Last week it was stiflingly hot; a result of which was the unprecedented difficulty I had writing my column. The little room where all my creative-y stuff is sequestered doesn’t get the air conditioning from the living room, so the temperature was about 94 degrees.
My computer kept shutting itself off because it is more intelligent than I am.
As it turned out, full sentences that I was absolutely certain I had included in the piece had not been added, and when reading the audio version I actually skipped three entire paragraphs.
It was pretty hot.
However, my main problem was the sidestepping of the actual subject I was trying to talk about. The column was about history…well, extreme summer heat, social media, classic videogames, and then history. It was inspired by a specific piece of news I found disturbing. Certainly that could be anything nowadays… toss a Junior Mint™ at a randomly open newspaper and you’ll absolutely hit something meriting concern.
Yet, in this forum, I end up writing around certain subjects, attempting to define them by the spaces I leave blank, as not to point fingers or push agendas or lay blame - goodness knows we have every possible flavor of that in the world already. This is necessary because I decided to write a light column in aggressively dark times, and need the “wiggle room” of this narrative structure to, well, keep things light.
That’s hard. It’s much easier to complain than to evenly assess / view with measured perspective / consider contextually. But I’d rather do anything than complain, so I try to make a point without necessarily pointing all that much.
Again, these literary tools and tropes are more effective when not attempting to type inside of a gigantic Easy-Bake™ Oven.
This week it is cooler. I’m a bit more focused. But I did not really complete last week’s thought. With your indulgence, I’d like to briefly try again at this subject, with a slightly more direct approach. Last week’s column is fine up to the very last section, where the following amendment should appear:
A couple of years ago, I wrote about visiting the Smithsonian African American History Museum in Washington, D.C.
https://substack.com/@lowerblackpain/p-137475327
The trip was a birthday present for my mother, who had always wanted to see it. I felt a little guilty for not even trying to suggest Mom might enjoy a Hawaiian beach holiday, as this was not a traditionally relaxing vacation choice.
The story the museum tells is intense and direct. The empathetic layout offered occasional benches, alcoves, eddys, and fainting rooms for folks to take a break if they needed it.
I needed it. A couple of times, actually. So much specific history in one place was humbling. I just bought a ticket and walked through a building where I happened to share the same skin tone as those celebrated there: I did not march at Selma, walk hundreds of miles north to anywhere or survive an ocean voyage on my back - my life and my accomplishments, including whatever social opposition I’ve survived, seemed to represent a pretty cheap seat in The Struggle for Equality.
Yet, after the experience we all felt strangely calm, sated with detail, context, and perspective.
That shift has stayed with me ever since. It’s the same sense as being lost, then seeing where you are on a map and feeling better even though you are technically in the exact same place. Detail, context, and perspective.
In early 2025, the contents of this museum were reviewed on a Federal level; a building with ten floors’ worth of displays focused on racial segregation, isolation, and societal oppression were to be re-examined with a directive to remove racial bias.
This order, to effectively remove all chocolate chips from the chocolate chip cookie, was met with resistance, yet due to circumstance had to be addressed, and we all heard tell in the news that some of the exhibits were to be dismantled and removed.
History can’t make us smarter if we can’t connect with it. Data and content do not always translate to fact, and the growing cornfield of distractions elevates the quest for any authenticity to an Indiana Jones™ adventure.
I’m not complaining. I’m not. I don’t expect the past to stay the same, as all must go the way of evolution or entropy - but museums are the one place where the past is allowed to settle… where time slows down enough that we can take a really good look at it.
Besides, the destruction of stories is not too successful historically. According to Wikipedia, the earliest book burning occurred in 600 B.C. when someone wrote a king a letter that he didn’t like. He burned it.
We know this because, after he did that, somebody wrote it down.
That is prime irony. In fact, every time we’ve heard about someone trying to destroy knowledge, wisdom, or information it’s because someone told the tale. You can’t stop the signal.
My very first and admittedly favorite example of this comes from Yul Brenner’s absolutely historically accurate film portrayal of Rameses II in “The Ten Commandments”, when he attempts to totally cancel his brother,
“Let the name of Moses be stricken from every book and tablet. Stricken from every pylon and obelisk of Egypt. Let the name of Moses be unheard and unspoken, erased from the memory of man, for all time!”
So successful. Think of how pleased he was to see all those Moses-less obelisks around town, thinking he’d really crushed that assignment.
Yeah, stories are much hardier than that.
It is troubling when anyone wishes to destroy history, because our combined experience, good and bad, forms the foundation and identity that all civilizations are built upon.
Every one of our NOWs is built on THENs. We have to take care of them thens, or our nows become… unstable. History is fluid, invisible, dangerous, and ubiquitous. It can be written, sung, sculpted, fried in batter, worn to a fancy party, and visited by tourists centuries after the lives of those who built it.
We are the living pages of the book of time, entrusted with the stewardship of the stories we are heir to and those we share, responsible not only for what’s going to happen, but caretaker of all that has come before, and more powerful than any pharaoh’s bellow of “So let it be written! So let it be done!”
Obelisks. Feh.
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