Monday, March 22, 2010

Welcome to 1937

By Paul Greenberg

"Surely Americans are the most historically amnesiac of peoples. Oh, we love antiques and historical re-enactments, colonial Williamburgs and Currier & Ives reproductions. Not to mention historical romances, preferably of the ripped-bodice genre. But we're antiquarians rather than historians; we search for artifacts rather than meanings. We love history so long as we don't have to do anything as strenuous as drawing parallels between past and present.


Why heed the past, that old nag? Ours is a New Order for the Ages, as it says on the dollar bill. This is the New World, which we tend to confuse with a blank world. Here we were to be born again as an entirely new species, the American. We assumed we could leave history safely behind in the old world, forgetting that we brought so much of it with us."

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