Column:

Leave predicting the future to TV psychics

By Charles Austin

Published March 11, 2008

As a species, we’ve become very aware of the way we catalogue ourselves. VH1 basically exists to prove that fact, as do award shows, pop culture critics and any event ever to be labeled the “first annual.” It’s easy to see the way we try to canonize pop culture the instant it happens, so that isn’t really worth talking about.

But this mentality carries over into all aspects of life. Politics completely seeks to write itself down in history books the instant anything we deem noteworthy happens, and outlets like CNN and FOX News Network are obsessed with classifying and giving immediate significance to everything in the same way that VH1 is. I honestly would not be surprised if CNN makes a habit of counting down the top 10 greatest hits in international news at the end of each year (now that I think about it, I’m scared that they might already be doing this).

But even to this extent, what I’m talking about doesn’t really matter. I think by this point most people, or most young people, take the 24-hour news networks with a grain of salt anyway. When CNN says something is significant, it’s pretty much understood that their opinion is no more significant than VH1’s opinion as to who are the greatest one hit wonders of the ‘80s. The Democratic primaries have been a hilarious testament to this fact, as basically every single race has been declared the final deciding grounds by every major news network. And they have been wrong every single time.

So, when news networks intentionally try to shape the way we view the world, it usually just ends up making them look stupid and disreputable, and that’s fine. But to take this one step further, President George Bush entirely buys into this same mentality. Every time he is asked about the war in Iraq, he tells us to just wait and see. He tells us that when all is said and done, history books will view the war as a success.

To his credit, there’s a chance he could be absolutely correct. I hate when Democrats act like there’s no way he could possibly be right and that the war is an objective failure. I mean, odds are he’s completely wrong and the war really is a massive failure, but all the speculation in the world won’t amount to anything when the Iraq war is finally far enough in the past to be historically examined.

The only problem with Bush’s rhetoric is that he uses it essentially as an excuse for unpopularity and a steadfast determination to never listen to what 70 percent of the country has to say.

Bush is willing to be hated in the present to be remembered fondly in the future. The same ideology that proclaimed “The Macarena” the greatest one hit wonder of all time is driving our foreign policy. The only difference is, Bush is declaring that the “Macarena” is not a hit now, but it will be in the future once we have ample hindsight.

The problem with this is that the way we view the present has hardly any impact on how the present will be viewed in the future. When something becomes “history,” it becomes part of a narrative that is incongruent with how events actually happened at the time. No matter how we view any event, it will be rewritten in the future to carry a significance that is meaningful to the world at that time. The simple fact of the matter is that, in history’s eyes, the present doesn’t define the future nearly as much as the future defines the present.