After a brief unplanned hiatus, I have returned from the land of midterms and existential angst. Quite simply, I stopped writing for a period because between several different papers and written exams, I exhausted my tolerance for dealing with words in a constructive capacity.
But recently, my Poli-Sci professor said something that shocked me enough to dust off an abandoned draft. After handing out a New York Times article on the impeachment inquiry, he said that, though he had covered the constitutional and political basis of impeachment before the midterm, he wanted to go over it again, because usually when he covered it, it was just for the quiz, and it looks like this is going to be a thing. He said that even as a political science professor, he didn’t know what was going to happen any better than we do, but that it was his job to prepare us as best he could.
And then he said: I hope you’re all paying attention to the news, because that may turn out to be more important than your grade in this class.
Sometimes, I wish I was disciplined enough to keep a proper journal. Given my intermittent memory issues, I can imagine that this would be immensely useful. I have been recommended to keep a journal on a few occasions by my doctors, and have attempted to cultivate the habit several times, but I never quite manage to keep it. I do not have the concentration nor the time, and I am simply not disciplined enough to compel myself to make time, or force myself to concentrate. I’m barely disciplined enough to post regularly here, and I sure do t have the fotitude to do the same thing without an audience.
I regret these circumstances, partly because it keeps me from being able to look up matters such as what I had to eat before my stomach became upset, or where I was at three o clock on January second two thousand and fifteen. But mostly, I regret not being able to keep a journal because I believe it might be of some historical interest in the far future. I may or may not remember where I was when the event that goes down in history takes place when future generations ask, but I certainly won’t remember where I was and what it was like the day before. And I won’t be able to look it up, either. All the sights, sounds, smells, and little details of human experience that I now enjoy will be washed away long before my story is even over.
We live in interesting times. That much is indisputable, I think. Some day there will be textbooks summarizing the headlines we are not watching daily. More than just textbooks, there will be historical dramas, novels, games, even musicals set in our era looking backwards. And they will get so much wrong, partly as a consequence of trying to imagine something they never lived, but mostly because they will be imagining what it must have been like to live now with the limited perspective of retrospect.
They might be sympathetic to our stories, but privately they will wonder why the future consensus wasn’t obvious to us at the time. It will seem inevitable to them.
This is the danger of history. Nowadays it’s easy to see why the Soviet Union had to fall, why the allies had to win World War 2, why the American Revolution had to triumph and establish a global superpower, why the Roman Empire was unsustainable, and so on and so forth. Those things happened, and insofar as we are satisfied in knowing why they happened, they seem to a certain degree inevitable. Or if not inevitable, it is difficult to see how people at the time could have been blind to what would come to pass.
I’m guilty of this too. In my case, it’s the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent breakup of the soviet bloc that fascinates me. I simply cannot imagine a world in which there is an east and west Germany, right next to each other, diametrically opposed, and seeing this as completely natural. I laugh every time I find a map from the time period. It just seems so silly, like a cheap gimmick. Of course they had to reunify, how could it be otherwise? Sure, I might be able to, for the sake of argument, dream up a scenario in which East Berlin is the site of something on par with Tiananmen Square, and the Warsaw Pact continues existing, placing itself somewhere between modern China and modern Cuba.
But I can’t begin to reconcile that fantasy with the real world. And I have trouble constructing a worldview where it would seem equally or even more reasonable to bet on that reality coming true instead of ours.
That is why I would want to try and keep a journal, to capture the uncertainty of this moment. It’s not that we don’t know we’re living through history, we just don’t know how it will end. If you’re reading this in the future, it may be difficult to understand, so let me give you a rundown.
- We don’t know what the economy will do. Some say it will soon go into a recession, others say that’s just alarmist speculation. Both options seem plausible.
- I can’t say what Europe will look like. The United Kingdom is in disarray and seems to be having an identity crisis over the prospect of leaving the European Union, which is uncertain. Allusions have been made to a more united Europe, which has caused massive backlash.
- I don’t know what will become of my own country, the United States. Impeachment hearings have been announced against the president, after years of activists calling for them. The scandal, which regards phone calls with Ukraine and other world leaders, has snowballed remarkably quickly.
- The President has threatened violence, and possibly even civil war, if he is removed, though most people have taken this as a joke.
This may sound like foreshadowing. Perhaps it is, but certainly not intentionally.
