Perspectives from the Past

Asking the dead what they'd think of us.

Atlanta, GA

June 21, 2020

This abominable year is only half done, but since it started we feel like we’ve already lived several. And, in a way, we have. As I heard it put recently…

We’ve endured a 1918 pandemic, a 1929 depression, 1968 riots, a 2000 bubble, a 2008 crash.

And that’s just since March. 

What the rest of the 2020 holds in store we can only imagine, and prefer not to. But we’re getting glimpses of 1984, and fear scenes from 1917…or 1789.

F. Scott Fitzgerald noted that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. Nowadays, many people are active, but few minds are functioning. Under these circumstances, “conversation” and “dialogue” are difficult, and usually futile. 

So we must proceed cautiously, poking our rhetorical bayonets in the ground to avoid tripping a land mine. The last thing I want for my descendants is a fight to keep my statue from being pulled down, or to prevent a bunch of Jacobins renaming the capitals of Puerto Rico and Newfoundland.

We therefore move warily, like a lawyer to an opinion. Rather than ride headlong into trouble, like Paul Revere at the sight of light, we carry our own lantern…like Diogenes after an honest man…and tiptoe softly on our quixotic quest for rational discourse. 

Glancing at the public spectacle and its narrow range of allowable opinion, we obviously need to look further afield, and to more distant times.

It has been said that nostalgics always yearn for those glorious halcyon days…just before they were born. I am no different, but tend to go back even further. Eras for which I have periodically longed include San Francisco after the Gold Rush, Paris before le déluge, Vienna after the Treaty, Florence under Lorenzo, Rome under the Antonines, Athens under Pericles, and Avignon under the papacy.

But whenever my antediluvian wishes weigh heavily, a few words spring to mind, and lighten the load: dentistry, anesthesia, and hygiene.

Then, I return quickly to my time, and my senses. Still, people of those benighted periods…troglodytic as they were by our sanctimonious standards…must have something to offer their enlightened, self-righteous children. But do those hyperactive, oversensitive offspring have the patience, perspective, or humility to listen?

To find out, we return to another era, and a simpler time. To that of picket fences, political unity, and social cohesion. Of three piece suits and three martini lunches. Of complaisant wives in calf-length dresses, high heels, and strands of pearls…unflappable ladies who hoisted nightly pot roasts as if they were the Claret Jug. A time, in short, that never really was – or at least not as popularly caricatured.

We reach back to the mid-20th century.

From those years, we draw a shade. A representative ghost. And we ask him what he thinks of modernity…of its superior confidence and confident superiority. We unlash our specter from the mast, and let him have a look around our contemporary world. Let’s see what he says…

“Whoa! What the hell have you done?”

Uh oh. We didn’t expect that.

“What do you mean?”, we reply, a bit offended.

“The place is a mess. When I died in the late-50s, debt was manageable, the dollar was strong, productivity was increasing, families were thriving, and streets were safe. Look at Detroit and Hiroshima at the end of 1945, and now look at both in your time. What happened? How can you have done so little with so much?”

“What are you talking about?”, we respond, our back arching. “Look around you. What we’ve invented is incredible.”

“Oh, sure. You have whiz-bang technology and high-falutin’ toys, but what has it gotten you? Invention progressed much more in our time than it seems to have in yours. You can communicate better, travel a little faster, and waste your time looking at funny pictures and dirty videos. But so what? Are you happier? Do your lives have more meaning? What’s the point?”

The conscripted spirit is now on a roll. Our pride wounded, we retreat, and let him advance…

“We invented the telephone. You made it mobile, and more versatile. But is that necessarily an improvement? Do you ever have time to think? Or even want it? All I see are people constantly staring at their little devices. What could possibly be that interesting? Do they even see the world around them? Or care?

“We also invented automobiles and airplanes. Yours have more gizmos than ours, but they basically do the same thing. Our planes carried us from place to place, in about as much time, and often in more comfort, than yours do. Our fathers laid rail and built steamships. Your versions are sleeker, but their essence is not too different. 

“The doctor who delivered me arrived in a one horse carriage. My corpse was taken to the grave in a 325 horsepower hearse. In my childhood, radio was unknown, television inconceivable. When I died, both were common. As a kid, my water was carried from a well; our “bathroom” was an outhouse. In old age, we had plumbing almost indistinguishable from yours, but with better shower pressure and more toilet flow.

“Your medical knowledge has improved, but your medical system is infinitely worse. When we got sick, we went to the doctor. He saw us, we paid him, and went back home. It was like going to the barber. 

“And if you couldn’t pay, many doctors provided urgent care pro bono, or churches and charities helped. We took care of each other, without your legislated labyrinth of bureaucracy, paperwork, and cost. Dead bodies didn’t lie on our sidewalks like live ones do on so many of yours.

“And what in God’s name have you done to your money? A newspaper costs you seven times what I paid, a soft drink ten times. Your average car costs more than my nice house. You spend a fortune to go to universities…then leave with worthless degrees, lots of debt, and no wisdom. We used to teach Greek and Latin in high school. You teach remedial English in college. And, apparently, no history.

“Seeing your latest riots, marches, and outrage, you seem to think our greatest offense was our approach to race. And I can’t deny it was bad.

“Our governments segregated blacks and treated them terribly. White Southerners prevented them being customers, and white Northerners resisted them being employees. Unions and the minimum wage were weapons against black employment. The reaction could be merciless if a black man said the wrong thing or looked the wrong way. It was reprehensible. 

“But black families usually stayed together, and they did a good job raising and educating their kids. Black neighborhoods were separated from ours, but weren’t particularly unsafe. Inner cities were livable, and walkable. Do you ever ask yourself how that could’ve been, when prejudice was clearly worse in my time than in yours? Were you even aware of this? Or did the question never cross your mind? 

“We had no federal welfare programs, drug wars, or education departments to destroy black families, turn their neighborhoods into war zones, or convert their schools into hell holes. That was your doing. Nice job. And now you cover your sins by attacking our symbols.

“You’re tearing down statues because some of the men they depict owned slaves? Do you honestly think that is why our fathers put them up? Do you not think these men had anything else to offer? That they had no sense of honor? No worthwhile ideas? No beneficial accomplishments? Or that they may have been doing their duty as they saw it, to protect their homes and their families against a foreign invader, whether from northern states or British Isles? What would you have done in their shoes? What do you know about suffering? Who do you think you are?

“And when will you be satisfied? When will you stop? And on what basis? Will you dig up Confederate cemeteries, or those on California missions? A statue of George Washington, who inherited hundreds of slaves in Virginia, was vandalized and toppled in Portland. One of Vladimir Lenin, who created a hundred million slaves in Russia, remains undisturbed in Seattle. What gives? Do you hate our ancestors for their vices, or for their virtues?

“You’re taking Washington’s name off schools and public buildings? And Thomas Jefferson’s too? America wouldn’t be America without these two. Or is that the real reason for the purge? And this is being opportunistically permitted by your unprincipled leaders, who haven’t the intellect, much less the achievements, to even hold a conversation with Thomas Jefferson. Do you seriously think any Founding Father would condone racism in your time? Are you certain you would have opposed it in theirs? Where do you come off?

“Perhaps worst of all, you take yourselves way too seriously. We could at least laugh at ourselves. You tell a joke and your career is over. You ask a girl on a date, and you risk an indictment. Anyone with an unfashionable point-of-view must grovel or look over his shoulder. You now hold people responsible for things that happened well before they were born. Then you excuse others for crimes they themselves commit today. I’m glad I died when I did.

“We weren’t perfect. Far from it. But we had a sense of right and wrong, and did the best we could. Unlike you, we didn’t think we had all the answers. We weren’t too pure or proud to think that the generations preceding us hadn’t learned anything, or that they had nothing to teach us. 

“Our ancestors were men of ideas. Our contemporaries were men of industry. But our descendants are children of insolence. You have no idea how good you have it. We built your world for you while we were alive, and you respond by denigrating us when we are dead.

“Before you take a broom to everything that occurred before last Tuesday, maybe you should sweep your own front porch. 

“And before you remove more equestrian statues, you may want to get off your high horse. It may be toppled next.”

JD