This will be a very brief essay. No essay at all, really, more like a sad mini-meditation on the ambiguities of history. It has been hard to be anything but sad in the current historical moment.
I have spent most of my life studying history. It has been history of a special sort, since it has focused on old works of art, literary and visual. My approach has been a fairly common one. I have tried to understand old verbal and visual constructs in terms of the likely intentions of their creators and their intended audiences. Trying to understand the past in its own terms is very hard work, because the past is a foreign country, or rather many foreign countries. We keep saying that we must heed the lessons of history, that we must never forget this or that. Sometimes the thises and the thats are of gigantic size, the evils of the Atlantic slave trade, the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust of European Jewry. Who possibly thinks that such enormities should be forgotten even if they could be?
But historical memory has many uses, some of them more conducive to human felicity than others. My own paternal grandfather provides me with a monitory example. Though born in this country, he was a fanatical pseudo-Irishman. His father, who arrived in America as a youth about the time of the Civil War was for most of his life a coal miner in southern Illinois, but I think my grandfather was born in Detroit. He had a mediocre career in various pockets of the lower, lower middle class. Its high point was a brief stint as a recruiting sergeant in the Spanish-American War. The immigrant father (my great grandfather) abandoned Catholicism in a dramatic fashion that I might recount another time. His son (my grandfather) turned the family religion department over to his Northern Baptist wife. His chief spiritual passion, so far as I could judge, was hating England. I don’t know that he had ever seen an actual Englishman, but I supposed he must have. However, he didn’t need to have done so in order to hate them all with a fury. Thus did the internalization of certain quasi-legendary iniquities of the administrations of Viscount Melbourne and Robert Peel continue to sour the world view of a man into the 1950s. And, incidentally, some of his posterity.
But among the world’s active and malignant ancestral hatreds, that born of the Irish famine was, if you will allow the irreverence, small potatoes compared with many others. Some still active ones were already virulent at the dawn of written history. When Joshua, who lived in the Bronze Age, first crossed the River Jordan, the land in which he found himself, however promising and indeed promised it might have been, was far from uninhabited. It was replete with Amelikites needing to be smitten “hip and thigh”. The Amelikites, sometimes called simply Amelik, were an indefinite tribe, or race, or coalition, who appear widely but indefinitely, (both in terms of chronology and of geography) in early sacred history. What is definite is that they needed the hip-and-thigh treatment, that is, ethnic cleansing, aka genocide.
Never forget. Remember the three hundred at Thermopylae. Remember the Alamo. Remember Treblinka and Sobibor. But for the love of God remember them in a fashion more likely to lead to their effectual oblivion than their repetition. John Kennedy performed one of the most benign and brilliant achievements of modern history during the Cuban missile crisis when he simply pretended that he never received a certain provocative note from Nikita Krushchev. (To his credit, Krushchev, having taken the time to think twice, went along with the fiction.) This was an act of willful oblivion that may have allowed the continuation of the human species.
