an effort not to refer to you lot as bloody colonials.
As things get noticeably worse he gets more snide: “Why don’t we give them some land? That should solve the problem.”
There are also, to be fair, a lot of other great jokes that don’t directly rely on the situation, particularly the fact that Buffy has chosen to have Thanksgiving at his place. Buffy is obsessed with his proper cooking implements until he asks dryly: “And having the dinner at my place is not to stick me with the cleanup?” Buffy can’t get back to discussing the ritualistic murders fast enough.
Anya, an ex-demon who is blessed with always saying the wrong thing whenever possible, has extraordinarily great lines. She memorably calls Thanksgiving “a ritual sacrifice…with pie.” She’s currently having sex with Xander (which she describes in detail despite no one asking) and is understandably upset when he might have syphilis. You know that she might have caught it. And when she goes to visit a potential victim of the murders where she starts out by asking: “Does everyone still have both ears?”, she shrugs it off. “Well, she gave us pie.”
And this is also the first time that Buffy crossed off with its spinoff Angel which means David Boreanaz has returned. He goes out of his way not to see Buffy throughout this and everyone keeps thinking that’s he turned evil. He finally explains exasperated: “I’m not evil. Why does everyone keep saying that?” He goes out of his way to show himself to everyone but Buffy to keep it secret — and at the end of the episode, Xander spills the beans setting up the crossover on Angel.
But the best joke — and the one that is the point of this article — comes when Spike, who has just been tagged by the Initiative (it doesn’t matter why, see the series it makes sense) ends up smack in the middle of the long debate about all of this. Finally exasperated, he shouts out:
“I can’t stand any more of this shouting about the namby-pamby boo-hooing about the bloody Indians.”
Willow: “We refer to them as…
Spike: You won. All right. You came in and you killed them, and you took their land. That’s what conquering nations do. It’s was Caesar did, and he’s not going around saying, “I came, I conquered, I felt really bad about it.” The history of the world is not people making friends. You had better weapons and you massacred them. End of story.”
Buffy clearly doesn’t want to hear this and says: “Well, I think the Spaniards actually did a lot of…” Then she paused. “Not that I don’t like Spaniards.”
After this goes on for a while, Willow deflects again:
“Well, if we could just talk to him…”
Spike shuts that down.
“You exterminated his race. What could you possibly say that would make him feel better?
It is telling that Spike — who by this point is one of the biggest villains in this series — has made a statement that is one of the most profound things I’ve ever heard about the reality of civilization and society I’ve ever heard on television and have rarely heard since in a quarter of a century. Even Xander, who isn’t in college and was a poor student acknowledges as much even though he undercuts it.
“Maybe it’s the syphilis talking but…some of that made sense.”
Giles then immediately rolls his eyes, metaphorically. “I made a lot of these points earlier, but fine.”
In the last twenty five years in America and across the globe there has been a huge hue and cry, by minority groups and among the left, about so much of the sins that the West have committed across the globe and how much of America is built in sin. I know it will be taken the wrong way by using a TV series to make an argument that America has nothing to apologize for because we do obviously, particularly in regard to the Native Americans and the entire nation of Africa. And I genuinely do understand why all of the people who were displaced and who don’t have the benefits of white privilege not only are justifiably angry but have a right to be.
But where I differ with them is a question I’ve had for awhile and have in fact raised in this blog before in other context and which Joss Whedon, through one of the series great monsters, has put forth more eloquently then I did.
Let me ask all of these enlightened people and academics a question I have and I’m not being facetious. In the history of the world — not Western civilization but the entire breadth of human history — is there a civilization that was entirely and completely peaceful? And I don’t mean a town or a county, I mean a civilization. One that existed for a while: decades, a century, any period, that spent his entire existence on the globe completely content with everything it had. One that never thought to expand its territory even within a few miles. One that never invented a single weapon or wrote anything about warfare in its literature. One that when a rival tribe or marauding set of warlords either only fought of defense of itself or just surrendered and let itself being absorbed saying that violence is not a resolution and ‘our time is over’.
Just because I can’t think of one doesn’t mean there isn’t one, of course, and I’m sure I will be burned in effigy and on-line by so many academics by saying I’m speaking in pure hypotheticals. They live in a world of pure hypotheticals, so I don’t know why they’d be offended. But the reason I doubt this fundamentally is because I remember reading something that Stephen King wrote that I think is directly on point.
If you are a fan of King you are familiar with his novel The Stand. (I was actually planning to write a separate article about it long ago but I’ll just stick to the bare minimum here.) Early in the novel a plague wipes out 99 percent of America and possibly the rest of the world. Only a few survivors with an immunity to it that science can’t explain are left to explore the wreckage of America and try to figure out what to do next.
One of those left alive is Glen Bateman, a fifty-ish sociology professor who Stu Redman encounters early in his travels. Glen initially begs off joining him but before he does, he explains ‘sociology in a nutshell’ in one of the greatest passages King’s ever written:
“Show me a man or a woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call ‘society’. Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God but human society was made in the image of his opposite number and is always trying to get back home.”
Before that he utters another cynical phrase: “That is the curse of human race: sociability.”
This is one of the darkest things written even by the master of horror. But looking at not only our society today but the entire history of the world, it’s difficult to make an argument that King, speaking through Bateman, is entirely wrong.
I don’t deny that the West — by which I guess we call all of Europe and America, except for Russia — was incapable of doing such horrible things to itself on its own. The fact that there’s such a thing in European history known as ‘The Hundred Years War’ pretty much makes that clear. But I don’t believe for one moment that when the Europeans began circumnavigating the globe they had exported prejudice and warfare the same way they didn’t everything else. As Spike said the history of the world has never been about making friends. And as he would know — having studied European history as a human and witness more of it then these children — civilizations don’t have to be a different color to want to kill each other. It may be the most bigoted reason but let’s not kid ourselves that it’s ever been the only reason.
I don’t deny that Europe owes a huge debt to all of the nations across the globe it made a mess of and then just left without a word of help. I don’t deny that America has spent four hundred years oppressing the natives of this country and looting and pillaging an entire continent to make it habitable for their owners. I don’t deny they then spent the next two centuries first wanting to own the people they’d uprooting from their homes and then denying them the same rights as everyone else. I deny none of that happened. What I do want to want to know is what we — as a nation — do now. And a completely different but more recent film gives me a metaphor — and not an optimistic one.
One of my favorite movies in recent years was Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird. A superb comedy that focuses on the conflict between a seventeen-year old girl (Saoirse Ronan) and her working-class mother (Laurie Metcalf) it is a triumph on every level. And one of my favorite scenes in it comes halfway through the film.
Lady Bird and her mother are having an argument about college. It has gotten to a point where her mother makes it clear, like mothers often do, about how much she has sacrificed for her daughter. Lady Bird grabs a pencil and paper and tells her: “Give me a number.” Metcalf is puzzled. Lady Bird demands her mother tell her exactly how much she spent sacrificing for her. She tells her mother once she raises this much money, she will give it to her and she will have to speak to her mother again. Her mother looks at her and tells her: “Honestly, I doubt you’ll ever be qualified to get a job where you could earn enough money to do that.” Lady Bird throws down the pad and storms out of the room.
It’s very hard not to see that scene and see the relationship that so many minority groups have with all of America. The entire film is a metaphor for it now that I think of. Ronan’s character resents her mother despite everything she has done for her and she and her mother are always fighting. Lady Bird has dreams for an expensive college that, for her working class family, are almost certainly unrealistic but she refuses to relinquish them and constantly considers her mother the villain. The argument I’ve just cited is one that I think is at the core of every discussion one tries to have with certain members of any minority group — African-Americans, LatinX, women, the LGBTQ+ community — the tension is always there and no matter how unrealistic the dreams, there is a demand for them. Certain parts of the scene don’t fit the metaphor exactly, but I think the demand is basically the same particularly when it comes to elected officials and people on the left, most of whom are in these communities. We know how horrible our history is with them and trying to resolve these demands seems impossible. I often think if we were to ask for a ‘number’ — a metaphor for what it would take to bring about resolution — we would get from members from all of these groups the same response Lady Bird’s mother gives her daughter.
And that may be part of the biggest problem facing so many of our divides today. If we had a ‘number’ — something that could accommodate all these of groups, not so that we didn’t have to ever see them again but so that we could end the argument, society would at least having something to try and work towards. It might be difficult and it might take a while, but at least we would know where to start.
But when it comes to some of the more extreme members of all minorities, and the left as a rule, they don’t want the number reached. For understandable reasons they are angry and enraged at the world. And it is an unfair place even if it weren’t for the structural blows that so many of them face. For many of them, the only thing keeping them going is their rage, their anger.
And if you suggest if there’s something that we can do to make things better, some small thing, some large thing, ‘a number’, many of them are genuinely surprised by the question. Maybe they’ve been so focused on the horrible ways society is that they genuinely don’t know what it would take to make things better for them, either individually or as a people. Maybe they know there is no single thing or even a lot of things that can be done to fix it. Hell, maybe some of them even think that anyone who asks to fix the problem doesn’t understand it in the first place.
And maybe they like it so that the people they consider the problem — all white cis males — are always uneasy around them. Maybe they think that there is no real solution so all they can do is make everyone who isn’t one of them think twice before saying or doing anything to them. After all, the history of the world isn’t about making friends. But since they can’t use the methods that were used against them, they can make the lives of everyone around them uncomfortable, unpleasant and remind them every time that there’s a debt that they are owed that they need to repay. They will never tell you what the number is, or how to reduce it but they’ll always tell you that it’s getting bigger.
I don’t have a solution for this. I don’t. But in a way I do think that what Glen Bateman thought was the curse of the human race — sociability — is the only way to save it. If we don’t try to find bonds, ways to talk to each other, be willing to listen, then we might as well as is said in The Stand ‘leave the whole thing to the cockroaches.”
The Stand ends on an exchange between Stu and Fran that is one of the most haunting. “Do you think people ever learn anything?” Stu asks Fran. Fran pauses before she gives an honest answer: “I don’t know.” I need to believe in the opposite, that we are at least capable of learning from our mistakes, of acknowledging that there are commonalities even between the most divided among us. I need to think that number can be reached and a common ground can be found. It may be as fictional an idea as any of the scenarios I’ve listed here. But there are worse lies to believe.