From an early age I
have regarded History as one long camp-fire story. From mouth to page little
was lost. I nearly shivered at Valley Forge and took the bullet for Lincoln at
the Ford Theater. Events jumped off the page directly onto the canvas of my
mind.
After WW II CBS
produced a radio program called, You Are
There in which they re-created a singular event from the annals of history.
It later became a TV show hosted by Walter Cronkite and ran until 1958. The
first one televised depicted the explosion of the Hindenburg dirigible (1937)
over New Jersey. Later broadcasts brought us Paul Newman as Brutus in the
assassination of Julius Caesar, John Cassavetes as Plato, James Dean in the
Capture of Jesse James and Kim Stanley as Cleopatra. The program always ended
with Cronkite saying, What sort of day
was it? A day like all days, filled with events that alter and illuminate our
time……and you are there.
No matter the
medium, the drama unfolded on the stage of my head. But even then it had a
certain remoteness set back in time. In fact I wasn’t really there. I probably
had three sweaters on while reading about that winter at Valley Forge.
Where is Walter
Cronkite now that these days are filled
with events that alter and illuminate our time? I want his reassuring voice
to tell me I’m not there, this is not happening, not in America eighty-four years
after the Nazi Party took over Germany. I love history but I don’t want to be
in it. Of course, we are always in it, eye-witness or not.
Never before in my
lifetime has History felt so close. Even though the man was elected with 46% of
the vote, this has the feel of a coup. Long-held precepts are being undermined,
constitutional guarantees put aside, executive edicts issued, agencies gagged,
the mechanics of governance dismantled. Our acts of resistance, or inaction,
are being noted and given paragraphs in the great chronicles, in real time.
For a number of
reasons we have raised a generation of young voters with little interest in
what has preceded them. They can’t be bothered with the past when the present
is so dazzling with gadgetry, with so many celebrities to follow, so unlike
anything seen before. Antecedents are too yesterday in this altogether new age.
Or so it may seem to them.
So why know
history? Because you learn that the Middle Ages was not the time when everyone
was middle age, that Aristotle was not alive when Lincoln was, that there are
trends and progression and you can find yourself in that larger context. And
when you get a handle on it you don’t vote because of a candidate’s hair or if
he’s a nice guy to have a beer with but more by policies, platform and experience.
You might even fear the consequences of a particular candidate handed over the
power of the office.
In fact all this
has a familiar whiff. In 1933 Adolph Hitler, with 37% of the vote, formed a
coalition government. It could have been stopped had the Communist Party been
willing to join with other left-centrist groups to form a majority. What ensued
is the abomination of the Holocaust.
Millennials did not
show up in our November election. Their numbers were the lowest since 1972.
When they did, almost half, among whites, voted for Trump or third party
candidates. Perhaps they never heard about Adolf and his deplorables or the civil rights movement or the women’s rights
struggle. A slumbering society is exactly what elects a Trump.
Many have asked how
a cultured nation like Germany with composers, thinkers and scientists, could
have abdicated their power over to a ranting, ruthless dictator. It was, in
part, his full grasp of the power of the new media, radio. One might also put
the question to us. It took a perfect storm; the confluence of an aggrieved
work force, a bit of misogyny, foreign interference and a man who tweeted his
ill-tempered blurts to a forgiving electorate.
Too bad Walter
Cronkite isn’t around to Tweet or text a camp-fire story, in bit-sized pieces,
of how it was, how it is and how much worse it can get.
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