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it's funny reading all these vague references to some vague history that functions to vaguely demonstrate in a vague kinda way that everything is always basically the same from then to now it is always the same human beings do not make anything new they do not create anything situations just repeat.
this is a strange time, then, in an 1812 kinda way.
there is considerable polarization in a 1969 kinda way over political questions (the political is a category constructed around the works of machiavelli, and so we are also still repeating the period of the borgias) the rise and continuous collapse of the american extreme right in a weimar 1928 kinda way is of a piece with the fragmentation of the left in a very 1848 kinda way and the collapse of civility therfore unfolds within the bourgeois public sphere in a very 1787 manner.
except of course for television, which links everything happening now to the 1950s.
and so there is turmoil in a 1936 sense linked to anomie in a 1919 kinda way and as a function of that we are living through a period of ideological incoherence that is all very very 1956.
so folk worry about fragmentation in a kinda 1215 way but also in a kinda henri iv period way except with a certain 1984 perspective mixed in.
people worry about fragmentation and this worrying about fragmentation makes them nervous: it is all most 1923 except that 1923 was not one thing it was different things in different places so maybe it is now less 1923 than it is 1973 it is hard to say.
well there is iraq, which turns out to have been very spanish-american war in that the case for war was as much a fabrication as the blowing up of the maine but maybe its more tonkin gulf so more 1964 it is probably a bit of both 1898 and 1964 with a bit of 1915 (remember the lusitania) thrown in. except of course there is television so all this is very 1958 which means obviously that none of the stuff about the fraud that was the case for the iraq war could be true so the problem must be those who say it is they sow division and really should be dealt with, a line of thinking that is very ussr 1936 don't you think?
yes, what we need is unity, national unity in a very 1941 kinda way or maybe it's more 1940. dissent is bad in a 1951 sense and so there is the haymarket scenario which we wonder about and there is the paris commune that we are worried about and so extraordinary rendition, which is both very 2006 and curiously very james bond, so 1966, an important aspect of the past we repeat that we had not previously been able to work into this. we learned about the importance of the general will from rousseau's writings of the 1770s which we repeat or would if the 1770s were one thing but they weren't so maybe 1696 france would be better except we don't like the french, which is very 2001 which was also a movie that came out in 1971 so we repeat that too.
people wish that more people liked each other more in a very summer of love manner 1967 but there is the hard reality of geopolitics and that is typically 1815 and so which history are we repeating repeating?
not knowing the answer is very 1788 except that 1788 was not one thing either so maybe 2006. maybe the way to deal with all this is to simply go out and get drunk, which rabelais also recommended so we repeat the 1630s each time we do. how do we feel about the 1630s? how do we feel about repeating the past?
that is an important 1989 question and i am glad you brought it up.
same shit different day.
but what are you talking about?
o nothing--you know, nothing in a meister echkhardt sense in a basho sense so something vaguely 15th century or 17th century japan maybe.
wait, i feel a gertrude stein quote on the horizon:
let us say what history teaches. history teaches.
isn't that terribly 1926 oxford?
were you there too?
i am here now so yes i was there.
same shit different day.
nothing ever changes.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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