Why Does This Keep Happening Here?
“America doesn’t have ten years of experience in Vietnam, we have one year of experience ten times.”
Colonel John Paul Vann in multiple sources
In this unimaginably difficult summer with four major crises happening at once — health, economic, racial and political — we can agree that all this has happened before, just not at the same time. The response to them reflects an American characteristic: the inability to effectively deploy lessons of the past to the crises of our age.
The Romans made mistakes, it is often said, but avoided making the same ones twice. Our national fault lines are deeply embedded and when they are, as now, under severe stress, looking backwards for insights rarely is considered the way to learn.
John Paul Vann, the subject of Neil Sheehan’s classic book on the United States in Vietnam, A Bright Shining Lie published in 1988, served in the military and as senior civilian official until he was killed in a downed helicopter in 1972. He was a persuasive critic of how the war was fought — a disaster in the making. As he observes in the quote above, the U.S. stumbled from one blunder to another because of a lack of accumulated understanding of the situation it faced.
Over the past year or so, I have read or reread a number of books, both non-fiction and novels that accurately explore our national past or portray a future that taken together contain all of the elements of what we are enduring now.
These Truths: A History of the United States (2018), Jill Lepore’s sweeping account of the country from the time of Columbus to the present day, explores the degree to which racial injustice and gender discrimination have defied the declaration that, “All men are created equal.” Because of the patriarchal and racist nature of the nation’s founding, we are still grappling with issues that are 400 years in the making. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slave owners, as we are being reminded with increased urgency today, and our collective forefathers had a very limited vision of who gets to decide how the country should work.
Meanwhile, the novels I’ve read this year — figments of authors’ creativity — strikingly invoke either realities of the time they were written or vexed scenarios for our society at some point in the future.
John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) shows the depression era at its height and all that meant to a family heading west in desperate search for a better life.
Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here (1935) and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004) unfold political dynamics of crypto fascism that in so many chilling respects is a mosaic of the Donald Trump era.
Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), one of her greatest books, vividly describes the pride that Blacks feel at their legacy of personal strength against great odds and the rage that is so visible now, so much a response to past discrimination and abuse.
Albert Camus’ The Plague (1947) is about a city in French colonial Morocco where the lack of comprehension and muddled response to a killer disease could be an account of the country’s response to COVID-19.
In non-fiction, John Gunther’s Inside U.S.A. (1947), a massive bestseller, is based on his travels to all 48 states in the aftermath of World War II. A portrait of society in the broadest sense of that time, I read it to compare perceptions then and now, in particular of issues of race and gender. A section on lynching which was common at that time, for instance, set against the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis is inevitable and very disturbing. A long list of prominent public figures of the time is notably lacking in women, Eleanor Roosevelt being an exception to prove the rule.
Fighting Words: The Bold American Journalists Who Brought the World Home Between the Wars (2020) by Nancy F. Cott is a joint biography of reporters writing mainly from Europe, including John Gunther. In his book Inside Europe, Gunther says of Adolph Hitler, he is “a prisoner of infantile fixations” — words that are used today to explain Trump’s behavior. In Jill Lepore’s blurb for the book, she writes that these “most talented journalists of their generation” described the evolution of nationalism into fascism in “an era uncannily like our own.” Dorothy Thompson and Rayna Raphaelson, were two of the best writers covered here, making a case for the importance of what we now call “diverse” viewpoints.
Jim Naughtie, one of the BBC’s long-time star broadcasters (and a friend) has been a visitor to the U.S. as a student, reporter and author for more than 50 years. His British bestseller On the Road: Adventures in the USA from Nixon to Trump (2019) is appealing and, in its way, affectionate. Read this year, many of the qualities he describes are poignant in the midst of our national nightmare.
Today’s world has been transformed by technology. The lynching of Floyd was televised. Trump’s rants on Twitter reach an audience far greater than was possible for demagogues of the past. Breadlines and cars arrayed in parking lots waiting for virus tests are photographed by drones.
George Santayana’s oft repeated 1905 aphorism “those who cannot learn the past are condemned to repeat it” also rendered as “those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it” certainly resonates this summer. And both versions are correct.
