David Shribman: Stop ... In the name of history
[David M. Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Shribman was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in journalism in 1995 for his coverage of Washington and the American political scene.]
... We have an economic crisis our grandchildren surely will find in their history textbooks. We know that when they read the phrase "first black president" they will be looking back at our times. The heartbreak in India late last month, occurring poignantly as Americans gathered to give thanks, was another reminder that we are not living in the blank pages of history.
But now history requires us to say: Enough with history. History is too much with us. This is not a time to live in the past.
Not long ago the editors of Time magazine put Barack Obama on its cover in a distinctly Franklin Roosevelt pose with a cigarette holder held in his lips at FDR's trademark jaunty angle. The new president has been talking about assembling a "Team of Rivals," a reference to the first Illinois president, Abraham Lincoln, who had the courage and character to assemble many of his political opponents around his own Cabinet table. Not long ago the planners of the Obama Inaugural made references to that of Andrew Jackson, who lent his name to an era in a way that the Obama crowd surely finds appealing.
Stop. Our troubles are so great that they do not need to be paired with those of other times. They stand on their own. If history has a utility right now, it is as a comparison. It should give us perspective, not prescriptions.
Obama seemed to understand this the night he stood before hundreds of thousands and acknowledged his election in Chicago's Grant Park, named for a Civil War general who was elected president in 1868 and the site of one of the Democratic Party's most tragic rendezvous with history a century later. He spoke of Lincoln and the divisions the former one-term member of the House faced when he returned to Washington as president, and he pronounced them greater than the crisis we face today.
Obama was right. Everyone heard that speech but no one listened to that line, perhaps the most important.
The point is that just as 2008 is not 1860, 2008 is not 1929, either. This is a Wall Street crash, not the Wall Street Crash.
Obama's election in 2008 may begin a new Democratic era the way Franklin Roosevelt's did in 1932, but we won't know for three decades or so (although a repudiation of Mr. Obama in 2012 would suggest this thesis is wrong). Obama could be a new FDR, but he could also be a new JEC (Jimmy Carter, whose term between Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan now appears to be an interregnum, and surely not the beginning of an era).
So the course for us in these historic times is not to ignore history but to resist the temptation to let history be our guide. That's good advice at any time, because history is rarely a guide to the future, only a way of looking at, and explaining, the past....
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... We have an economic crisis our grandchildren surely will find in their history textbooks. We know that when they read the phrase "first black president" they will be looking back at our times. The heartbreak in India late last month, occurring poignantly as Americans gathered to give thanks, was another reminder that we are not living in the blank pages of history.
But now history requires us to say: Enough with history. History is too much with us. This is not a time to live in the past.
Not long ago the editors of Time magazine put Barack Obama on its cover in a distinctly Franklin Roosevelt pose with a cigarette holder held in his lips at FDR's trademark jaunty angle. The new president has been talking about assembling a "Team of Rivals," a reference to the first Illinois president, Abraham Lincoln, who had the courage and character to assemble many of his political opponents around his own Cabinet table. Not long ago the planners of the Obama Inaugural made references to that of Andrew Jackson, who lent his name to an era in a way that the Obama crowd surely finds appealing.
Stop. Our troubles are so great that they do not need to be paired with those of other times. They stand on their own. If history has a utility right now, it is as a comparison. It should give us perspective, not prescriptions.
Obama seemed to understand this the night he stood before hundreds of thousands and acknowledged his election in Chicago's Grant Park, named for a Civil War general who was elected president in 1868 and the site of one of the Democratic Party's most tragic rendezvous with history a century later. He spoke of Lincoln and the divisions the former one-term member of the House faced when he returned to Washington as president, and he pronounced them greater than the crisis we face today.
Obama was right. Everyone heard that speech but no one listened to that line, perhaps the most important.
The point is that just as 2008 is not 1860, 2008 is not 1929, either. This is a Wall Street crash, not the Wall Street Crash.
Obama's election in 2008 may begin a new Democratic era the way Franklin Roosevelt's did in 1932, but we won't know for three decades or so (although a repudiation of Mr. Obama in 2012 would suggest this thesis is wrong). Obama could be a new FDR, but he could also be a new JEC (Jimmy Carter, whose term between Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan now appears to be an interregnum, and surely not the beginning of an era).
So the course for us in these historic times is not to ignore history but to resist the temptation to let history be our guide. That's good advice at any time, because history is rarely a guide to the future, only a way of looking at, and explaining, the past....