A number of old fogies, including me, were lined up in front of the steam tables at a Chicago cafeteria (“Mannie’s”, for those of you in the know) a few days ago when the first guy on the line, an old, thin, stooped, Black dude with very few teeth, started inquiring about what was in stuffed derma and what was the difference between corned beef and pastrami, apologizing to the rest of us for making us wait, we returning the good humor by remarking that we were all old and retired and so had nothing else to do but kill time. I, on the other hand, was listening with my inner ear to the counterman, wondering whether he would say something condescending or dismissive to the old black man. Would he act as if the customer should have known what the different products were? Would he be annoyed that the oldster was holding up the line? No, he just described the cuisine in a chatty and goodhumored manner. I, however, was looking to hear something from fifty years ago, which would then have been seen as an expression of prejudice and would today be called an example of “microaggression”. That places me. I am still conscious of the feelings I had at the time of the Civil Rights Movement and so the lack of hostility by the counterman was a sign of how far we had all come even if I could not get over noticing how far we had come.
The same thing happened to me twenty years ago. I was watching television with my wife and observed that there were so many Black young women serving as models and spokespersons. My wife got annoyed and asked me “So what?”, which was a terse way of saying that we have all come so far that noticing that a model is Black or white is no longer necessary. We are past that. A model is just a model. That, she was saying, was the more enlightened view, while I was still harping on how things had been different back then. I would still insist, both today and twenty years ago, that if someone from the Fifties came to the present and was introduced to it through television, as occurs to so many aliens who learn first about life on Earth that way, what the visitor from the past would first find strange was not commercial advertisements for hospitals, or women anchorpersons, but how many Black people were in the mix, including those serving as anchorpersons and as leads in television dramas. That is the true success of the Civil Rights Movement, and so every Black model attests to another victory for our side. What people told me would never happen, if they had thought in terms of such concrete examples, has happened, and so I can say, “We told you so”.
There is another way in which I live in the past. I still have to remind myself that the Germans are now a model of a moral nation and have been so for some seventy years, whatever I think about their hard money policies. That is because I am a survivor of the Second World War for the simple reason that my mother got out of Poland in May of 1939 and that if she had remained she like the rest of her family would have been dead and so my daughter would not have existed. I was brought up in a family that was aware of how many family members it had lost and how fortunate those were who reached America. So the Second World War is not over for me and will never be over for me, nor for my son, who was raised in a family aware of its pedigree, and who says that the Second World War will not be over until he is dead. It will be a good thing when it is finally over for everybody alive.
While I was in Chicago, I also visited the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie and saw busloads of high school students being escorted through the museum which has suitably grim pictures and artifacts of what happened in Germany and under German direction during the reign of the Third Reich. For those children, the Holocaust was history rather than memory. (What is the word for a different kind of nostalgia, not one that refers to a fond feeling for past events which one has a vague memory of being lived through, but refers instead to a memory better cast aside? What is bad nostalgia?) It is good for these kids to learn about the atrocities in world history so that they can appreciate just how complicated human history is as well as to remind them to shun all the genocides that have taken place in the world since then. But a friend remarked that for them it is like learning about George Washington or Thomas Jefferson: people who are reinvigorated through historical study that allows them to be appreciated for more than their whigs and knickers and their associations with slavery, however much that was also part of their times.
The Civil War is unlike the Revolutionary War because its issues and divides are still with us. The South never accepted that it had lost and the white South is a coherent voting bloc that dominates the Senate and, at the moment, the Presidency. Issues of voting rights and white aggression against Blacks are alive in American institutions and in the public consciousness. That war will not be over anytime soon. Not even Reparations would heal the breech and I don’t know what will unless the South changes because young people there are no longer interested in the same tired issues which, however, never seem to go away and that not because Blacks are militant about them but because prejudice and discrimination do not disappear, however much progress we have made with Black models and, yes, even a Black President, whose shining example as a reasonable and articulate spokesman for all the right things does not seem to have outlasted his term, there being an amnesia about such a figure rather than a notalgia for such a figure.
The reason I and a friend visited the Holocaust Museum was not to see that exhibit. It was to see an exhibit about the life and times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which turned out for me to be very emotional. The exhibit was meant for young people, as was the rest of the museum. It had, towards its beginning, a placard showing all the things women couldn’t do in the Fifties. They couldn’t join police departments or the combat forces in the Army. They couldn’t get legal abortions. They couldn’t go to most Ivy League schools. I knew this because it wasn’t, as it was supposed to be, a shocking reminder of how different things had been back then; I wasn’t shocked because I had lived through those times where such restrictions were taken for granted. They had to become treated as social issues before they could be addressed as matters that could be changed. So this was an exhibit about my life and times, rather than something historical, something out of the past, even if it were a past to be recalled now as history. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is about my age, though she was in college a few years before I was, and so the girls I knew were her contemporaries and like her, I presume, in that they wanted to become what they wanted to become, and did not think of that as a Feminist thing to do, but just what they wanted to do. They knew there would be prejudice and discrimination. A girl I knew of was one of the few female members of her law school class and was subjected to interrogation by her criminal justice professor about the details of rape cases just so that she would be toughened up to deal with that when she went into practice. That could be considered discrimination or even prejudice because she was thought to be too soft, as a young woman, to deal with gory details. I thought of it as hazing rather than as harrassment, though I wasn’t sure it was fair to do that because most of the young men had been brought up so that they also might be a bit queasy about handling rape cases. But none of the girls seriously suffered as students because they met the requirements to get into law school easily and did very well at law school once they were there.
The exhibit turns Ginsburg’s into an exemplary life. She had a marriage where her husband was not jealous of her accomplishments and shared child care duties and was better at cooking than she was. I don’t think, however, that her family was all that extraordinary or heroic for having been an equal partnership. She is also praised for the landmark Supreme Court decisions in which she played a part either as an attorney for the plaintiff or, later, as a Justice. I, for one, never quite understood the nature of her jurisprudance in that I thought you could make as equally pursuasive a case that the special condition of women had to be disregarded so that they could be granted equality, as would be the case if you used the older argument that the special condition of women as, for example, the only sex that got pregnant, was a condition that allowed them special favoritism, just as was the case with labor laws that protected pregnant women from toxic work environments because they were the mothers of the next genertion. Legal argument has for many years now seemed to me purely rhetorical, enlisted in the service of its conclusions rather than the conclusions inferred from the analysis, and so I settle on a results oriented view of the Supreme Court: you get what the general ideologies of the members lead them to rather than more or less acute reasoning. So Ruth Bader Ginsburg was on the winning side not just because she was so smart and so incisive in her reasoning, and she was both, but because the culture was on her side and so she is a fit representative of the changing times, and it is sad that such a fiery spirit is getting old, but that happens to all of us.
So there are a number of ways to apply history in the present. I apply remembered history of the Civil Rights Movement to my perception of the present even though most people might or might not also do that. I apply learned history about the Civil War to my analysis of present day events just as students going to a Holocaust meuseum might. I apply my remembered experiences of the Woman’s Revolution to understand an exhibit about an icon of that movement which treats her as history. Each of these separate states of mind not only modifies history; they modify what we are as people, and no one can escape being in distant history, remembered history and memory coterminous with what is now history. We all live in these simultaneities, and so, in our minds, are always time travellers of one of these sorts or another. The point is that these are all objective categories because, obviously, we do not choose which periods of time we live through, but which ways of dealing with the experience of a time says a lot about a person’s consciousness even if it is not usually recognized that these are distinctive ways of being.