Friday, May 19, 2017

The Problem of Interesting Times

The last week has been a whirlwind of revelations, firings, appointments, beginnings and endings. Unless you have been living under a rock, here is a recap of just the biggest events over the last week:


  • The Firing of FBI Director James Comey has created a political firestorm that has quickly raged out of the control of the White House and President Donald Trump. [Atlantic]
  • One reaction that will undoubtedly loom large over the events of this week has been the appointment of Comey's predecessor as Director of the FBI, Robert Muller as a Special Prosecutor by the Department of Justice to investigate the Trump Campaign's relationship with Russia. [NYT]
  • Longtime head of Fox News -- and Ohio University's most infamous alum -- Roger Ailes died at age 77. [CNNMoney]
  • Bodyguards of Turkish...Premier? Erdogan were involved in a melee -- apparently at Erdogan's direction -- with anti-Erdogan protesters in Washington DC [Guardian]
  • Today, the 18th of May, aircraft from the United States attacked Assad-aligned militias in Syria. [Independent]
  • And what might be my favorite revelation of yesterday: The King of the Netherlands has secretly been a commercial pilot for the last twenty odd years. [CNN]
And these are just a sampling of the many, many important events that have been happening around the world the last few days.

There is a famous Chinese curse: "may you live in interesting times," and if these are not the times that the architect of the jinx meant, then we must not be far off. 

In part the deluge of information pouring out of the political realm is a product of the hyper-real-time news world that we live with in the information age. This particular political period has been likened to the obvious Nixonian moment where his Presidency started to crumble under the weight of the Watergate investigation, or the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, or the collapse of Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe, and while all of these momentous occasions are good reminders that crises have always plagued the political fortunes of nations, these comparisons are lacking.

The Presidency of Donald Trump has been in the eyes of close observers a study in chaos and disorganization, and for those without such a keen eye for politics it has been a grating 119 days of scandal, missteps, and self-inflicted wounds. The issue with this constant barrage of information about buffoonery of the Presidency is that it ultimately may normalize the outrageous. Humans have an excellent capacity (and, some may argue an inherent appetite) for novel things, and keeping the breaking news dial turned to 11 is only going to diminish the power that these events have.

Additionally, as I alluded to above, the constant pouring over of the minutiae of large daily events leads to a clouding of one's perspective to anything that exists beyond the horizon of the big important event. On top of this, as we -- understandably -- react to this large event, our reactions create further noise that future historians will use to fill in the corners of their dissertations (there are probably about two hundred historical dissertations waiting to be written on the events of this week) and monographs. Historians are acutely aware of this phenomena, and many historians have built careers by focusing on the one big event (Gettysburg, the Second World War, the Diet of Worms), but by getting caught up in the moment, the big event, the large players it is easy to miss the broader picture of what is going on in the world. One website I frequent barely mentioned the bombing of Syrian troops by American aircraft, despite it usually being front page news for a week, for example.

None of this should be news to anyone, but some food for thought as we are about to dive into a six month, or year, or years long process of investigation of the highest office in the American political system: things may be interesting, but we need to try to keep our perspective in order to help tie our interpretations to the broader context of our day.

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