History as the World's Longest Bad Novel
Reading history books and watching movies creates weird thoughts. Here's a rambling and pretentious one I had while buried in the pages of William Earl Weeks' Building the Continental Empire: American Expansion from the Revolution to the Civil War.
On page 130, Weeks describes American opposition to the Mexican-American war:
From the outset, the war against Mexico had its critics. Their protests grew louder as the war dragged on and the outcome seemed to include the acquisition of a massive colony. The old warhorse John Quincy Adams served as the spiritual leader of this opposition, even if his age prevented him from assuming an active role. Adams, in his final term as a congressman, refused to vote funds for military honors and urged American officers to resign their commissions rather than fight in what he deemed to be “this most unrighteous war.” Yet Adams’s opposition to the war did not prevent him from voting for the war appropriations bill, as did almost all members of Congress. However unjustified the war, the patriotic imperative to “support the troops” prevented members of Congress from pursuing the one course of action that could have ended.
A little later, on page 131, Weeks quotes Albert Gallatin, who, along with John Quincy Adams, was one of the leading anti-war spokesmen:
“The allegation that the subjugation of Mexico would be means of enlightening the Mexicans, of improving their social state, and of increasing their happiness, is but the shallow attempt to disguise unbounded cupidity and ambition. Truth never was or can be propagated by fire and sword, or by any other then purely moral means.”
And, just under that, on the same page, Weeks about what the war meant to some Americans:
The war’s potential for undermining American liberty at home proved for many Americans one of the most troubling aspects of the situation. An article in the New Englander reiterated Gallatin’s view that America’s mission was to be realized by peaceful and moral means, and that the creation of invading armies foreshadowed future chaos. War caused national indebtedness, high taxes, and, most important, an increasing concentration of power, all of which undermined the very mission in whose name the war was being fought.
Now, the Mexican-American war started in 1846, and Weeks published Building the Continental Empire in 1996. Nevertheless, the parallels between both the war itself and Weeks' analysis of it, and events and analysis that have occurred since both 1846 and 1996, are rather striking—almost to the point that History not only repeats itself, but repeats itself verbatim!
And the repetition isn't confined to only one side. Doves, for example, often like to point out that hawks never change, that the hawk is always antiquated and the dove constantly reborn—and they quote history to prove their valid point. But, the truth is, doves ain't done any changing, either. Cindy Sheehan is as historically familiar as Dick Cheney. The oft-argued notion that, say, the Iraq War is simply a repetition of Imperial America while the anti-war movement is somehow new and revolutionary is a sham. History repeats; but it often repeats in tight little packages, where force and counter-force are so tied together that, instead of untangling the little buggers, it just tosses the whole knot at us again.Disregarding what kinds of pessimistic implications this has for a progressive view of history, it's the abstract idea of repetition that I find interesting.
What if History was a book...
Repetition is a valuable literary device. It can, among other things, draw attention to important themes, generate narrative rhythm, or create links between seemingly disparate ideas.
In the great book of History, repetition, likewise, highlights events or situations that, by simply reoccurring, warrant perhaps not only greater attention than other, singular, events; but, because they reoccur, warrant special attention on the grounds that there's a good chance they'll happen again. In other words, historical repetition sounds an alarm for the future. To study historical repetition is to prepare for an inevitable present.
The problem, however, is that repetition, when abused, leads to stereotype, banality, cliché—which, incidentally, Wikipedia defines as follows:
...a phrase, expression, or idea that has been overused to the point of losing its intended force or novelty, especially when at some time it was considered distinctively forceful...And what is History if not an endless parade of these overused phrases and expressions; an unstructured mess of stock characters and stock situations permanently entangled in the same thirty-six dramatic situations; a several-thousand year long film played on a handful of too plain and too dusty Hollywood back-lots?
If the only props available are a cactus, two guns, and a cowboy hat, then all that's ever going to get made is one rehashed genre film after another.
History is a self-perpetuating cliché.
If history is to be the great human story, a tapestry of various ages and innumerable cultures, then how sad for us. Not because the story is peppered with violence, and betrayal, and general vileness—because numerous are the great books and films full of the same—but, rather, sad for us because of the unoriginality of that violence and vileness. Given the greatest film budget ever known to man, and an intergalactic Cinecittà to work in, we've managed to construct a boring, failed epic that constantly resorts to using the same stock footage over and over again.
If only history actually repeated, instead of being repetition.
Give a bad writer one million pages, and he'll only be able to remain creative for a hundred of them. After that, repetition, stereotype will settle in. And page 101 will not be derivative of another work, another writer, but of page 1 of the same book, by the same writer. It'll be self-plagiarism: the Narcissus of plagiarisms.
Which is quite fitting, actually, because every work—whether it's Citizen Kane or History—has an author who is responsible for it. History, like a film, is an act of creation; it exists as the result of action.
So, when one looks at the author of History, one finds nothing too surprising. Just one self-absorbed hack:
The present.
On the bright side, while the book of History is long and repetitive (a bit like Atlas Shrugged, maybe), it's also never-ending (no matter what Francis Fukuyama says); therefore, there is still hope. For there exists infinite unwritten space for new characters, fresh plots, and—most mouth-watering of all—bold and brave new forms to take shape. If only the present would hit the thesaurus a little more, and do some extra-curricular reading!
But, if there is to be a model of history as a work of fiction, let that model be Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. And let us still be in the first act, still following Marion Crane as she pulls into the Bates Motel with her stolen money and her place as the film's main character. Norman Bates and creative genius, hopefully, lurk just behind the stuffed birds and the hole in the wall.
