The Great Delay

Oh, history:

You are cruel to the defeated, overly kind to the powerful, and dismissive of the everymyn.

You are laudatory of the fortunately-timed, worshipful of false idols, exculpatory of the gloriously flawed, and encouraging of secret theatre.

You are overly nostalgic, keenly vulnerable to bias, and prone to scapegoating.

For every Richard Nixon there is a (Nixon-era) Dick Cheney; for every Pol Pot there is a Harry Truman; for every Milli Vanilli, there is a Led Zeppelin. For every Oliver North, there is a Ronald Reagan. For every Aaron Burr, there is an Andrew Jackson.

For every story you tell there is a cause and an effect. Every beginning is a middle is an end. Every fractal loop is deceptively familiar, lulling the preoccupied into complacence with delusions of repetition.

So what are you going to make of this time in which we now live?

Will you cast George W. Bush as the main villain, and ignore Bush-era Dick Cheney? Or will Karl Rove be granted an exception to Godwin's Law and recognized as the rightful heir to the Goebbelian mantra of social control, a laundry list of crimes detailed in leiu of the full picture, covering ye olde asses of the avaricious PNAC?

Will Al Gore's political death and rebirth be canonized as the silencing of prophetic foresight? Or will he go down, in the final calculation, as that guy who accidentally claimed to have invented the Internet and was super serial about ManBearPig?

Will you blame us, the American people, first? For prolonging this Great Delay in the face of catastrophic pressures? For egoism that prevents us from acknowledging mistakes and thus condemns us to repeat them? For stupid brutal pride, for a lack of determination to uphold things we can regard with moral certainty but are Family Guyed and Facebooked into waiving away?

Oh, history... you frontin' ass mofucka.