But having said that — well, didn’t you, at some point during the past week or two, if not several times over the past year, yearn inwardly to retreat into some mythological past, where leaders’ actions arose from noble impulses and wars were tidy little things with clear objectives and known outcomes? Of course you did. Everyone did. Some of our leaders, oddly enough, are convinced that radical changes in public policy might actually effect such a retreat. But the one thing we all learn when we grow up is that history isn’t childhood, and that the past wasn’t really any more innocent than the present, and that hardly anybody even remembers the show Time Tunnel, whose premise was that it was in fact possible to just hurtle backwards into bygone eras. So you can’t go back to that place that really never was. As close as you can come to something like what you’re looking for is Music from the United Nations. |