The Burden of History
Over the past couple of weeks I have been reading a batch of books about Los Angeles. City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s, by Otto Friedrich and Los Angeles in the 1970s, edited by David Kukoff. City of Nets ranges far and wide over the Hollywood community in the period from 1939-1950. Friedrich peers behind the studio hype of the time and shows how the production of the Hollywood product over that time affected those in and around it. There is a certain amount of seediness that creeps in. We learn about Bertholt Brecht's terrible breath and about Arnold Schoenberg’s fascination with Hopalong Cassidy and TV dinners. Kukoff’s anthology reads like a series of mini bildungsromans, showing how the peculiar aspects of Los Angeles in the 1970s formed these couple dozen or so authors. The difference between the two books is the difference between a disinterested, if snarky, critical eye, and the more or less self-critical remembrances from the 1970s. The subjects of Friedrich’s book are all gone now and have entered the realm of historical figures, whereas the authors in Kukoff’s collection are still out and about and now influential figures in Los Angeles’ cultural life.
It was oddly disconnected reading, in our very manic times. It served my general purposes of LA historical research and at the same time provided a bit of shelter from the stress of this moment. What I learned was good to know, but I wondered whether I was spending my time well. Was it helping me get used to things that I really shouldn’t be willing to get used to? What both books show is the way that we have no choice but to live within the uncertainty of the times that we live in. Friedrich’s book ends with the McCarthy years, the rise of Television and the decline of the hegemony of the studios. With the passage of time we can look at those times as completed narratives.The figures whose lives were ground up by the blacklist didn’t know that they were inside the mouth of the fish until they were swallowed down. I couldn’t help but wonder whether this was the model to map our own times onto.
This, I suppose, is the burden of history. The narratives that appear to be closed and well mapped can play too much of a role in our understanding in the events of our own time. As I read these two books, they began to bring on a claustrophobic feeling. The certainty of these narratives, despite the contested nature of their meaning, started to feel like a trap.
We carry many stories that help us juggle our various personal narratives. We would like to be able to predict the consequences of our actions based on some vast trove of data the way AI does, but our ability to do so is far less well informed and subject to the bounds of our emotions and our ethical constraints. Perhaps, somewhere within the architecture of our brains, we are like the AI that we have created, in that we are filling in the next steps of the narrative letter by letter and word by word. But the reality of our lives is entirely unlike the texts that AI produces. AI can respond to us, but it cannot act on us without our consent. It can attack us, as has been reported recently, but only if we allow it in. In the real world we have people, like our President, who choose to attack us regardless of the choices that we make. They don’t interact with our lives, they try to dominate them. They try to crush our own narratives beneath their own.
As the days go by the anxiety of the military occupation that we are living under has ebbed, but the occupation is neither concluded or continuing on tenuous legal grounds. The courts have failed us, in that they have failed to act in the interest of their own self-preservation. And so the quiet presence of an armed enemy force among us, an army (nearly five thousand strong) meant to intimidate us and cause us to give up on our rights and freedoms, remains and grows. They are a fifteen minute walk from where I sit, or a five minute drive in their armored vehicles.
This is the rock and the hard place that I feel so cramped by. On one side are the narratives that I carry from my own reading and experience: the Holocaust, the McCarthy era, and the Reagan years. On the other side, are the narratives that others are trying to force on us, and by force I mean by means of violence and intimidation. They are not exclusive to each other, and that awareness pushes me, all the moreso, to resist them both. It is a hard thing to look closely at the world without hiding from the messy undetermined future that it implies. But doing hard things wears one down. At this moment it is OK for us to do what we need to do to protect ourselves. There is no shame in it. That is what I believe, but it isn’t what I feel, not for myself at least. It isn’t a good feeling. I don’t know how to get myself out of this place or around it today. Instead of faking it, I’ll offer another person's opinion that might help, that of the Clash’s frontman, Joe Strummer:
“And so now I’d like to say – people can change anything they want to. And that means everything in the world. People are running about following their little tracks – I am one of them. But we’ve all got to stop just following our own little mouse trail. People can do anything – this is something that I’m beginning to learn. People are out there doing bad things to each other. That’s because they’ve been dehumanised. It’s time to take the humanity back into the center of the ring and follow that for a time. Greed, it ain’t going anywhere. They should have that in a big billboard across Times Square. Without people you’re nothing. That’s my spiel.”
