Dangerous past times

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

Among the titles that I’ve coveted in my life — from president to general to knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter — the one I’ve come closest to achieving is “historian.” But I can’t even claim that, really, as I’m a mere bachelor and master. Not a doctor. 

However, in weaker moments, I allow myself to lean on the university’s Medieval power to grant distinction and reckon that if it called me a “master” of history, then that’s what I am. My diploma says that I’m entitled to “all the Rights, Privileges and Dignities to that Degree appertaining.” I’m still not sure which “Rights, Privileges and Dignities” I’m owed; but, a lot of times, my mastery of history is just a pain in the ass. 

One of the biggest pains in the ass is hearing that “people who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” No. People who don’t know history doom historians to listening to them make lame observations about “history repeating” when it surely does not. It doesn’t even “rhyme,” as Mark Twain quipped. History isn’t even in the past — it’s happening to us right now and it’s not even a subject, it’s a practice. We don’t “learn” history, we “do” history as a constellation of research methodologies and structures of thought that say as much or more about the present as they do about the past.

James Baldwin was approximately twice as smart as Mark Twain and at least seven times smarter than me, and he made the deceptively simple observation that, “History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us.”

That’s a heavy burden, which is why most people content themselves with saying crap like, “Those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it,” while not actually knowing anything about history. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that those are often the same people who get really pissed off when someone actually tells them about history.

I had one of those experiences the other night at the bar.

There I was: Drinking some beers and having a good time with my friends, when some guy asked me what was up with my outfit. To be fair, I was decked out in full English country gentleman style, wearing a pair of woolen breeks, knee-high socks and my best brown leather brogues, a woolen vest, wool tie and Prince-of-Wales tweed jacket. 

My friends and family know to expect this sort of thing from me, but this guy wasn’t my friend or family member, and came on kind of aggressive. It turned out this 20-something scrapper was from England — and not too far from where my own English relatives live — and my clothes triggered him a little, since he professed a deep sense of loathing for his home country. Once he determined that I wasn’t appropriating his culture (after I could locate Essex, Sussex, Wessex and Cornwall on a map), we fell into a pretty bruising conversation about history that reminded me just how present the past really is. 

Some people might be critical of England for its rightward turn. Well, this guy was angry that England wasn’t right-wing enough, and he loved North Idaho in particular because he felt reinforced in his beliefs here. 

“Immigrants wreckin’ the country, innit?” he said with a straight face.

Once our conversation came around to the fact that I’m schooled in history, he asked me a question: Did I think that the media was unfair to the Nazis? Like, were movies too hard on the Germans and weren’t the Nazis really just badass nationalists and all that stuff they say about “the camps” a little overblown? He totally wasn’t a racist or a Nazi sympathizer, though, as he told me numerous times. (If you have to say this, then you are this.)

We talked for more than an hour, during which time I realized that this person did not have even the most basic grasp on the events of the past 20 years, much less the first decades of the 20th century. He even came to realize it, too, becoming drunkenly emotional about how “no one ever taught me anything about history.”

It was heartbreaking. This man did not want to be a Nazi apologist, he just didn’t know any better. I don’t think I changed his mind on anything, and he certainly didn’t sway me toward his perspective, but he showed me just how present (and dangerous) the past can be.