May 23, 2007
That’s So Last Year Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 10:45 AM EST That barely perceptible laughter you hear is the staff of American Heritage expressing very restrained amusement over that fact that after spending decades covering history, we are about to become history ourselves. You’ll understand, I’m sure, if the irony is lost on us, though I have to admit it is a hell of a gag. In fact, you know who would think it’s really funny? Javier Solana. Solana’s job title is European Union High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, and if you think he’s stealing money because the EU doesn’t have a common foreign and security policy, don’t worry; he has half a dozen other titles, all equally Ruritanian. Anyway, last October, in a bilingual speech dealing mainly with the Middle East and Africa, Solana couldn’t resist throwing in the obligatory anti-American cheap shot (this is the one area where Europe really does have a common policy): “When Americans say ‘That is history,’ they often mean it is no longer relevant. When Europeans say ‘That is history,’ they usually mean the opposite.” Charlemagne, the Economist’s Europe columnist, called Solano’s remark a “neat turn of phrase,” which suggests that Charlemagne does not get out much. Ever since “____ is history” became a catch phrase—in the early 1980s, as I recall—history teachers, academics, convention orators, and editorial writers have been lamenting that its use signals Americans’ contempt for the past, a regrettable trait to which just about any supposed ill, as viewed from the left or the right, can be attributed. There was a time not so long ago when half the articles we got in the mail began with that phrase (the other half began with William Faulkner’s quote “The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past”). In real life, however, calling something history does not signify disdain, nor does it imply that the object of the epithet is irrelevant. All it means is that it’s finished. (Peter Morance, our old art director, once suggested that we run an obituary column called “You’re History.”) It’s a pointless word substitution that’s meant to sound snappy, the way sportswriters will say the Brewers “own” a 28-18 record instead of “have.” It can also be used in a menacing way, as in yesterday’s paper, when Amy Fisher said of her lover Joey Buttafuoco’s wife, from whom Joey was supposed to be estranged but isn’t: “She’s messing up my life. She’s history.” This is probably just a rhetorical threat, though with Amy you never know. Most often, when somebody says that something is history, they simply mean that it’s over and done with and can’t be changed. Consider, for example, this quote from Javier Solana himself, in a speech at Belgrade in December 2004: “Nine years ago, almost to the day, IFOR deployed its first contingency to Bosnia-Herzegovina in order to implement the Dayton Agreement. A day very difficult to forget for the citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina. A day very difficult to forget for me. But all that is history. Today we gather here to look to the future.” Or this one, again from Javier Solana, in an interview conducted in late 2005: “Those leaders are obliged to convince their people that history is history, and, if they want a future, that they have to take decisions that are sometimes difficult, but, no doubt, far better for generations to come.” So let’s get something straight. When anybody, American or not, says that something is history, it isn’t necessarily meant to be derogatory or dismissive. All it means is that the speaker has a weakness for phrases gleaned from talk radio. Despite their unaccountable failure to embrace our magazine, Americans are not any less appreciative of history than Europeans; if they were, why would every home-run record for switch-hitting catchers and every election of the first Croatian-American highway superintendent be described as “historic”? But don’t expect the Europeans to pay any attention; they never do. In fact, I’m sure that at this very moment, somewhere in Europe, some scholar with a doctorate from the Sorbonne is writing a treatise analyzing the hermeneutical implications of “Gag me with a spoon” and “Where’s the beef?”
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