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Re: Let's relax, please



While I'm pretty much in agreement with the flag-flying Jingoist set on
this discussion, I feel compelled to put in a couple of remarks that
might be construed as a bit cynical.

1.  Having lived through a few "threshold" events, I am no longer sure
which ones could be so identified at the onset.  Certainly Netscape's
going public wasn't recognized at the time (although I would vote for
Apple or Microsoft going public as critical events....), or more of us on
the Listserve would be rich and only doing archives for a hobby....

2.  Terrorist events are by nature manufactured media events.  As media
events, small visual bites can be made into major worldwide news.  I
recall that back in my adolescent anarchist days, I danced a little jig
when I heard that JFK had been assassinated--I was young and therefore as
ignorant as a Palestinian peasant at the time.  Had a camera been focused
on me, perhaps the world could have been convinced that all 17-yr-olds
were behind Lee Harvey Oswald!  This is not to say that the actual events
were not horrendous.  Only that my perception of them were not fully
constructed until much later.

3.  In order to test whether the media manufacture will work, whether
history will be changed, one will have to see if the American people will
assent to an even greater restriction of their property rights to
government search and seizure, a major increase in the budget for the CIA
and the military, a reinstatement of the draft, and other changes that go
on with the actual or virtual declaration of war.  If they are not, then
our media generated outrage will fade like Tim McVay under the seductive
IV needle, leaving us with a sense of drift and malaise that will no
doubt be acted out in more intense late-nite WWF bouts.  I strongly doubt
we have the national stamina to fight this one out.

4.  It's probably a good thing we don't have that stamina.  For several
years I have been thinking that the elimination of the Cold War has set
the stage for the resumption of the real conflict that created Western
civilization in the first place:  The Crusade vs. the Jihad.  As someone
with Libyan relatives AND a deep fundamentalist Christian background,
this has troubled me more than a little.

5.  All of which has little to do with the archival function of this
listserve, except insomuch as archivists (even those of us with library
degrees) are the handmaidens of historical research.  If we capture the
facts, and relegate the media commentary to a trivial subseries, we
ultimately control the story.  We should be comforted with the fact that
our enemies go through this fundamentalist frenzy about every two hundred
years.  First they burn every one else's books, then they burn their own.
 We, on the other hand, keep our records (in this profession, probably
too many of them...).  As a result, we always own the past.

6.  It is, at any rate, a comfort to hear folks on the TV using the word
"enormity" correctly for once, even if only by accident.


John Howard Fowler, PhD, MLIS, CIB
Consulting Archivist
3221 W. 177th
Torrance, CA  90504-4003
310-327-5848

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