Compartmentalizing History

I was thinking yesterday about how we think about history, or not so much history but how we separate certain parts of happenings. In many ways it can't be done. Hemingway wrote about World War I so much it is hard to forget that he was there, but it is easy to forget that The Great Gatsby came out in 1925, a year that Babe Ruth "struggled" appearing in only 98 games and hitting .290/.393/.543. We don't think of Babe Ruth having played baseball at the same time as the great modernist were penning what can be thought of as the height of American literature.

I started thinking about this because I saw a note on how Babe Ruth hit his first career homerun in 1914, and when I see the year 1914 my first thought is World War I. June 28th of 1914 was when Aschduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. It was the beginning of a war that would be come to known as The War to end all Wars even though some of its aftermath would directly lead to several other wars including World War II. We don't think of this world as being as connected as it is. The same paper that mentioned the assassination of the Archduke had a box score that mentioned that days happenings from the National League, the American League, and the Federal League.



We learn history this way, or maybe that isn't exactly right. We don't consider Babe Ruth to be history, and we don't consider literature to be history. They are things that happened simultaneously and separately from history. As I said before it is hard to separate some literature from history because it mentions history, but most literature that mentions history happens after the fact. It almost has to. It is difficult to write about something that hasn't happened yet. The recording of history as history happened seems like a very 1970s America thing.

That is part of what I think is wrong with the spirit of this age. Everyone wants to be angry but there isn't that much to be angry about. Think about all the comparisons that were made between the Iraq war and the Vietnam war when the former first started. That comparison is laughable. It approaches satire to compare the two, and that is what I think the spirit of this decade has realized. Life has become about hipster irony. Embrace the crap of the world ironically because the world will always produce crap and the newer more modern crap is actually fucking sunshine and roses compared to older crap and anger at it approaches the contrived.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't be angry about what is happening in the world. If we don't like something we should be angry about it, but don't compare it to much bigger events from the past. The Vietnam war defined an age the Iraq war is something that happened. They are not the close to the same, but that comparison is ten years old, and the new spirit is to approach everything with irony. To embrace Starbucks and Pabst Blue Ribbon.

As I Lay Dying was published in 1930. Babe Ruth hit .359/.493/.732. He was 35 years old. Maybe the reason I never realized that the greatest American baseball player was playing at the same time as the modernist movement was happening in American literature is because I never thought about it before. Or the years were just numbers. Babe Ruth played in the same world that TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote. We never think of it that way. We learn the history of wars, politics, sports, literature, art, music, but only connect them when they connect themselves. Or this all could just be me and just because I never thought of Steinbeck and Glenn Miller existing in the same world doesn't mean others didn't.

The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939. Babe Ruth was four years retired and already in the Hall of Fame. It was also the same year The Ink Spots released "If I Didn't Care." Someone somewhere sat down and read The Grapes of Wrath while listening to The Ink Spots over the radio to be interrupted by a news report about Hitler invading Poland. I was taught history, I was taught literature, and I learned pop culture on my own. I never thought of them as connected, but the people that lived that era could escape it as much as we can Miley Cyrus and Syria.