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8.23.04 Cycles of History

I'm not a good student of history but as I get older I'm more fascinated by how it cycles and recycles itself. Last Friday I wrote about World War I, which ended the Belle Epoque. From 8.23.04 The New Yorker article by Adam Gopnik:

The new histories suggest that the war was welcomed in 1914, and particularly by the literate classes, as a necessary act of hygiene, a chance to restore seriousness of purpose after the two trivial decades of the Edwardian Belle Epoque. The bourgeois atomization of society -- with its pursuit of private pleasures at the expense of common cause, its celebration of goods at the expense of honor -- would be repaired by a unifying new national purpose.

In yesterday's NY Times, Dahlia Lithwick also picks up on historical cycles. She looks back to the mid-twenties, when people felt "an old-time need for a burning bush. Horrified by the moral and cultural declines of the Jazz Age, they turned away from internationalism and intellectualism." It was the era of the Scopes monkey trial.

She thinks we have reached that point again. She says that "with ever-increasing shrillness, we hear from elected or appointed officials that it's religious persecution to ask them to suspend sectarian prayer or practices on the bench, in the legislature or at the schoolhouse gate."

Is there something about our species that gets plum worn out by good times? The Belle Epoque, the Roaring Twenties, the Clinton Nineties -- do prosperous times sit heavy with us like too much Halloween candy? Are New Year's resolutions hardwired into us? We spend November and December every year indulging ourselves. Every January it's burning bush season -- the militant among us actually do keep those resolutions and punish themselves back into shape in order to don a bathing suit during spring break.

Too much prosperity, worshipping at the feet of too many idols, and we must get out the hair shirts, start a righteous war, and face winter at the health club so that we can do it all over again next year.

Wasn't it around 1998 when we were forced to listen to 24-hour Monicasts while Osama bin Laden gathered his dark forces? That's about 6 years of punishment by the righteous. We've hit bottom, haven't we? Teresa Heinz Kerry seems like just the firebrand we need to start the pendulum back in the other direction.

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