History in the making

For the time being, the big American show at centre ring will capture all our attention. That's because there has scarcely been anything like it in history, and we intend to watch unblinkingly

More than a few readers have complained this paper is too steeped in doom and gloom. We've been told too much of what we present concerns politics, which is too specifically focused on American politics in particular, and which has become too narrowly obsessive about the war in Iraq.

Too which our reply can only be, "How can it be any other way?" The war as it is progressing in Iraq holds such terrible and ominous consequences that nothing in life anywhere on the planet can remain untouched by it.

This paper seems fated to chronicle these consequences. It was launched in November 2000, inadvertently right in the midst of the electoral catastrophe that eventually ended with a stacked panel of partisan judges at the US Supreme Court illegally intervening in, and halting, a ballot recount, thereby effectively appointing George W Bush President of the US.

Politics since then has never achieved enough altitude to go downhill. Less than a year later came September 11, but more ominously came Bush's coming-of-age speech September 23, when he uttered the words that await him at a table where he and his cabal shall yet dine: "You are either with us or you are with the terrorists."

Like the nursery rhyme goes, first comes fraud, then comes war, then comes Bushie in a baby carriage. The power of America in the world, not just military power, but cultural, moral, economic and diplomatic, was at a zenith sometime during the previous Clinton administration-a moment that can only have been noticed in hindsight, from this present, much denuded, point of view.

Now, in every respect, American power is in decline. The turbulence this mammoth decline will create will throw every aspect of our lives through whirling vortexes.

It is astonishingly bad luck that this turn should occur during the presidency of a weak, uninterested, and wholly incapable man. It is a recipe for a more rapid, irretrievable, and deeper collapse than might have been the case had someone stronger, more involved, and more able been at the helm.

Because the decline will therefore be so fast, so certain, and so deep, the effects, like a rock not tossed into a pond but fired from a howitzer directly into it from above, will be all that much more splashy, and rough.

Consequently, there is no local news even of the most banal kind that can be reported and discussed, we think, without direct and immediate reference to the reality the world is thrown wholly into by the momentous American decline. There can be no film, novel, or artwork that can be sensibly assessed without hanging it on the backdrop of the unfolding catastrophe overtaking us. And there can certainly be no mention of politics from the local to the international without accommodation of the singular overwhelming fact of the passing of an old world and the emergence of a new, occasioned by the fall of the Great American Empire.

We do not intend to sound melodramatic. But how can one be melodramatic when living at the moment of one of history's most pendulous moments?

We wish journals of the past had been more melodramatic when they chronicled their times in the intellectual life of their society during periods of historically tremendous turns.

Read the papers in the public library archives during the 33 days between the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, and the declaration of war by Germany on Russia on the following August 1. There is no sense at all that any change is underway. Yet in hindsight we know everything changed.

Not true, actually. You can find occasional columnists here and there in that period who wondered whether something big was set in motion by that minor political assassination in out-of-the-way Sarajevo. But these columnists were no doubt gloomy types. 1914 was a fabulous year by all accounts-right up until it stopped being so. Even through the fall of 1914, after France, Britain, Japan, and Prussia had joined Germany and Russia in war, there was still a strong sense that nothing overly big was really going on. Only when Turkey, Italy, Romania, Greece, and finally America joined in and engaged in battle (46 months into a 51 month war), did it occur to anyone to call it The Great War.

It's so typical for people whose job it is to notice what is going on, to in fact not notice what is going on, that there is a popular truism for it: fish are the last to learn about water. Through all the first drafts of history that newspapers are said to be, we yearn to see someone, anyone, actually show an awareness of the history they were inadvertently, and poorly, drafting. That's disappointing for those times of calm. It is wrenching for those times of tumult.

If we were to construct a time machine, everyone keeps pointing to important moments of transition in history they'd like to go visit first: Christ brought to Pilate, the coronation of Charlemagne, the fall of Constantinople, and so on. But what would we find?

Not much, probably. Who could have known at the time a very obscure Jewish zealot's treatment at the hands of a minor provincial authority would come to form the genetic code for a world-dominating religion, or that a warrior-king would, in a series of uncertain battles, found modern civilization?

Had you known the import of these events at the time they were happening, because you time-traveled back to those moments, what sort of reception would your excitement elicit among the people then? Right as you would be, not many people would buy into your excitement.

And that would be too bad for them, because being alive at a moment of great change, and also being aware that a great change is underway, would surely rank at the top of greatest human experiences possible. And since we can't have a time machine, it's only possible to get that experience by noticing the momentousness of the moment the first time it comes around. And that's only possible if one comes around during your lifetime.

This moment in these days today is surely one of the great moments of transition. It is certainly not one of the high points of history, but it is a profound low point. Nonetheless, regardless of its quality, it is one of those moments that those in the future-meaning those who will know it was a great moment-would love to come visit.

They won't be able to, of course, but they will turn to the newspapers of the day to try to learn something about what it was like to be here, now, exactly where we are.

Almost all the newspapers they will find will disappoint them, as those in the month of July 1914 disappointed me. It will look to them as though no one today was the least bit aware anything momentous was afoot, and so they won't learn anything about what it was like to be witness to history in the making.

Not all newspapers, though. If they find a Republic in that future, presuming there is a future, they will find one group of writers attempting to notice that a great momentous time is unfolding before our eyes, and attempting to convey something of what it was like to be here, now, alive and cognizant through this very interesting historical transition.

We are not all doom and gloom. If we are right, and there is unfolding in these very days a great deal of history in the making, we intend to be chroniclers of that history. It's not our fault that the history being made today is grim. It is our obligation, on the other hand, to capture exactly the flavour and temperature of that grimness.

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