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 Custer's Last Stand
(From my Book: Art & Synchronicity as Daytime Dreams)
 
When I was a boy in the 1960’s, General Custer was a hero. By the time I was a young man in the late 1970’s, he had become an enemy of the people. These sweeping changes in the American story have been nothing short of mind-bending. I have watched history itself be reshaped—used as a tool to bend an entire culture toward some later, predetermined outcome. Tom Wolfe captured this perfectly in his brilliant book The Painted Word, when he described how culture is painted over, layer by layer, until the original picture disappears, and it’s replaced by a tiny group of editors for the New York Times that he called “Culturburg.”
 
No story shows this more clearly than Custer’s Last Stand.
To a boy with a cowboy hat and a toy gun, Custer was the ruddy-haired cavalryman who rode bravely into legend (and true story: galloping off from Appomattox with the very table on which Lee and Grant had signed the paper to end of the Civil War.) Fifteen years later, he is recast as a reckless, glory-hunting monster who got what he deserved.
 
I’m not wise enough to judge whether these “mind-benders”—the historians, filmmakers, and textbook writers—ultimately serve humanity’s good or its harm.
 
But I do know what it did to a young boy who once had heroes.