Faulkner was wrong about a lot of things, and not even close to my favorite writer, but he did get one thing right--the past is not even past.
Fitzgerald knew that, and said as much in his famous last lines of the Great Gatsby, "So, we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
When I got to college, I could not fit any history course into my schedule, being a science major and having to fulfill a range of required courses, but since graduating more than half a century ago, I've luxuriated in the time to read any history whenever I like, and it's been wonderful and revealing.
Lately, I've been reading Edmund Morris's two final books about Theodore Roosevelt, a man I thought I knew enough about to never want to know anything more about him, but I was wrong, wrong, wrong. The man is a contradiction, wrapped up in a paradox, folded inside an incongruity.
He was born to great wealth, but despised the effete, bloodless privileged classes, although he aspired to be a member of the "ruling class." He embraced the idea of proving manliness by violent engagement in war, which he bragged was the only way a real man could emerge as a fully made man, and yet he finessed two different peace settlements--the Russo-Japanese War and a conflict over Morocco which would have thrust Germany into war with France. He did not think Black African savages were "ready" for self rule and yet he invited Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House, infuriating the entire block of Confederate states. He was a man who reveled in slaughtering animals, proving his manhood like some pre Francis Macomber, but he was an ardent conservationist who wanted to protect wild animals and their habitats.
He was erudite enough to quote scripture from the Koran to clerics on his visit to Egypt, wowing them to the extent that he was the first infidel they ever saw fit to gift a copy of the Koran. Visiting the Balkans, he expounded on the history of those troubled areas, astonishing and delighting the populace.
But most of the problems he confronted we are still dealing with today: Separation of church and state--he was indifferent to organized religion, having worked out his own sense of ethics as a "gentleman"--wealth inequality; the control by a small number of "special interests" (that was a phrase then) over the rest of the nation; the rape of the environment by coal and oil monopolies; the willfulness of non democratic governments to dominate economies and countries which have elected forms of government; the overwhelming of the working man by the owners.
He did not believe international disputes could or should be arbitrated by judicial bodies like the World Bank or the Hague. He thought the manly thing to do was to settle conflicts with war. So he led the charge into the Spanish American War. But then, he gave Cuba its independences more rapidly than anyone expected, and after presiding over the rape of the Philippines and facing ongoing insurrection there, he bargained for an early settlement.
He faced, during his Presidency, what every President since the Civil War has faced: the fact that through generational efforts, the South has Won the Civil War, as Heather Cox Richardson, among many others has argued. They simply never stopped resisting, lynching, suppressing their Negroes/Blacks/African Americans.
He rejected the irrational, the unprovable and decisions and ideas based on blind faith as a retreat into the Middle Ages, the time before the Enlightenment, but he never succeeded in defeating that willful blindness.
Almost every really good history is based on what happened in the past as it is revealed in the words and pictures of those who lived it--diaries, newspapers, newsreels, books--but good history writing is not really about the past; as you read it you are fully aware you are reading about issues we still grapple with today. The demagogue who appeals to the lowest intellect, to the emotional masses who feel deprived, resentful and are hungry for revenge has always been with us. The sense of outrage of the mass of working folks who know the system is designed in a way which means they can never win--"the game is rigged." The inclination to look for explanations in "God" and, as Christopher Hitchens calls it, "That invisible dictator in the sky." George Carlin saw the same "Invisible God in the sky, who will punish you with everlasting hellfire, misery and suffering--But He LOVES YOU!"
Some problems get solved, over time. Technology and social organization eliminates mass starvation and food insecurity for most people, goods and services become more widely available, even if unevenly. But many problems of ignorance, economic grievance, racial intolerance, religious strife persist.
This is where Donald Trump thrives. He wants to take us back to the good old days when men were men and women were under the thumb of men and America was Archie Bunker white and everyone was happy, and even before that, to the time of the Kaiser and the Royal families who ruled Europe and Africa and Asia.
He is careful to not play the race card too overtly, because A/ He doesn't have to--all he has to do is say the dark illegal immigrants from South of the border are "an infestation" or talk about "shithole nations" and everyone knows he is full out Archie Bunker
B/There really has been progress in some ways in race relations which he cannot undo, and he can appeal to the macho in Brown Hispanic males if he is not too obviously racist.
As you get older, you don't get quite as angry and frustrated when you hear Trump or hear his acolytes echo his nonsense: You just shake your head and smile, because you know you've heard that line before and you know how that plays out.
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