|
well, ace, i'm not sure i see the point of continuing this, but i'll see what happens.
1. history is what narratives about what happened say it is.
in principle, history is everything that has happened, but if you think about even the most ordinary aspects of your experience every day, most of what happens drops away. you can't hold onto it--try to describe the process of making a sentence that you type here if you want an example. describe what goes through your mind as you write a sentence. all that is happening, but all that falls away. so there's no hope of capturing everything that happens.
so history as a genre is not that--it is a type of text taken up with narratives that construct and link elements--maybe events, maybe other things--into a type of pattern.
2. your notion of history via the example of "roots" is kinda absurd. historians make shit up all the time--but that doesn't mean that therefore the histories they write are any more or less "history" for that--it depends on the type of argument, the nature of the materials used as evidence and the logic that links them. it's a type of conceptual art.
if you want to hold up the standard of "what actually happened" and you take that idea "what actually happened" at all seriously, then there is no written history, just types of fiction. i have no particular problem with that, but i doubt seriously that my reasons for this have the slightest to do with yours.
3. as for documentation of the bush-process of selling the fake case for the iraq war--you wouldn't be interested because you're politically inclined not to be, and methodologically inclined not to look at that sort of documentation. so your history--the one you'd write--wouldn't use them. almost any other historian doing the same project would use those documents, were they available. your history would soon become an example of politically motivated fiction claiming to be history because its arguments, types of evidence and logic that connected these into patterns, wouldn't stand up. if you don;t believe me, try doing it. it'd be fun.
4. on the last point about your analogy--well, ace, this one i dont care about.
fact is that you aren't cowboy george and so are not president and so are not past a certain point used to having what you say recorded for posterity or whatever and so you would react differently to the idea of being recorded.
this is so obvious that it is not worth arguing about.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|