Blast from the past

Less script and more commentary screed, I found the original We're History from Nov. 25, 2005. No audio for this, but here's what was written:

Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America – “Scandal mongering journalism, course public manners, the frenzied pursuit of things, the indifference to learning and unconcern with quality were only some of the characteristics of American civilization that bore the stamp of the common man”

“Perfectly willing to mislead and tell untruths if it will help us win the war” Robert Dalleck, quoting FDR

Samuel Elliot Morrison wrote that US public opinion in 1940 forced FDR “to do good by stealth”

A nation without a past is a nation without a soul. No history, no traditions; no traditions, no absolutes; no absolutes, no morality, no responsibility. We rapidly devolve into classic nihilism.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “As an individual deprived of memory becomes disoriented and lost, not know where he has been or where he is going, so a nation denied a conception of its past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future.”

History may not necessarily repeat itself exactly in the mode of the old Santayana saying, but it often has the feeling of Marx who said that history first happens as tragedy then repeats itself as farce.

Others will argue that history is not what you thought; it is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.

This is the home of the unprecedented – the most overused phrase in our public discourse. Was it unprecedented when a group of conspirators led by Ramzi Yousef bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. No an anarchist packed horse drawn carriage with dynamite in the 1920s and set it off on Wall Street.

There is nothing new in the world, just differences of scale. Growth follows in progressive directions, mostly expansive. Consider that power went from human muscle to animal muscle to mechanical to chemical to nuclear. One notable opposite is calculation devices which have progressively shrunk from the size of a room to the size of a thumbnail with a progressive ability to execute.

There are absolute changes – women can vote – but the vast majority of what we acknowledge are relative changes.

History isn’t unique, people are. The belief that these times are so unique, so unprecedented feeds into something George Will deemed generational vanity.

It’s a self-absorbed, self-congratulatory generational uniqueness. Never before have we faced such challenges or overcome such hurdles.

This is one of those small bits of logic that destroy the argument – to acknowledge that the present has precedent is to acknowledge that there are constraints, recruiting trends. These are the immutable circumstances of the human condition: good and evil, right and wrong. There also contrasts: rich and poor, powerful and weak, ascendant and declining.

Society may remove some of the physical attributes of a problem – we can relieve starvation, and perhaps poverty – but can we ever remove the concept of poor, those that in comparison to others have less. For all the positive talk to the contrary, the predilection of society is to find differences, not similarities. Society will define new paradigms of poverty to suit the era. It strives for hierarchy, which becomes another constant.

The party slogan of 1984: He who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past.