Blank Spaces of History

 

It's usually the case that some of the biographies publishing industry will write biographies of big political figures. None of them come bigger than presidential biographies.

When we look at the presidents of the USA, usually what happens is that we'll look at the first few presidents, and they are the really consequential ones. And we'll look at the presidents from the time that the US became a great world power, maybe from McKinley or Theodore Roosevelt onwards. And there's this big gap between Andrew Jackson and McKinley, where there weren't many presidents of note, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln.

So I was looking at Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan. These were the anti-bellum presidents. During this time, there was the North and the South growing apart from each other. There were a lot of tensions that led to the Civil War. Polk was the president who oversaw the Mexican War, I think, so he emerges with some credit. The rest of these guy were people who just oversaw slavery and expansion of the territory of the USA, and the building of the empire.

The US was a country which grew slowly. We're not accustomed to this. Singapore went from a third world country – not a backwater, cos it was never a backwater, but it was a third world country – to a first world one in less than 50 years. The US eventually became a great nation, but the transformation took more than a hundred years, and there was that greatest of all hurdles to be crossed, the Civil War.

But there was a lot of this blank space in between. Maybe I hadn't really researched that far into that, but there was a lot of blank space. And then, most of the history that I read about took place in the 20^th century. When the west was won, when the imperial expansion of the continental United States was over. Perhaps I hadn't paid close enough attention to the legends of the US: the Wild West outlaws, the Mexican war legends, the literary figures like Mark Twain. Maybe I was looking more at the periods when the modern government would exert a greater influence on peoples' lives.

IT was when the US started becoming an imperial power that its history became more notable. The conquest of Philippines, Hawaii, the south Pacific and Alaska. Then its involvement in the first World War, the rise of the FBI, the roaring twenties and the jazz age.

The thing about the US was that it seemed like a little corner of the world, all by itself. Even when the Americans took trips abroad to Europe – which was basically the only other part of the world they considered civilised, there was this air of bewilderment, where the old world had a kind of sophistication they could never understand. And yet there was this moral hectoring that you saw from the Americans, when Fitzgerald accused his fellow Americans of being “careless drivers”. In more modern language, we'd say that these people do not live with mindfulness. This was the land of the free, and some people would equate that with being the land of the careless. You simply did what you felt like doing, and you couldn't care less. Slavery, genocide was all part of this care less attitude. People could still get by, regardless, because there was always a way to distance themselves from everything else.

What is interesting, though, is that I think about the parallels between my life and the history of a nation. When we think about history, we are actually not that interested in the continuities. The people doing the business of getting through their everyday lives are not that interesting to us. What is truly significant is the times of turbulence, when things did change. We also have to look at the blank areas in between, when things stayed the way they were. Why were black people slaves for hundreds of years, generation after generation? It's not only about why things change, but also why they didn't change. The US of the 13 states is so different from the US of the 1960s. How did it morph from one shape to the other? Universities lasted for centuries. What stayed the same about the Ivy League universities and what changed?

Now I'm in my 40s, and this blog has been around for almost 20 years – I blogged a lot more in the first 5 years. What did I change about myself, and what did I do over and over again, without really knowing and understanding why?