THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief The Morality of Laughter by F.H. Buckley (University of Michigan Press, 240 pp., $35). Supreme Court ''1 — Justice Antonin Scalia once began an opinion with,...
...The pre-Columbian story in North America is fascinating, particularly the "high society" architectural achievements of the Midwest Mound Builders and the cliff-dwelling Anasazi of the Southwest...
...But Page also tells the story of the arrival of the horse on the Great Plains and the resulting golden age of the nomadic buffalo culture...
...Erom splotchy art barely distinguishable from paint rags (Buckley also slights cubism, rectangles and circles, and toilet fixtures) to the erection of antihuman box-shaped buildings, bad art and architecture would not have proliferated had people been willing to laugh at it...
...Likewise, the virtue of learning is a normal point between the risible extremes of true and false pedantry...
...In The Morality of Laughter Buckley points to the tarps Jackson Pollock used to keep on his studio floor, which sold at astronomical prices...
...The five hundred years of relations between Euro-Americans and American Indians are controversial of late, mostly thanks to frankly bad scholarship mired in political correctness...
...How funny can it be, after all, to lay out the sociology of joke-telling and divide comic vices and virtues into categories...
...We laugh, for example, at both misanthropy and hypocrisy, extremes on either side of integrity...
...Nevertheless, The Morality of Laughter is a useful reminder that a cheery society is a healthy one...
...Buckley—and he doesn't just mean in the law, but also in urban planning, art, and academia in general...
...The public howled...
...Buckley also manages a few sly cracks of his own, though his prose tends to overthink its subject...
...Jake Page's well-researched history for the general reader is refreshingly free of victimology—which is exactly what makes the tragedy of its story stand forth so clearly...
...We don't laugh enough at silly ideas, says George Mason University law professor EH...
...Page remains clear-eyed when writing about Indian life today, observing, "one is constantly aware that the Indian peoples have accomplished more than survival...
...A too-uncommon instance of corrective public laughter occurred in 1990 when "performance artist" Karen Einley, whose performance was to smear chocolate over her body to symbolize excrement, complained after she lost her NEA grant...
...Later came the savage geopolitics of the Six Nations of the Iro-quois that for two centuries would influence the struggle between England and Erance for North American dominance...
...Whether they realize it or not," Buckley writes, "those who laugh are moralists, for they uphold a set of comic norms...
...Page covers it all, and, admirably, he does not shy away from the formerly taboo subjects of torture and cannibalism...
...Bill Croke...
...Beth Henary In the Hands of the Great Spirit: The 20,000-Year History of American Indians by Jake Page (Free Press, 464 pp., $30...
...He also dispels the New Age myth that Indians lived in harmony with the environment, citing many examples of their manipulating it for their own ends...
...They have, in many instances, thrived...
...But now, with In the Hands of the Great Spirit, the former Smithsonian magazine editor Jake Page starts at the beginning to give a comprehensive look at the Indians' journey from the Bering Strait land bridge to Eox Woods Casino...
...Once the Europeans arrive, the story is ultimately tragic, of course, but Page chronicles it dispassionately...
...Still, life "on the Rez" is one of poverty, political corruption, and a host of social ills, though a few improvements seem to be coming...
...You can read here about the great battles, massacres, broken treaties, famine, disease, and the purgatory of reservation life...
...Along the way are names as familiar as Sacagawea, Tecumseh, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Geronimo...
...In these virtues lies laughter's conservative tendency, its signal that there is a better way to live...
...Supreme Court ''1 — Justice Antonin Scalia once began an opinion with, "I join the opinion of the Court except that portion which takes seriously, and thus encourages in the future, an argument that should be laughed out of court...
Vol. 8 • May 2003 • No. 33
