The word "secret" is spreading, getting into all sorts of places where it doesn't belong, like the titles of halfway-good TV on historical topics with no blatantly non-historians among the talking heads. The thing is, historians don't keep secrets about the things they study. In fact, it's their job to do the opposite, to bring things to light, things which very often were never kept secret by any one at any time. Don't get me wrong: occasionally, people do keep secrets, and sometimes the people who expose those secrets are historians. It's just not their full-time job. Typically, the information which historians gather was never held secret by anyone, it just hadn't been recorded, and/or the records hadn't been published, and/or the information on one particular topic hadn't been gathered together into one place, and/or every one of those things had already happened, in books which had been forgotten, gathering dust for a while, and/or etc etc.
Beyond that, often enough, none of the information, exactly 0% of it, on a TV show on an historical topic with a title that starts "Secrets of[...]" is secret to anyone who's taken some trouble to research the topic. Often, a lot of the information on the show is bullshit, but that's not the same as secrets.
A lot of people have a very difficult time in life. It may sometimes feel as if there are secrets and conspiracies all around them. Kind people can help them by explaining how things really are. That's what real historians do, full time. Assholes who make crap shows for the so-called "History Channel" do exactly the opposite: they exploit people's anxiety. They say:
Yes, you're right, there ARE secrets and conspiracies all around you! (Aliens too!) But that's okay, because there are CODES to UNLOCK all of these secrets! So, chin up, because who knows, you might dig up the Holy Grail* in that woods over there right next to your home!
*There is no Holy Grail, it was invented by Chretien de Troyes in the 12th century in a fictional poem about King Arthur and his Knights. Good poem -- but fictional.
Well, it's no secret that you can sell crap to morons. I don't know if more crap is posing as history today than a few decades ago or if the decades-old crap has just steadily faded away, to be constantly replaced on a conveyor-belt of crap in crap factories. 40 years ago there was no so-called "History Channel," but The Bermuda Triangle by Charles Berlitz was huge bestselling book, and Uri Geller was making a fortune bending spoons. But not nearly as much as he claimed to be earning, apparently. Uri, this is Donald, he's running for President, he's yuge, you 2 have a lot in common.
"DaDa ist schön wie die Nacht, die den jungen Tag in ihren Armen wiegt." - Hans Arp
"Was wir DaDa nennen, ist ein Narrenspiel aus dem Nichts, in das alle höheren Fragen verwickelt sind." - Hugo Ball
"DADA spricht mit Dir, es ist alles, es umfaßt alles, es gehört allen Religionen an, kann weder Sieg noch Niederlage sein, es lebt im Raum und nicht in der Zeit." - Francis Picabia
"Dada ist die Sonne, Dada ist das Ei. Dada ist die Polizei der Polizei." - Richard Huelsenbeck
Showing posts with label history channel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history channel. Show all posts
Saturday, October 3, 2015
Tuesday, April 7, 2015
Most Documentary TV Shows On Ancient Topics (Biblical Studies And Early Christianty, Mostly) Really, Really Suck
A recent program about the fragments of the True Cross did a fairly good job of presenting the viewer with a story about the activities of the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine the Great and a devout Christian, who according to that story pretty much invented what we now know as Christian veneration of relics. The program tells us that Helena went to Jerusalem, found a piece of wood and declared that it was the Cross on which Jesus was put to death, cut it up into little pieces and distributed these pieces to churches all across the Roman Empire. This is the traditional story about how Helena began the belief that all of those pieces of wood in churches are pieces of True Cross. There are very good reasons to doubt whether Helena ever interested herself in relics at all. If these reasons were presented during this program, I must have blinked or zoned out at the time.
The same program did a particularly bad job of presenting the information it had on some recent scientific evaluation on the authenticity of the True Cross: a piece of wood considered since the 11th century to be piece of the True Cross was carbon-14 dated, and found to have come from a tree which lived in the 11th century. Not even close to the supposed time of Jesus, not even close to Helena's discovery in the 4th century of what she called the True Cross.
The carbon-14 dating was presented to the viewer in the very last several minutes of the 1-hour show. Why not at the very beginning of the show? Why not inform the viewer right at the start that any preoccupation with the Cross or any other relics on Helena's part is not solidly demonstrated by any historical evidence?
Perhaps the show's producers were afraid that if they did that sort of thing -- made sense -- it would be hard to keep viewers' attention for the rest of the hour. Perhaps they were exactly right about that. In any case, their handling of the material was pretty typical of such shows purporting to present the latest scholarly knowledge about ancient religious things: present a mix of comments by serious scholars with obfuscating narration, as if what the producers actually want is mainly to keep the viewer confused. The scholars will discuss "the tradition," that is, what the most conservative of believers regard as history, although almost no-one else who's studied the subject matter still does. The shows do not make plain what is meant by "tradition," they don't make plain that the experts are not relating what they consider to be fact. To make things worse, often crackpots who DO regard the traditional fables as factual are interviewed along with the experts.
Is there any rational reason at all to believe that Helena would have had any means at all of determining that what she had discovered was the True Cross? (IF, for the sake of argument, she actually looked for the Cross at all?) I doubt it very much, but my point is that the question was not discussed on air. The people most well-qualified in the world to discuss such matters, and quite willing to share their expertise, were interviewed, and we got a recitation of a bunch of fairy tales and precious little evaluation of what history, if any, is contained in them.
I have to wonder just exactly how much edifying information is routinely edited out of such interviews. I wonder whether one can hold out some hope that the raw footage of the entire interviews tends to be preserved, and will someday be edited into something much better than most of what goes on the air these days.
Thank goodness, these scholars write books, books with which the producers for half-assed "Secrets Revealed" shows on the so-called "History Channels" and NatGeo and the Smithsonian Channel, etc, have nothing to do. If you watch some of these shows and are intrigued by what is said by people like Professors Ehrman, Pagels and Chilton, you might find it quite interesting to read their books and see how badly the TV shows present what they have to say.
And then you'll walk around angrily muttering to yourself all the time about how TV jerks us around, just like I do. Just like me, you'll shout, "Why don't the experts insist on better shows being made? Is it just money, simple as that? Are the experts afraid that if they rock the boat they'll kill the golden goose? Et tu, Bart?!" Yes, you'll be angry, but I'll be a little bit less alone.
The same program did a particularly bad job of presenting the information it had on some recent scientific evaluation on the authenticity of the True Cross: a piece of wood considered since the 11th century to be piece of the True Cross was carbon-14 dated, and found to have come from a tree which lived in the 11th century. Not even close to the supposed time of Jesus, not even close to Helena's discovery in the 4th century of what she called the True Cross.
The carbon-14 dating was presented to the viewer in the very last several minutes of the 1-hour show. Why not at the very beginning of the show? Why not inform the viewer right at the start that any preoccupation with the Cross or any other relics on Helena's part is not solidly demonstrated by any historical evidence?
Perhaps the show's producers were afraid that if they did that sort of thing -- made sense -- it would be hard to keep viewers' attention for the rest of the hour. Perhaps they were exactly right about that. In any case, their handling of the material was pretty typical of such shows purporting to present the latest scholarly knowledge about ancient religious things: present a mix of comments by serious scholars with obfuscating narration, as if what the producers actually want is mainly to keep the viewer confused. The scholars will discuss "the tradition," that is, what the most conservative of believers regard as history, although almost no-one else who's studied the subject matter still does. The shows do not make plain what is meant by "tradition," they don't make plain that the experts are not relating what they consider to be fact. To make things worse, often crackpots who DO regard the traditional fables as factual are interviewed along with the experts.
Is there any rational reason at all to believe that Helena would have had any means at all of determining that what she had discovered was the True Cross? (IF, for the sake of argument, she actually looked for the Cross at all?) I doubt it very much, but my point is that the question was not discussed on air. The people most well-qualified in the world to discuss such matters, and quite willing to share their expertise, were interviewed, and we got a recitation of a bunch of fairy tales and precious little evaluation of what history, if any, is contained in them.
I have to wonder just exactly how much edifying information is routinely edited out of such interviews. I wonder whether one can hold out some hope that the raw footage of the entire interviews tends to be preserved, and will someday be edited into something much better than most of what goes on the air these days.
Thank goodness, these scholars write books, books with which the producers for half-assed "Secrets Revealed" shows on the so-called "History Channels" and NatGeo and the Smithsonian Channel, etc, have nothing to do. If you watch some of these shows and are intrigued by what is said by people like Professors Ehrman, Pagels and Chilton, you might find it quite interesting to read their books and see how badly the TV shows present what they have to say.
And then you'll walk around angrily muttering to yourself all the time about how TV jerks us around, just like I do. Just like me, you'll shout, "Why don't the experts insist on better shows being made? Is it just money, simple as that? Are the experts afraid that if they rock the boat they'll kill the golden goose? Et tu, Bart?!" Yes, you'll be angry, but I'll be a little bit less alone.
Friday, November 15, 2013
So I Actually Watched The First Episode Of "Bible Secrets Revealed"
I didn't learn anything new about the Bible from this episode, which is not to say that nobody would learn anything from it. But the question is, how much misinformation would they get from the show which would stick, and how many erroneous preconceptions which they had would the show confirm? "Bible Secrets Revealed" has a very impressive array of talking heads on hand, including some bona-fide experts in Biblical studies such as Bart Ehrman and Elaine Pagels, some others in the grad-student-to-Associate-Professor range who made few egregious blunders, and, at least in the first episode, "Lost in Translation," only a couple of dingbats. A very low proportion of dingbats for a show on the so-called History Channel. Unfortunately, very poor use was made of the academic talent on hand. (Why, oh, why do Ehrman and Pagels and other real historians continue to work with the so-called History Channel, giving it what little credibility it has?) The narration, the most dominant voice in any documentary on an historical subject, was written by a dingbat. All those competent scholars got just a few seconds at a time on the audio track, and over and over, just about when they were going to get to something interesting, the narrator broke in and said something vapid or downright stupid. For example, in my previous blog post on this series, I speculated:
"It will be interesting to see whether this series addresses misconceptions about the Bible, such as the very widespread one about the Bible having been written and/or re-written and/or edited and/or altered in any other way at the Council of Nicea. It would be very impressive if the show addresses the way in which that particular misconception has been perpetuated by the so-called History Channel."
They did not address that popular misconception directly. The narrator did strongly, erroneously imply that Constantine wrote or re-wrote the Bible, and flatly, erroneously stated that Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.
So many people competent on the subject of the history of the Bible were around this time, in the making of this particular series, but as usual it is obvious, both that none of them had a say in the final draft of the narration, and also that whoever did write the narration wasn't listening at all closely to that unusually-large collection of experts and competent non-nincompoops, which was an unusually-large waste of brains, even for the so-called History Channel.
Maybe the narration was written by Reza Aslan, one of the unusually-few dingbats among the talking heads. Aslan, who toward the end of the episode rhapsodized about the stories in the Bible having been around for "5000 years." (Try roughly half that, Sparky. Theories about the composition of the Bible more than about 2500 to 3000 years ago are quite speculative.) The plot of the narration began with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls -- but no mention was made of Nag Hammadi or Oxyrhynchus -- which Bart Ehrman called "beyond a doubt the most significant archaeological find of the 20th century." But surely, Bart, you meant to say the most significant biblical find of the century, not the most significant find of any kind. Right? And surely you have to mention Nag Hammadi and Oxyrhynchus in the same breath. Right? Even though Oxyrhynchus began to be excavated in the 19th century. Well, very possibly Ehrman did mention those sites, and still others, in the same breath, and quite possibly he did qualify his remark about the Dead Sea Scrolls, calling them the most significant 20th-century-find having to do specifically with the Bible, or perhaps he was more specific still and called the Scrolls the most important 20th-century find having to do with the Old Testament. We may never know, what with the so-called History Channel's ADD-afflicted style of editing which gives us 4 or 5 seconds of talking-head commentary at a time, between longer stretches of dingbat-written narration.
It'd be nice to have the full interviews with the talking heads -- with some of them, I mean, of course. I could live quite comfortably without Aslan's full contribution. But some of the others might have mentioned, in this early part of the episode, when they were discussing how certain parts of the New Testament were altered, their best guesses about when during the first three centuries of Christianity these changes were made, and with the approval of which leaders of the early Church. (But who wants to hear a bunch of dates and names in a program on a historical subject, right?)
But no. And the episode leaps from this spotty coverage of pre-Nicene times and some of its Biblical-textual problems to late-Medieval England, and John Wycliffe. The Vulgate is mentioned only in passing in reference to the English bible translations of Wycliffe and Tyndale and the King James Version. Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopic, Syrian, Gothic, French, Slavonic, German (Luther, hello!) and other Bible translations are mentioned not at all, and apparently the English translations are only mentioned because it takes us to the USA. Apparently God is still a God-fearing English-speaking Amurrkin at the so-called History Channel. A mention of the Jefferson Bible, the book of Mormon, pro-slavery bible readings in the Confederacy, some video montage of international scenes in place of any mention of non-English versions after Antiquity, and the so-called History Channel calls it a wrap, thinking, yes, this will do as a representation of the entire subject of Biblical textual criticism.
It won't do. People who know better need to speak up louder about the shoddy nature of the so-called History Channel. (And I'll say it again, specifically to Ehrman and Pagels: they need to stop appearing on it! How badly will their contributions have to be mangled and distorted before thay say Enough?) Competent historians should receive more support from other media. From outlets like the television channels from National Geographic and the Smithsonian Institution, which seemed at first like they might be a breath of fresh air, but instead have decided that the viewing public needs to be inundated with shows about aircraft crashes and survivalists.
"It will be interesting to see whether this series addresses misconceptions about the Bible, such as the very widespread one about the Bible having been written and/or re-written and/or edited and/or altered in any other way at the Council of Nicea. It would be very impressive if the show addresses the way in which that particular misconception has been perpetuated by the so-called History Channel."
They did not address that popular misconception directly. The narrator did strongly, erroneously imply that Constantine wrote or re-wrote the Bible, and flatly, erroneously stated that Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.
So many people competent on the subject of the history of the Bible were around this time, in the making of this particular series, but as usual it is obvious, both that none of them had a say in the final draft of the narration, and also that whoever did write the narration wasn't listening at all closely to that unusually-large collection of experts and competent non-nincompoops, which was an unusually-large waste of brains, even for the so-called History Channel.
Maybe the narration was written by Reza Aslan, one of the unusually-few dingbats among the talking heads. Aslan, who toward the end of the episode rhapsodized about the stories in the Bible having been around for "5000 years." (Try roughly half that, Sparky. Theories about the composition of the Bible more than about 2500 to 3000 years ago are quite speculative.) The plot of the narration began with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls -- but no mention was made of Nag Hammadi or Oxyrhynchus -- which Bart Ehrman called "beyond a doubt the most significant archaeological find of the 20th century." But surely, Bart, you meant to say the most significant biblical find of the century, not the most significant find of any kind. Right? And surely you have to mention Nag Hammadi and Oxyrhynchus in the same breath. Right? Even though Oxyrhynchus began to be excavated in the 19th century. Well, very possibly Ehrman did mention those sites, and still others, in the same breath, and quite possibly he did qualify his remark about the Dead Sea Scrolls, calling them the most significant 20th-century-find having to do specifically with the Bible, or perhaps he was more specific still and called the Scrolls the most important 20th-century find having to do with the Old Testament. We may never know, what with the so-called History Channel's ADD-afflicted style of editing which gives us 4 or 5 seconds of talking-head commentary at a time, between longer stretches of dingbat-written narration.
It'd be nice to have the full interviews with the talking heads -- with some of them, I mean, of course. I could live quite comfortably without Aslan's full contribution. But some of the others might have mentioned, in this early part of the episode, when they were discussing how certain parts of the New Testament were altered, their best guesses about when during the first three centuries of Christianity these changes were made, and with the approval of which leaders of the early Church. (But who wants to hear a bunch of dates and names in a program on a historical subject, right?)
But no. And the episode leaps from this spotty coverage of pre-Nicene times and some of its Biblical-textual problems to late-Medieval England, and John Wycliffe. The Vulgate is mentioned only in passing in reference to the English bible translations of Wycliffe and Tyndale and the King James Version. Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopic, Syrian, Gothic, French, Slavonic, German (Luther, hello!) and other Bible translations are mentioned not at all, and apparently the English translations are only mentioned because it takes us to the USA. Apparently God is still a God-fearing English-speaking Amurrkin at the so-called History Channel. A mention of the Jefferson Bible, the book of Mormon, pro-slavery bible readings in the Confederacy, some video montage of international scenes in place of any mention of non-English versions after Antiquity, and the so-called History Channel calls it a wrap, thinking, yes, this will do as a representation of the entire subject of Biblical textual criticism.
It won't do. People who know better need to speak up louder about the shoddy nature of the so-called History Channel. (And I'll say it again, specifically to Ehrman and Pagels: they need to stop appearing on it! How badly will their contributions have to be mangled and distorted before thay say Enough?) Competent historians should receive more support from other media. From outlets like the television channels from National Geographic and the Smithsonian Institution, which seemed at first like they might be a breath of fresh air, but instead have decided that the viewing public needs to be inundated with shows about aircraft crashes and survivalists.
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
"Bible Secrets Revealed" On The History Channel
Tonight a series entitled "Bible Secrets Revealed" will debut on the so-called History Channel.
First things first: in the title of a show on the so-called History Channel, "Secrets" generally means "out-of-date scholarship, superstition, mistranslation, mispronunciation and straight-up, mind-boggling, how-on-Earth-are--they-able-to-sell-this-crap bullshit," and that ain't no secret, Daddy-O. I don't see any reason to suspect that things will be different in this case. The "experts" consulted for this series include University of Iowa Assistant Professor Robert Cargill, already guilty of serial collaboration with the so-called History Channel, Reza Aslan, who may be an expert on finding a good literary agent and had the incredible good luck to be propelled into literary superstardom when he was insulted on-air by a Fox News "pundit," and David Wolpe, who is just a dingbat. Cargill and Aslan and some other talking heads may make some accurate statements which don't get cut from their interviews, but unless the so-called History Channel undergoes a massive transformation with this series, and there's absolutely no reason to suspect that it will, experts will be nicely balanced in the mix by people who think -- or at least, who say -- that they've found Noah's Arc and Adam and Eve's DNA. Also, par for the course on the so-called History Channel is for some actual expert to say something like, "Object X has been conclusively proven to be a 20th-century forgery," immediately followed by the voice-over narrator saying something like, "Is Object X actually a 3000-year-old artifact which was touched by Moses himself? We may never know for sure. But for believers, [...]" I see no reason to believe that the narrators and the people who write the narration on the so-called History Channel even listen to the talking heads -- If they did, the narrators wouldn't commit the spectacular, aforementioned mispronunciations nearly so often -- let alone being able to sort the actual experts out from the idiots and the hucksters.
It will be interesting to see whether this series addresses misconceptions about the Bible, such as the very widespread one about the Bible having been written and/or re-written and/or edited and/or altered in any other way at the Council of Nicea. It would be very impressive if the show addresses the way in which that particular misconception has been perpetuated by the so-called History Channel. ... ... ...
... ... ...
Excuse me. I fell off of my chair laughing just then, at the thought of the so-called History Channel doing something impressive and/or consciously attempting to clean up a bit of the dreck and confusion it itself has spread.
First things first: in the title of a show on the so-called History Channel, "Secrets" generally means "out-of-date scholarship, superstition, mistranslation, mispronunciation and straight-up, mind-boggling, how-on-Earth-are--they-able-to-sell-this-crap bullshit," and that ain't no secret, Daddy-O. I don't see any reason to suspect that things will be different in this case. The "experts" consulted for this series include University of Iowa Assistant Professor Robert Cargill, already guilty of serial collaboration with the so-called History Channel, Reza Aslan, who may be an expert on finding a good literary agent and had the incredible good luck to be propelled into literary superstardom when he was insulted on-air by a Fox News "pundit," and David Wolpe, who is just a dingbat. Cargill and Aslan and some other talking heads may make some accurate statements which don't get cut from their interviews, but unless the so-called History Channel undergoes a massive transformation with this series, and there's absolutely no reason to suspect that it will, experts will be nicely balanced in the mix by people who think -- or at least, who say -- that they've found Noah's Arc and Adam and Eve's DNA. Also, par for the course on the so-called History Channel is for some actual expert to say something like, "Object X has been conclusively proven to be a 20th-century forgery," immediately followed by the voice-over narrator saying something like, "Is Object X actually a 3000-year-old artifact which was touched by Moses himself? We may never know for sure. But for believers, [...]" I see no reason to believe that the narrators and the people who write the narration on the so-called History Channel even listen to the talking heads -- If they did, the narrators wouldn't commit the spectacular, aforementioned mispronunciations nearly so often -- let alone being able to sort the actual experts out from the idiots and the hucksters.
It will be interesting to see whether this series addresses misconceptions about the Bible, such as the very widespread one about the Bible having been written and/or re-written and/or edited and/or altered in any other way at the Council of Nicea. It would be very impressive if the show addresses the way in which that particular misconception has been perpetuated by the so-called History Channel. ... ... ...
... ... ...
Excuse me. I fell off of my chair laughing just then, at the thought of the so-called History Channel doing something impressive and/or consciously attempting to clean up a bit of the dreck and confusion it itself has spread.
Thursday, April 4, 2013
I Just Noticed: The Entire Year 2012 Came And Went And We're Still Here
This is disturbing. Not only because it seems to indicate that all of those symbologists and experts on ancient aliens and so forth may have been off in their calculations, but because it will give ammunition to all those "scientists" and "archaeologists" and forth -- you know. The ones who are professors and such and all think they're so G-D smart and are so G-D proud of their "peer-reviewed journals" and all -- in their worldwide conspiracy to hinder heroes like Däniken and Downing and Tsoukalos from telling the world the truth. The public might be more inclined to listen to "scientists" when they perpetrate awful smears such as saying that not only are Tsoukalos' interpretation of ancient Mayan and Egyptian heiroglyphics dubious, but that there's no actual evidence that Tsoukalos can actually read any heiroglyphics.
OMG -- this could damage the credibility of the History Channel!! People might start to doubt the messages we've gotten from the Bible code! They could start to doubt perfectly obvious truths such as that the angels and demons in old paintings are actually aliens, no matter how many times Tsoukalos smirks in the direction of a camera and exclaims that it's perfectly obvious!
People might stop believing in astrology! People might start to wonder whether people built the pyramids in Egypt and Latin America all by themselves, with absolutely no help from extraterrestrials! Where would that leave us?!
I'm afraid! Afraid for myself, and for Dan Brown.
OMG -- this could damage the credibility of the History Channel!! People might start to doubt the messages we've gotten from the Bible code! They could start to doubt perfectly obvious truths such as that the angels and demons in old paintings are actually aliens, no matter how many times Tsoukalos smirks in the direction of a camera and exclaims that it's perfectly obvious!
People might stop believing in astrology! People might start to wonder whether people built the pyramids in Egypt and Latin America all by themselves, with absolutely no help from extraterrestrials! Where would that leave us?!
I'm afraid! Afraid for myself, and for Dan Brown.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
"Is the History Channel Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?"
I thought that up. Me. If Comedy Central starts a series with that title I want my props. Although of course I in turn must give South Park props for inspiring me.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
This Annoys Me
In the History Channel documentary The Crusades - Crescent & The Cross
, William, Archbishop of Tyre, author of one of the most highly-regarded contemporary chronicles
of the Crusades, is portrayed in dramatic re-enactments by an actor in a long black robe, with a very long and unkempt grey beard and hair, so long and untidy that the viewer wonders whether there might be some bugs or rats crawling around in them, speaking passages from his chronicles to other monks in what appears to be a very dark and dank northern European castle or monastery.
Why does this annoy me? Well, we happen to know that William didn't look anything at all like that, for one thing. He looked like this:
-- tonsured, and wearing light-colored robes, as was usual for Crusaders living in the Holy Land, as William did for almost his entire life. We can even deduce, from the way William points his left eye toward his writing in this and other pictures of him, that the vision in his right eye may have been impaired. In the case of many leading figures of the Crusades, we have to guess how they looked. In William's case no guessing was necessary, and still the History Channel managed to get his appearance about as wrong as possible. That's what annoys me.
I'm also annoyed by the way that the actor portraying William shouts and hisses the passages from William's work in such a way as to make William seem quite an unpleasant and fanatical creep. But maybe this wasn't intentional, maybe the actor was doing the best he could and unaware of how creepy he was being.
By our 21st-century standards, William certainly said much which was fanatical and bigoted. Compared to his 12th-century Crusader contemporaries, however, William was very unusually broad-minded and mild-tempered. But if you only know him from this History channel program, you're going to think he was a snarling bigot who looked like a Druid. But of course, that's par for the course for the History Channel. The narrator of The Last Days of World War II
pronounces "Volkstuerm" as if it were spelled "Wochsstromm," and "Braun" like the English "brawn" instead of its correct pronunciation, which is identical to that of its synonym "brown." The History channel is the only place I've ever heard the word "ArMIStice" spoken with the emPHASis on the the second SylLABle.
They churn out nothing but crap and I hate them.
, William, Archbishop of Tyre, author of one of the most highly-regarded contemporary chroniclesof the Crusades, is portrayed in dramatic re-enactments by an actor in a long black robe, with a very long and unkempt grey beard and hair, so long and untidy that the viewer wonders whether there might be some bugs or rats crawling around in them, speaking passages from his chronicles to other monks in what appears to be a very dark and dank northern European castle or monastery.
Why does this annoy me? Well, we happen to know that William didn't look anything at all like that, for one thing. He looked like this:
-- tonsured, and wearing light-colored robes, as was usual for Crusaders living in the Holy Land, as William did for almost his entire life. We can even deduce, from the way William points his left eye toward his writing in this and other pictures of him, that the vision in his right eye may have been impaired. In the case of many leading figures of the Crusades, we have to guess how they looked. In William's case no guessing was necessary, and still the History Channel managed to get his appearance about as wrong as possible. That's what annoys me.
I'm also annoyed by the way that the actor portraying William shouts and hisses the passages from William's work in such a way as to make William seem quite an unpleasant and fanatical creep. But maybe this wasn't intentional, maybe the actor was doing the best he could and unaware of how creepy he was being.
By our 21st-century standards, William certainly said much which was fanatical and bigoted. Compared to his 12th-century Crusader contemporaries, however, William was very unusually broad-minded and mild-tempered. But if you only know him from this History channel program, you're going to think he was a snarling bigot who looked like a Druid. But of course, that's par for the course for the History Channel. The narrator of The Last Days of World War II pronounces "Volkstuerm" as if it were spelled "Wochsstromm," and "Braun" like the English "brawn" instead of its correct pronunciation, which is identical to that of its synonym "brown." The History channel is the only place I've ever heard the word "ArMIStice" spoken with the emPHASis on the the second SylLABle.
They churn out nothing but crap and I hate them.
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