Rather than continue the old story, which is of Joe Biden as the good, calm sheriff who gives his citizens entitlement benefits and offers high mindedness to counter the ditsy, libelous and mean spirited counter-force of his Republican opponents, even if having turned the tables so that those who want to sunset social security are now saying they have no such intentions to do so, Biden accomplishing a rhetorical fait accompli, and even though the MSNBC crowd are saying that every day we are inching forward to one or another indictments of Trump, but justice so long delayed is denied in the sense that Trump may well be passing from the scene and so punishing him is past the point excerpt as a precedent for other miscreants who might attain the Oval Office, the American populace has been exposed to a new story to chew on, which are the weather and other instrumented balloons that have appeared over North America to be shot down by North American military aircraft.
New stories lend themselves to be compared to old stories so as to show they are both the same and different. The new shootdows over Alaska, the Yukon and Lake Huron were done by NORAD, which is the North American Air Defense which was created so that American and Canadian radar and aircraft could counter Soviet planes and then missiles headed over the North Pole and out to destroy mostly American targets, whether cities or what were called “counterforce” targets, which were our own military airports and missile silos, depending on what was the military doctrine that prevailed in the Kremlin. Condi Rice in graduate school had to master the throw weights of both American and Soviet missiles even though when she became Secretary of State and before that National Security Advisor she had to deal with a different story which was an enemy using hijacked planes to attack American military and civilian targets, she insisting that no one had ever contemplated that scenario, which was clearly untrue and, anyway, military planners are obligated to consider alternative scenarios. In fact, Hollywood screenwriters were hired after 9/11 to figure out some loopy story, implausible but possible, as to what Al Qaeda might be dreaming up. It turned out that the terrorists didn’t have much more in their playbook even though the at the time publisher of the New YorkTimes stayed on the job because there would be any number of attacks on “the homeland”, as it was now taken to be called. Anyway, the terrorist scenario was redirected by the George Bush administration to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that had its own developments and sequels, including a deep distrust of what the American government claims is the case, some trust restored by Biden as a straight shooter.
Stories in prior history, that of the Cold War, which are somewhat similar to present events, the takedowns over North America, may focus the attention and lead to the suspicion that the precedent events will be able to be sustained for a contemporary story, but that may not be the case. The Chinese balloon and those three unknown objects were slow rather than fast and not yet announced as having explosives and only the Chinese balloon was guided. It may turn out that these later three wandering American weather objects and so nothing to worry about and now never to be recovered even if NORAD did shoot them down perhaps out of an abundance of caution, It was an incident rather than a story however much Republicans are out to see that Biden was somehow at fault, whether to have moved too slowly on the Chinese balloon or too hasty with the others, when what seems to be clear is that the Pentagon was learning what was going on, but that is a story not readily told in such a divisive political atmosphere. People should say nothing if they have nothing to say, but that is a different story, that of Republican irresponsibility, and one I have been telling for a while now.
In fact, it is not all that easy to construct stories because a story requires a development, which means how situations change because of external events, as when a train accident makes the heroine in Wilkie Collins’ “No Name” is without financial rights, and so in some sense without a name, or because there is an unfolding of the dynamics of a story, such as what people do with a large inheritance once that happens in Dickens’ “Our Mutual Friend” , the developments more a matter of good character rather than circumstance. Stories can insist on staying as incidents, which are matters of current events which are repeated rather than developed. Two recent examples of incidents were the killing of Tre Nichols and the mass shooting at Michigan State University. These incidents, the killing of Black citizens by outraged policemen for reasons unclear but generally attributed to racism, and the killing of usually single young men with long guns because of grievances against race or religion or nothing in particular, occur again and again and there are claims that something should be done about it, only there being images of fire trucks and police vehjjicles and other people rushing away from the shooting, and then mourning and burial, each incident not much of a story because there is little in the way of motivation or the intricacies whereby weapons were obtained or how the planning was carried out and then accomplished-- only the painful results. Spiro Agnew said that once you have seen one slum you have seen them all, which was a callous observation but true enough and applicable to other incidents or facts of social life because they do not change but are only repeated, the furniture of social life rather than the drama of it.
Not that there aren’t enough stories in current events to keep the public amused and enlightened. There is the story of Joe Biden, something of a fable about a man so long delayed in his quest for President, even passed over when he was Vice-President, that when he did take over he would have thought to be a caretaker government, just trying to rectify some of the ravages rendered by Trump, but instead offered a legislative agenda for expanding entitlements as comprehensive as anyone since the New Deal and managing to accomplish good parts of it despite closely divided Congressional government. The moral is that straightforward honest Joe, always taking the high road, prevails after all. And there is the opposite moral, which is that Hillary Clintgon, also a straight arrow, was defeated because she stood by her man, and was too assertive or because, as she bitterly said, many of her opponents were deplorable and irredeemable, which was true enough and they are now House Committee chairpeople.
Every new Presidential candidate has his or her own story and we will see how those unfold for Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo and how they alter themselves as external events unfold but the columnists at the New York Times, who I respect, aren’t saying why they distrust Harris as President and Rick Lowry, the Conservative pundit, is only saying of Nikki Haley is that she is a flipflopper, which is hardly new. Commentators should tell what they know because we, the public, otherwise get much abbreviated stories about these people.
Here is a story that has legs, all the way back to the introduction of slaves into Jamestown in 1619 and most of that time, at least since Lincoln, who considered repatriating ex-slaves to Africa, about a story conflicting with another story about how to normalize African Americans by making them part of America, assimilated into the American mainstream by most ethnic immigrants, or set apart because of being brought in chains from more primitive societies than to be found in Europe, and also subject to Jim Crow, and so requiring reparations because of their history when Asians don’t get that and Jews got them from Germany. Nor is this long story about a story hidden in academic books and discourses. The conflicted stories appear regularly in the nightly news and are a topic for people considering running for President. Ron DeSantis anh Sarah Huckabee Sanders oppose “woke” history, which means that children should not be denigrated because their ancestors were white and that anything beyond the Civil Rights Movement should not be considered history but is advocacy, such as reparations or intersectionality, even if what does seem to bother anti-woke people is that they might have to be partly responsible and therefore ashamed of their pasts, which is true enough of most all peoples, most of them having baggage, and the anti woke people normalizing African Americans by making current irritants just go away, just as some Japanese have done with the ravages in their war with China in the Thirties.
For their part, rhe woke population is feeling a bit of triumphalism, so successful have been middle and upper class Blacks and so Black advocates crowing about their achievements even to a fault of exaggeration that results in African American history made as extraordinary rather than the normal social evolution of ethnic groups once they became asn ethnic group rather than a caste. It isn’t just the 1619 Project or CRT that properties that slavery was the pivotal thing about American history. The placards at the Museum of African American History and Culture sited on the Washington Mall proclaims that the surplus wealth of the slaves in the South created the steel industries if the midwest, this Marxist interpretation of history to be countered by the ingenuity of Andrew Carnegie and the homegrown and English sources of American wealth. Just because Black history is important history doesn't mean it is the only history worth telling, however much somer documents want to puff their readers up, Why have an ASP history on only African American history when that would likely replace for them an AP American history? Students go to school to learn what is not part of their own experience, or at least I thought so, when normalization was the theme, but maybe some African American students are thought so intellectually impoverished that they need a separated curriculum for themselve
Here is an older history or story of America that nevertheless seems sound, The United States was founded upon regionalism and remains so to this day. Here are some of its strands. There are the northeastern entrepreneurs, from Boston through Philadelphia. There are the southern plantation owners and slave traders, the South largely where slaves and ex slaves lived until after the First World War. There was the era of the Revolution and the Constitution where a bevy of geniuses created a new social compact based on human rights even if having to compromise with slavery so as to create a union, expecting slavery to disintegrate from its own weight but which instead required a great civil war. And then there was the western expansion, overwhelmingly white, into the Great Plains and the mountain states, still significantly underpopulated, and then, also in the second half of the Nineteenth Century, the immigration of fifty orf sixty million Europeans to America, doubling the population and filling the cities and overwhelmingly white, and then the introduction of the Black experience into politics as more than a nuisance after the Second World war when white leaders like Trman and Warren decided that Jim Crow could no longer abide.
This makes America a complex story of many intertwining stands rather than a simple story of virtue slowly and surely overcoming vice, and that is what history is supposed to do with students, make it more complex (and humbling) than most stories and so beyond either good nor evil to being what it is. That does not suit those who are both woke and anti-woke, but so be it.