Repeating the Arc of History

A new commentary every Wednesday - June 10, 2015

REPEATING THE ARC OF HISTORY

I am aware that a new disaster is about to bloom on multiplex screens all across America and soon the rest of the world. Actually, it really is about the monumental efforts of the special effects people in Hollywood to portray the sloughing off of California following the expected great abrasion of the tectonic plates along the San Andreas fault. It is meant to top all prior disaster films.

This is positively "IT," people! Unless maybe someone later describes how it could be possible to bore a hole into the molten core of our planet. I confess that I have not conquered a deep seated fear of molten lava. It's the reason for my refusing to spend more than few minutes changing planes in Hawaii.

After suffering though innumerable films about giant geckos, volcanic eruptions, monumental tidal waves, plagues of all sorts, hordes of reconstituted dinosaurs, a few giant meteorites set on a path bound to impact Cleveland, Ohio, not to mention the setting off of myriad atomic weapons and producing enough radiation to destroy all life on this planet, I'm bored with disaster films.

Some of this may be due to the fact that I was a motion picture projectionist for seven years. This goes back to before Charlton "Exodus" Heston as Ben-Hur, expert chariot racer.

It all began with a book by H.G. Wells: "War of the Worlds," the inspiration for a radio play by genius Orson Welles that caused panic across America one night in 1938.

Do we exhibit a tendency toward masochism or is the course of history of humankind so terrible that we wish to escape reality for one hundred and twenty minutes?

Early in my adulthood, I struggled and skimmed through the six volumes of "The History of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire," by English historian Edward Gibbon. I was astonished to learn that he had begun this work in 1776, incidental to the beginning of our revolution. It is so dense, that I remember very little of it, except maybe the Goths preceded the Visigoths in sacking Rome. I also remember dimly by reading later accounts, that for centuries thereafter, fights would break out in the halls of great seats of learning from time to time about whether Gibbons should have included the Diaspora of the Jews after the Babylonian captivity or the advent of Christianity.

Whether he did or not, one great truth emerged from this work of a lifetime: The dissolution of the Roman Empire was due to the lack of civic virtue among its citizens—an unwillingness to defend their empire against the barbarians. They preferred to attend the circus.

You have undoubtedly read something written by Spanish philosopher George Santayana and often repeated in various mutations since: "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Take from this what you will.

-Phil Richardson, Observer of the human condition and storyteller.

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