COLUMN ONE A tale of two muses

— Poor, superannuated Clio, quiet muse of History waiting in the shadows. She’s always being shoved aside by her much younger sister, Anomie, the ever-bubbling, ever-fashionable, ever-changing muse of the Present that I’ve just made up.

The proper, toga-clad Clio, like a little vine-covered statue somewhere in the dark recesses of an untended garden long since gone to seed, is used to being overlooked. She is accustomed to fading gently into the night. But even though she’s always reserving judgment, the breadth and depth of her vision inspires. And when the result is a Gibbon, Parkman or Macauley, no other muse can match her.

The shape-shifting Anomie doesn’t inspire but only excites, and that but briefly. A flirtatious young vixen, she drains and moves on. A quick-change artist who’s always introducing The Next Big Thing, she tends to evaporate even before the dream world she’s conjured up materializes. Even when it does, it turns out to be only The Last Old Thing, and so of no interest to future-fixated Americans.

Anomie is always moving on, as if she needed to fill up the empty imaginations of her worshippers with something, anything, more dramatic than her last oracular pronouncement. She’s got to top herself; it’s her very nature. Which is why she’s always talking about the Ultimate Sensation, the Greatest Generation, the Be-All and End-All-before unveiling Something Even Better. Anomie is the goddess of fads, full of flare and devoid of meaning. A walking vacuum. A girl you might like to talk to, but not after, oh, about 30 seconds.

It doesn’t take long to realize that in her case there’s no there there, as Gertrude Stein said about Oakland.

The same thing could be said about today’s Facebook-updating, channelsurfing, forever-blogging conveyors of nothing in particular.

Now all news must be Breaking News, and These Times Are the Most Challenging Our Generation Has Ever Faced, and more and more newspapers, those that are left, sound like supermarket tabloids.

They seem to put out their End of the World edition weekly. In our superficial time, the Medusas of the Media strike every note at once.

The result is one giant dis-chord.

Like a great cathedral organ being played by a five-year-old who wants to pound all the keys and press all the footpedals simultaneously-just to see what happens. Some call it music, but Miles Davis it ain’t.

That’s what happens when Clio is eclipsed by Anomie. We lose all perspective, all appreciation of the long view, aka History.

It’s revealing, the way Americans automatically, almost unconsciously diss history. You can hear it in theway we talk. We’ve got to be the most amnesiac of all peoples. We say of a public figure who has lost favor, “He’s history,” meaning he no longer matters. The same goes for anything that’s no longer in fashion. It’s history, that is, not worth paying attention to. What’s past is no longer prologue but not worth thinking about. It’s so . . . yesterday.

We forget that it is precisely the past that may have most to say about the present, and how it came to be what it is. And how we came to be what we are. Who’s got time for Clio? She’s no fun, with her compendium of the follies and failures of man through the ages.

Meanwhile, glittering Anomie is always holding court. In her dazzling presence, one superlative succeeds another like fireworks in the night sky. An amazing sight. But each display doesn’t last long, and has to be followed by something even flashier.

We now move through time like someone who has lost all memory.

Everything’s NEW! to us. There used to be a phrase to describe such a handicap: born yesterday.

But that handicap becomes scarcely recognizable once everyone shares it, and Anomie’s sway is complete.

Think I exaggerate? Consider this keen observation from our ever with-it president, who delivered himself of this Deep Thought the other day:

“Let’s face it: This has been the toughest year and a half since the 1930s.” Talk about foreshortened perspective. Did I see poor Clioshudder on her cold marble pedestal when she heard that fauxhistorical judgment?

The toughest year and a half since the 1930s.

Hmmm. That covers a lot of territory. It would include Pearl Harbor-December 7, 1941-“a date which will live in infamy,” but that has since been displaced by September 11, 2001.

The toughest year and a half since the 1930s.

That time span would include most of the Second World War.

And all of the long, twilight struggle known as the Cold War, which sporadically grew hot, as in the Korean or Forgotten War.

And the long terrible morass that was the war in Vietnam and environs. Not to mention the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the world has come to actually ending. Don’t forget the 444 days of the Iran Hostage Crisis. And that other lowlight of the Carter Years: stagflation, which exposed the Keynesian supposition that a country couldn’t enjoy both inflation and recession at the same time. History is just full of thingsthat could never happen and yet do. Like the financial panic of 2008-2009, whose after-effects have left us all a little snakebit . . . .

Like our president, we tend to forget that History did not begin with us, or even in the oh-sodistant 1930s.

I went up to Governor’s School the other day, which is always a highlight of my summer, being surrounded by all those bright, articulate, well-mannered, so alive kids. I took as my text the president’s ahistorical remark. It was the perfect crystallization of Anomie’s non-thought. After that, the temptation to put in a short word for taking the long view proved irresistible. And by the long view, I mean the l-o-o-ng view.

My favorite observation in these matters comes from Chou En-Lai, Mao Tse-Tung’s foreign minister.

In 1972, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger astounded the country-and the world-by paying a visit to the Forbidden City in order to open diplomatic relations with Communist China. History is just full of such surprises. The inevitable may never happen, butthe unexpected regularly does.

The story is told that, while making conversation, Dr. Kissinger, knowing of his host’s interest in revolutions, asked Comrade Chou what he thought the impact of the French Revolution on Western civilization had been. The Chinese foreign minister pondered. And then he pronounced:

“It’s too early to tell.”

Clever people, these Chinese.

They take the long view. Which leads me to believe they may be around for a while.

More important than classifying a revolution as good or bad is trying to understand it. For the proper end of the study of History, allow me to submit, is not to reinforce or challenge any prevailing orthodoxy, but to try to understand it. Which requires a good deal of thought-and imagination. To immerse ourselves in the past, and absorb it as surely as we’ve absorbed our own, requires the one irreplaceable quality: time, time, time. And thepatience to explore it.

It’s too early to tell. Poor Anomie, she could have no idea what Comrade Chou was talking about, but recalling his sage response, I thought I saw Clio smile, and emerge from the shadows. Her countenance may not be that beautiful-it reflects one bad memory after another-but, unlike Anomie’s, it is always interesting. Time cannot wither nor custom stale her attraction for some of us. Maybe because she has so much to tell us.

Paul Greenberg is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. E-mail him at: pgreenberg@arkansasonline.com

Perspective, Pages 81 on 06/27/2010

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