Buffalo iconography embodies an at-once proud and poignant place in the American imagination. We picture an Edenic pre-Columbian continent teeming with species now decimated, endless grasslands, harmony between man and nature and among people for millennia. American nostalgia is a powerful phenomenon. Donald Trump originally mobilized his hordes of grievance-gripped supporters around a common desire to Make America Great “Again”. To which better era this credo refers has always been hard to precisely pin down, but what is clear upon any further interrogation is that those Good Old Days never happened, or at least they weren't remotely as rosy as desperate revisionists insist. Whatever Rockwellian image of simpler times, of a nation dotted with prosperous, pre-cosmopolitan Mayberrys, where, as the Rascal Flatts song opines, “everything is black and white”, and to which a sincere Trump voter might hope to return, is a technicolor fabrication.
The mythology of massive buffalo herds on the great plains since time immemorial, as it turns out, may also be, in part, fiction. Study of the area’s pre-Columbian Indigenous civilizations suggests that agriculture and society were far more complex than has been commonly understood, and human beings are thought to have used fire to help create and enlarge those grasslands as range for herds to roam and be hunted. It was only after European-brought diseases drastically reduced the Indigenous population in the 1500s that the numbers of bison boomed, having seen their primary predator diminished in number and still having endless cultivated prairies on which to graze.
History, as refracted in the unfaithful mirror of human memory, is incoherent unless it's mangled into a manageable shape. It seems unlikely that Jake Angeli, bedecked in evocative bovine regalia, grasped the symbolic significance of his outfit. But in forcing his way into our nation’s house and into our collective psyche, he compels us to consider the role that American fantasy and revisionism have played in creating the conditions necessary for the events of January 6th (and the violence that may soon follow). Though Trump’s call to action brought dangerous and moronic marauders of many stripes to the Capitol, each living in one state of twisted unreality or another, what they all have in common is the belief that they’re fighting an existential threat in order to hold on to something important— and to go back to something better (or at least better for them).
Ancient people forged the Great Plains in fire before their civilizations dwindled. Somebody’s Good Old Days are the end of someone else’s empire. As this country lurches forward leaving history in its wake, some men, and some myths, will be left behind.
Aidan Kahn
Twitter: @aidan_kahn
Instagram: @canaidan
Cover art by Aidan Kahn © 2021 (Painting— Norman Rockwell, Freedom From Want (1943), Photograph— The Independent)
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