August 10, 2006
Becoming History Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:15 AM EST I’ve been watching a lot of TV over the last couple of weeks, and am struck by the eerie experience of watching a portion of one’s own times become history, meaning become something imagined to be irretrievably the past. Two of the shows I’ve been watching, Showtime’s Brotherhood and HBO’s rebroadcast of the first seasons of The Wire, are more or less noir dramas set in the present, but take a little time to explore the destruction of the blue-collar political economy and physical environment that long dominated large portions of most East Coast cities. In the decades following the Second World War, union jobs paid a living wage and a pension, and what were then called white ethnics often lived, self-segregated, in very tightly demarcated urban neighborhoods; in the Chicago and New York my father and uncles grew up in, you risked a beating when you crossed a street that marked an border. The jobs and neighborhoods were protected, for both good and ill, by the New Deal social compact and the political power of big city machines. People went to college and got out of those trades and neighborhoods—this was America—but staying in them did not seem like an impossible ambition. Now, these shows suggest, it is an impossible ambition—the stevedores of Baltimore, in The Wire, and the people in sewing plants in Providence, in Brotherhood, are all living on borrowed time.
Neither show is grossly sentimental about the death of these ways of life, but both make reference to things that were in part impressive and admirable. In The Wire, there is a scene at a bar where old stevedores mock young ones, and are mocked in turn, about memories of unloading grain ships with wooden shovels. It took me a minute to work that one out—these shows trust you to do that. You probably unloaded a grain ship with a wooden shovel because a spark might set off an explosion—the finest particles of grain are potentially as explosive as nitroglycerine. This was not a gentle way to live—it shortened people’s lives when it didn’t kill them young—but what interested me is the experience of television serial drama recording the disappearance of a world I long assumed to be eternal. In Brotherhood, an aging woman, a shop steward, assumes there is something you can do when the plant manager announces a large number of layoffs of longtime employees. There isn’t, not in this vision of the present, and she is herself fired for her pains. I remember being told in 1972 to be ready for a wildcat strike when it was rumored that the police had beaten and capriciously arrested a fellow ambulance technician in Brooklyn, then being told that the police had backed down. I wonder whether anyone in Local 420 would try that today.
In these shows, the old neighborhoods are disappearing, becoming loft condos for the much richer people who today live in the hearts of great American and European cities. I grew up aware that a world my parents took as normal—for example, one where the street of New York were washed clean every night, you fearlessly changed subway trains at 2:30 in the morning at 145th Street, and you cut school to hear Ella Fitzgerald and Benny Goodman playing in Times Square theaters in the middle of the day—seemed impossibly distant. Now a world I thought normal looks very dated to people writing for premium cable.
This came home in a more diffuse way while watching another cable series, BBC America’s Life on Mars, where a Manchester police detective is mysteriously transported back to the Dark Ages of 1973. I was supposed to graduate from college in 1973—it actually took me a bit longer—and Life on Mars made me realize that I still imagine 1973 as the apex of modernity. It is very, very odd to see it imagined as not only impossibly but ludicrously distant, even if that distance is mostly established superficially—a world where people with goofy haircuts somehow live without cell phones while playing LPs. Life on Mars does toy with more serious differences—attitudes toward women, and the nature of authority in a work place—but it doesn’t work those themes very hard. It remains disconcerting to see the popular and material culture of your salad days depicted as, well, history.
This came home to me more piercingly last night, waiting for the trailers in a movie theater to finally end. My uncle died earlier this week. When I was growing up, he was the only Republican in the family, and one of the few people I knew with an M.B.A.—his father had been raised in the mountains of West Virginia, at a time when the Republican Party was still locally famous for crushing the rebellion, freeing the slaves, and creating West Virginia. My grandfather remembered the Blizzard of ’88, which meant the Civil War was still within shouting distance. Having a Republican in a New Deal Democrat extended family was noteworthy, and caused periodic comment.
Less than a decade ago, I discovered that my uncle had another distinction—he was the only member of the family to have shot down a Messerschmitt. This came out only in response to a direct question from one of his children, which had been answered quietly and untheatrically—he’d been credited with a partial kill, and he explained that when a large formation of B24s was attacked, it was pretty hard to tell who’d hit what. In any case, I sat in that theater, thinking that it must be something to say that you’d shot down a Messerschmitt, rolling that plangent noun around in my mind, until I realized that it was unlikely that “Messerschmitt” was still a plangent word to my undergraduates, or in most cases, a recognizable one. In the mid-1950s, of course, most small American boys knew what a Messerschmitt was—we drew crayon pictures of them in school, probably fewer than of MiG-17s, but some. They were part of our present, but for my students, they are, at best, history, and in most cases not even that. If I told my undergraduates that my uncle had shot down a pterodactyl, they wouldn’t believe me, but at least they’d know what I was talking about. Becoming history is a disconcerting business.
It occurs to me that the process can also go into reverse: discovering that you know someone who knew someone who was physically present at an historical event makes that event less “historical”: the distance closes down. One can also “become history” at the hands of younger professionals, reading academic history of one’s own times, and suddenly suspect that historical perspective is sometimes the time it takes to get something decisively wrong. More on this soon.
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