Historical Rhymes

From Vesperisms Season 3, Episode 3, June 2022

Greetings and Salutations, and welcome to Vesperisms: The Art of Thinking for Yourself. I’m here to help you recalibrate toward an artistic worldview. So grab your coffee, and have a seat in my studio, and let’s have a chat.

This is Season 3, Episode 3, Understanding Historical Rhymes.

---

It’s been a wild couple of years. You’ve heard me say that each of us, whether or not we are artists, has our particular “sense-making apparatus”. And that has been seriously messed with. Every time I watch the news or scroll through my Instagram, I see people making comparisons to other periods in history. We have a kind of instinct that this or that has happened before, and that if we can just wrap our arms around this particular iteration of it, we can avoid the mistakes of the past and reverse course.

In the last few years alone, it’s been like one whiplash-inducing accident after another: four years of panic over whether or not we were being governed by an authoritarian, with plenteous invocations of various dictators and evil political movements. Then we had a global medical event that essentially put the world under martial law, with a dizzying back-and-forth over treatments, allegations of unfathomable corruption, and the undeniable opportunism of the political machine.

 We witnessed peaceful working class uprisings all over the world put down by rubber bullets and tear gas and citizens beaten by police and trampled by horses in their streets. We witnessed leaders of Western democracies freezing the bank accounts of their citizens because of their views, whether political or medical. We’ve seen inflation and supply chain issues so bad that “prepping” has left the domain of conspiracy nuts and become a mainstream topic of conversation. We see Cold War actors storming the borders of surrounding nations and speaking openly of nuclear war. And we see the psychological break of young men coming to fruition in a seeming chain of man shootings.

From talk of two-tiered societies and concentration camps and the confusion over what these terms even mean, to daily reports of explosive racism and antisemitism and what women are and what rights they may or may not be entitled to, not to mention the fact that we have freaking supreme court justices in hiding in anticipation of assassination—doesn’t it feel like we’ve taken an enormous step backwards into a past we thought had been overcome? Do you find yourself asking, how, with all that we know, are we repeating this? It’s like every day brings with it a string of catastrophic events, and try as we might to avoid getting sucked in, it’s very difficult to escape.

But what if it’s not escape that we’re looking for?