This ship is sinking
Wrong. This situation looks to be a lot less temporary than I’d hoped. Not long ago we were sailing along with fair winds and a following sea, and then somehow the crazies mutinied and abruptly changed course. Now we’re headed straight into the storm of the century. Also, there are icebergs. The gale-force winds don’t quite drown out the maniacal laughter of the flaccid old Ahab up on the bridge. This will end, as all things do, but it will not end soon, and it will not end well.
I just finished Ian McEwan’s latest novel, “What We Can Know.” In it, he imagines a historian 100 years hence, surveying this time with a mix of nostalgia and incredulity. Humanity is still limping along in 2125, in a chastened world that is quite a bit wetter and more austere. From his vantage point, sifting through the vestiges of pop culture and social media, we were fools who didn’t know how good we had it. Ignored climate warnings and fanatic leaders didn’t quite end the world, but they came pretty close.
The book is more nuanced than that — maybe a little too nuanced for this impatient reader — but it addresses something I often ponder: everything we do or don’t do ends up as history. And the stuff that makes it captivating – villainy, unrest, chaos and war – is rarely the stuff you want to experience firsthand. Look at Chicago: Troops on the streets and they're not afraid to shoot.
Trump and his minions envision a history with his dumb face on coins and Mount Rushmore, maybe an ironic Nobel Peace Prize wedged in among the gold bric-a-brac now crowding the Oval Office. Where they see Augustus, quite a few of us see Caligula. To extend the nautical metaphor, they see the Queen Mary while most of us see the Titanic.
It’s the curse of living in interesting times. I won’t be around to read the history of now, but I just hope future historians get it right.
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