On Set, Looking West (at an Obstructed View)

there's a berlin wall between today and yesterday

Fellow American, increasingly, there is being built a kind of Berlin Wall between us and our history, and my hunch is we are to the east of it.

History progresses, you think. Of course we can’t go back. But it’s worse: you are actively prevented from doing so.

By what?

First, of course, laws. Social pressure too: to openly express a too ardently nostalgic wish, especially when we are talking about the heartlands of the past rather than just its border regions with today, is seen as suspect.

But really, most of all, by ourselves, though unintentionally so. We consume too freely the ideas propagated to us, their self-designated labels as consensus truths. We swallow ourselves into perspective determinism. Everyone knows the story of the 1960s goes like this, means this, is a triumph representing this, etc. (The meaning of the 1960s is but one of a myriad examples, “many such cases” as the saying goes.)

Above all, what they don’t want you to ask: is it possible that most of what was lost was actually stolen?

To lose something feels like an Act of God, a fact to be disappointed at but ultimately accepted. Acceptance then fades out the energy associated with the adverse event. To have something stolen, however, inspires in any person with a reasonable supply of agency a program of recovery, and a desire that the perpetrators may face justice.

Bad weather, the decline of civilization, who’ll blame the sky for its rain?

I think it’s a movie set. The thunder crackling, a thunder sheet struck to the left of the frame. A lot more is staged than you think. And you may be just an extra, but you’ll be asked to stay for the entirety of filming.

And not nicely.