As a kid, from roughly age 10 to age 12, I was almost compulsively fixated on L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. Never one for the genre of storytelling that I privately refer to as Elves ‘n’ Dragons ‘n’ S***, there was something appealing to me about the way Baum combined a magical land full of fantastic creatures with plain-spoken, pragmatic frontier populism. Although I doubt I would have explained the appeal exactly that way at 10.) The stories were all about kids getting into amazing adventures, but they were all turn of the century Midwestern kids, and they had all of their adventures with critters who talked like they were from the next Kansas town over. Scarecrows and girls made out of patchwork quilts. Even the Clockwork Man (fiction’s first robot?) was done in a sort of straightforward, can-do American manner. Of course the metal man can walk and talk. It’s not magic; it’s wind-up. There are gears in there.

Being the kid I was, it was never enough for me to just enjoy something for what it was. I couldn’t just watch “Saturday Night Live”; I had to research the history of “Saturday Night Live” at the library. So between Oz books, I did all the reading I could about the history and trivia of Oz and its creator Mr. Baum. Judging from what I read, he seemed like the kind of 20th century seat-of-the-pants go-getter you saw a lot of during those days but haven’t really seen since. I thought of him as a man in the Edison/Wright Brothers/P.T. Barnum mold, from a time when people were forever trying something outrageous, failing spectacularly in public, and then moving to the next town to completely reinvent themselves. Baum would open a store, fail, open another store, fail, start a newspaper, fail, write a book, fai– hey wait a second, people actually bought that book! I’m writing another one o’ those bad boys!

Thinking I had essentially read and seen everything there was to read and see about L. Frank Baum (I’ve even watched his self-made, terrible silent film versions of the Oz stories from when he tried to start his own movie company, at which he spectacularly failed) I simply cannot describe to you how gobsmacked I was when I turned on NPR this morning in time to hear that, as a newspaper editor around the time of the Wounded Knee massacre, L. Frank Baum– author of The Wizard of Oz!!– wrote a handful of editorials calling for the genocide of the American Indian. For their own good. (Now that Sitting Bull had died, Baum argued, the last of the noble savages was gone, leaving only “whining curs” as his successors.) There is just no way to continue a day that begins with the sound of your childhood kicking you in the beanbag.

Oh, and also, Jim Henson named names for Senator McCarthy. And Mr. Rogers used to sit on his porch at night and shoot at hippies with a pellet gun. And Santa Claus smuggled munitions for the Nazis from 1939 to 1943.

It’s not just that one of my favorite childhood authors favored wiping an entire race of people off the face of the earth. One of my favorite childhood authors favored wiping an entire race of people off the face of the earth, and I read everything about him I could get my hands on in the 1980s without ever encountering the information. He’s not the person I thought he was, and maybe neither am I.

I guess… the stories were still good, right? He was who he was, but that doesn’t take away from his contributions, particularly in the field of tin limb lubrication awareness. Context doesn’t take anything away, except in the sense that I will never be able to read the books again. Or… hey! If I did, they… sure would seem completely different! Like reading them all over again for the first time. So there’s that.

What absolutely normal thing are you doing or thinking right now that future generations will think is appallingly monstrous? Your great-grandmother probably didn’t think white people and Irish people should be allowed to marry, and her favorite president of all time put Japanese-Americans in camps for a while. Sometimes, apropos of nothing, I will think, “How am I Future Man’s slave trader?” You ask people this question, and a lot of people will probably tell you it’s the gay stuff. The gay marriage stuff, they’d say, is gonna look a lot like segregation in 100 years. Personally, I think  it’ll be one of the ones you’d never see coming; that’s what makes it so confounding. I’m gonna go with “meat eating.” I think your great-granddaughter will one day say, “…and oh my God, do you know what they used to do to cows?”

Mind you, I’m not putting the burger down.

You never know which way the pendulum of history is going to swing, though. We assume that the relaxing of social norms will persist, but for all I know 100 years from now my great-grandkids will be saying, “…and he thought homosexuality was perfectly fine! Men having sex with men! No problem for him at all. Oh well; his books were still pretty good. He was what he was.”