News Reporter: Act Four: How will we explain 2016 to future generations so they'll believe us?

Wednesday 28 September 2016

Act Four: How will we explain 2016 to future generations so they'll believe us?

Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics

Silhouettes of U.S. presidential nominees Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. (Photos by Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)

Every week, I answer a question from Monday’s Act Four chat in the Wednesday installment of this newsletter. To read the transcript of our Sept. 26 conversation, click here. And to submit a question for the Oct. 3 chat, click here. This week, a reader gives in to a bit of the 2016 doldrums to ask:

When future generations tell stories about this time, will it be remotely believable?

I think the answer is yes, because when future generations tell stories about 2016, they’ll probably talk about a version of history that has been buffed into plausibility, and they won’t be doing so in the midst of actually experiencing it, with all the nausea and cognitive dissonance that implies. And good luck to them! I keep having a hard time grappling with everything that’s happening in the presidential election and American culture and fitting it into some compelling overall theory, because things keep happening that make me feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach, whether it’s Prince’s death or Donald Trump’s threats to bring Gennifer Flowers to the first presidential debate.

Future generations will have theories, and they will know how this particular part of the American story ends, and they will have emotional distance. That, or they’ll be eking out a subsistence existence from the smoking ruins of the world we presently occupy.

I’m being simultaneously mordant or flip, so let’s look at it another way. One of the things I find refreshing about the musical “Hamilton” is what it does to our established history. With one exception — George Washington — “Hamilton” shakes the dust off our rather staid vision of the Founding Fathers, and restores them to all their temperamental, tom-catting, insult-wielding glory. Knowing that John Adams referred to Alexander Hamilton as “a bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar” doesn’t necessarily make me feel better about the prospect that Donald Trump might become president.

But it does remind me that we have a tendency to sand down our rougher historical edges into narratives that we can handle. This isn’t necessarily a good thing; Americans have certainly absorbed a lot of myths that make it harder for us to grapple with the truth. But it does suggest that our descendants will find some way to explain what happened to us this year. They won’t necessarily understand what it felt like, and thank goodness. They might sanitize it and make it less frightening, and maybe we’ll even feel less rattled in a year or two. But I do think they’ll believe us.