The Russian poet and novelist Boris Pasternak observed that "history cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing." Which was an interesting assertion from a man who saw, among other clearly historic events, the Russian Revolution, the rise of the Bolsheviks, the Stalinist terror and World War II.
But let's work with Boris a little. No doubt he was correct in the sense that history sort of sneaks up on us. Day after day, stuff happens, and some of it is strange, some is unsettling, some is stirring, some is portentous. But we don't often know, in real time, whether these various happenings are adding up to anything meaningful enough to be called "history."
Amid nuclear tension, a North Korean soldier peers past South Korean border guards.
(Kim Kyung-Hoon - Reuters)
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Yet there comes a day when you look out the window and notice that the lawn is extremely shaggy. You may not have seen the grass growing, but suddenly it's so high you can no longer find the dog's chew toys or the baseball glove you asked your kid 400 times to put away. And then it rains for three straight days and you realize there is no way your lawn mower can get through the sopping wet, jungle-thick morass without making a terrible mess of the mower, the lawn, your shoes . . .
Based on interviews with esteemed experts, the perusal of a stack of dense tomes, a plodding trip through thousands of pages of knotty articles in learned journals, plus the findings of assorted blue-ribbon federal commissions and weeks of squint-eyed reflection, I can report that this is precisely where America finds itself today.
We are up to our shins in the sloppy grass of history.
Maybe you have noticed. The past half-dozen years or so, strange things, unsettling things, stirring things, portentous things have been happening right and left. The decade of the 1990s danced in with such promise. No more Cold War. No more Evil Empire. The Persian Gulf War required a mere four days of land operations and seemed to spell the end of that gloomy, doubt-America malaise widely known as the "Vietnam syndrome." For a moment, it genuinely seemed that the most interesting question a president could face was, "Boxers or briefs?"
Then:
February 1998. A bloodthirsty zealot with a billionaire father declared war on America. Weird. From some cave or compound in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden dispatched a fatwa to a London newspaper announcing the sacred duty of Muslims to kill Americans anywhere they could find us. Only a handful of us even noticed. But this strange event turned out to be truly historic. After all, how many rich fanatics have declared war on an entire country?
And how many, within six months, have managed to blow up two U.S. embassies?
Our elected leaders began making their own sort of history. On December 19, 1998, the designated speaker of the House, Louisiana congressman Bob Livingston, marched onto the floor of Congress, announced he was quitting on account of a sex scandal, and called on President Clinton to do likewise. That certainly felt new. The rich guy in Afghanistan was trying to have a war with us, but our government had painfully snagged on what we were calling "zipper problems." Yet this wasn't even the biggest story of the day, because Livingston's speech was a footnote to the fact that the House impeached a president for only the second time in U.S. history.
Then bin Laden's troops bombed, and nearly sank, a U.S. Navy destroyer.
Then came a deadlocked presidential election, the first in more than a century.
All this played out against a backdrop of dazzling new technologies and dizzying new wealth. Men and women barely out of college were making and losing fortunes that might have turned John D. Rockefeller's head -- and how? Strange, unsettling stuff: data harvesting, digital pet-food sales, cooking the books.
And then, bin Laden brought his war to the American mainland. Hitler couldn't get here. Brezhnev couldn't get here. But the radical Islamists managed to hit us harder than we had been hit at home since the Civil War.
Followed by Afghanistan and Iraq. Some people have begun using the phrase "World War IV." (No, you didn't miss one: WWIII is what used to be called the Cold War.)
Rogue states are developing nukes.
There's a plague decimating Africa.
The polar ice caps are melting.
It's no wonder our civic mood is grouchy. We are bombarded by banner headlines, caught in CAPS LOCK mode, deluged with dire declarations. Tom Wolfe dubbed the 1970s the Me Decade. We're living in the Yikes Years.
BACK IN THE SUNLIT ERA WHEN THE BERLIN WALL CAME DOWN, before all hell broke loose, a theorist named Francis Fukuyama published an influential essay announcing "The End of History." It was a highly philosophical piece having to do with the ideological triumph of democracy and free markets, but the catchy title took on a life of its own, coming to stand for the ascendancy of the United States and its ideals.
We're going to pay a visit to Fukuyama later in this article, and we'll hear what he now has to say about history. For the moment, though, just try to recall those days, when our leaders blithely wondered what to buy with our "peace dividend" and how best to manage the "Pax Americana."
Some people actually felt a twinge of regret at Fukuyama's coinage. No more history? What a drag! It was such an American response -- after all, history had been good to us, nationally speaking. History gathered up various scattered bands of religious outcasts, economic refugees and insatiable colonists; history molded these elements into a nation; history boosted that nation into the global driver's seat. Several years after Fukuyama wrote his essay, a French leader, Hubert Vedrine, decided that the word "superpower" wasn't enough for us anymore. America wasn't just "super," America was "hyper," as in hyperpuissance, hyperpower. It sounded like something out of a DC Comics futurama. The world had never seen our equal -- a single nation dominating the globe militarily, economically, culturally.
In those naive days, it seemed both a great relief and a slight shame to think that Americans might be done with an era of true significance and entering a time of uneventful sameness, that we might be embarking on a tranquil but meaningless period that would eventually be boiled down to a mere sentence or two in the history texts of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Were we destined to share the fate of the citizens of the Gilded Age, who apparently liked to argue over "free silver" while riding bicycles with absurdly large front wheels?
Now we see there was no need to worry.
One last belaboring of Pasternak: It's clear now that the end of the Cold War wasn't the end of grass; it was more like resodding the lawn. For a while there, nothing seemed to be growing. But new roots were going down, and once they took hold, the grass came back stronger and thicker than before.
So, what does this all point to? What does it mean? Years from now, when a virtual teacher downloads the history of our time into a microchip in our great-grandchild's brain, what will the data say?
