Casual
Caldwell, Christopher
Casual DON'T STOP THINKING ABOUT YESTERDAY There is a New Year's story (it may even be true) about Merriman Smith, one of the great White House correspondents of mid-century. As a young reporter...
...Probably, in our narrow-minded way, we look at the stuff we've experienced as "alive" and the stuff that went on before we arrived as "dead...
...They were told it was untrue...
...As a young reporter freshly arrived from Georgia in the 1930s, Smith was told to man the Washington desk on New Year's Day, while his more senior colleagues nursed their hangovers...
...The pessimistic way is to say that time is proceeding at breakneck speed...
...Bill Clinton's election (1992), for instance, is closer to the 1970s than it is to the present...
...How modern is modernism in the first place...
...And Jimmy Carter's Inauguration Day (1977) is as close to Harry Truman's (1949) as it is to the one George Bush will enjoy at the end of this month...
...It is always hard to be sure if you're doing something no one else does, but I'm confident that few people indulge in my own New Year's pastime...
...More binds us to history than we think...
...His editors asked him who his sources were...
...Roosevelt passed the day at the White House, where they ushered in the New Year with black-eyed peas and ham hocks...
...Why does this game work...
...That's the optimistic way of looking at it...
...Sources...
...So Smith drafted a story that began: "The President and Mrs...
...We have a keen sense of sequence about what we've seen, while what we haven't seen is jumbled into the bin of "the past...
...You take an event that seems recent, figure out the number of years since it happened, and then count back from there...
...His editors had told him to do some kind of New Year's roundup that would allude to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt's decision to spend the holiday at the White House...
...Wars of royal succession, for instance, seem like the stuff of fable, vaguely medieval, while Marxism seems like a "modern" phenomenon, even if it has seen better days...
...Or maybe it's that all music gets old fast...
...Dalloway (1925) is as close to the publication of Wordsworth's Prelude (1850) as it is to anything now on the New York Times fiction bestseller list...
...CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL...
...was his incredulous reply...
...Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948) is closer to the last scribblings of Whitman and Tennyson (d...
...Virginia Woolf's Mrs...
...A lot of stuff by the Beatles ("I Want to Hold Your Hand," 1963) and Bob Dylan ("Blowin' in the Wind," 1963) is closer to "Yes, We Have No Bananas," which came out the year Warren Harding died (1923), than it is to Madonna's next hit...
...Music from the 1960s dates particularly badly...
...Almost inevitably, you find that recent things happened longer ago than you think...
...Even some of the novelists who are in full vigor today published their first books an awful long time ago...
...Eisenhower's arrival in Washington is closer to Queen Victoria's reign than it is to us...
...Everybody has black-eyed peas and ham hocks on New Year's Day...
...FDR's arrival in Washington (1933) is as close to Abe Lincoln's (1861) as to Barack Obama's (2005...
...Look at Woodstock (1969), now 36 years past and as close to the Hoover administration (1929-33) as to the present—but is still discussed as a credential of youthfulness rather than decrepitude...
...can drive certain people into an inexplicable and unsportsmanlike rage...
...Maybe that is why certain classes of people hate this game, and why even a kindly meant sally—like, "Mom, did you know that your coming-out party is now closer to the Battle of Sedan than it is to the present...
...Maybe because people want to believe they're younger than they actually are...
...When stories began appearing that the president had not had black-eyed peas, Smith was in the hot seat...
...Reporters frantically called the White House to confirm the story...
...1892) than it is to any poem that will be published this year...
...This level of detail caused a panic of why-we-no-have among other wire services...
...The Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the UK" (1976) belongs more to the era of "I'm Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover" (1948) than it does to ours...
...It is a mental game you can play to bring the past ever closer...
...And yet, three years from now, the Communist Manifesto (1848) will be no closer in time to us than it is to the Glorious Revolution (1688...
Vol. 10 • January 2005 • No. 17
