History is History

With so much time on our hands, feet and other nameless appendages, people are always making comparisons to the past. It sure beats properly and objectively analyzing the present. Making allusions to historical events that are eerily similar to our current quandary are a common way of coping. The problem, as I see it, is that we’re not thinking broadly enough. We’re constantly invoking one person in particular (a malevolent mustachioed menace mandating marauding monstrous minions murder). But much has happened since the last Ice Age. Too much to be forgotten. 

After not watching the party conventions, I couldn’t help but thinking how very Cretaceous this all seems. Warming climate with extinction an always popular topic of conversation.     

Do you find yourself walking around repeating “Spain, 1492, Spain, 1492?” I do. Thanks to Tim “Le Gourmand” Cook, no one knows how to properly read a map anymore. Though it's been over 500 years, there’s still a lot of talk about Chrissy Columbus. What's changed?

Staring at a pile of dust in the corner of my bedroom, I was brought back to the days of Salem, when witches were stripped of their broomsticks - along with their dignity. Given our national obsession with suction power, we’ve traded our perfectly good modern brooms for Dysons. 

At the beginning of the pandemic, with everyone trapped inside, I thought, “boy, is this Paleolithic.” From Chauvet Cave to dumpsters in the Costco parking lot, we’re just bored scrawling primates, scribbling for a captive audience.

Initially, I sensed things were getting a little too Teutonic (tootonic), with everyone dressed in black and yelling all the time. But then I realized – people back then weren’t always wearing black. I had simply been looking at black and white photography. What a relief. Now, that would've been concerning. 

A friend of mine named Artie, a retired ironworker, spending his golden years in Sayville, Long Island, recently lost his boat, The Iron Sage, to an unexpected fire in the Great South Bay. I mentioned how his mishap reminded me of the sinking of the USS Bonhomme Richard in 1779. No further information was provided, nor was any requested. Thank, God.

History gives us a common language to understand each other. When are we going to realize that all of it – and I mean, all of it – is at our disposal for distortion?