The next recession confirmed occurred in the years between 1807 and 1814, and was called the Depression of 1807. This depression was primarily caused by the Embargo Act of 1807, signed into effect by then President Thomas Jefferson. This act destroyed a good part of the shipping related industries, and it was fought hard by the Federalists, who allowed smuggling to take effect in New England as a result of the Act.Everything moves along very fast in History: you fall, skin your shin, and by the time you blink, why it's been kissed by Mom and it's all better.
Not so in the Now. We have to live through it in slow-motion... or regular time, actually, not the accelerated time of History. Like cinema's 24 frames per second, we now live 365 days per year, no matter what. Reading the history text, we have no idea of the suffering involved.
What is important is that the country as a whole came through it in what seemed to historians to be one piece. The dead bury their dead and life goes on. One whole fabric: the cloth has actually changed, but it is still one whole fabric and we can see that no matter who suffered, the greater good was somehow attained through fate.
It is a different viewpoint from those who suffer.
What we have on cable and radio and all news and opinion sources is a concerted effort to speak historically: to speak in abstract, general terms about the downside of poverty and despair, but keep your eyes on the (theoretical) recovery. No one speaks for the living, those who live every day. How little we delve into the lives of those being foreclosed on: the vomiting at 3:00 A.M. from worry and despair!
The only speaking is abstract, done for long term Trust Funds, Corporations enduring over time, Politicians who hold old beliefs and old powers, People who are unkind to new forms of thinking. These are the historical thinkers who skim over the pain and sum things up the way they wish, who, being for the moment safe from pain, project themselves into a timeless, vague and neat universe where they are always top dog and they do not wrong and everything will work out in the end... in that far away end where trust funds wax fat still....
Do we look at each individual every day, or do we look at conglomerates of interests over time? When things are going wrong, do we look at the poor and sick, or do we focus on MarketWatch 24/7 and guess at historical trends?
Only those who survive have the right to think historically.
Only the survivors write the history.
Think about it.
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3 comments:
Of course . . . and that would be the literate survivors at that. History is what the historians say it is, and we don't convey pain very well. For that you need literature and poetry.
True enough.
I wonder why literature and poetry are considered not as scientific as history?
There is a great mass of facts to consider in historical research, but sooner or later, one must take all this "symbolic" data and create a new historical volume with it.
Maybe the Historian is an Artist who paints with a Palette of the Past.
... and the pigments of the Past are ground from Facts which are accepted by peer and peer review ( for the most part ), but there is always an idiosyncratic twist to the egg in the tempera!
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