The past just used to be allowed to happen. Now I\’m not saying that it was reported accurately, for we all know that old adage about history going to the victors, but people weren\’t actively trying to create the past in the same way that we do nowadays. Something is an instant classic a day after release, we are constantly forced to take note of something that happened yesterday as if it were an historical event. This happens on all levels of our existence and I understand that it is a marketing strategy but it is affecting the way in which we speak about and treat our own lives. We do not go out into the world on a daily basis and just let things flow around us as they are often supposed to do — instead we are looking for some way to capture every bit of minutiae for posterity when perhaps some things do not deserve the honour.
History goes to the marketers, the sloganeers — the ones who have a big enough bank balance to purchase it. And they will sell it off to Joe Public in expensive piecemeal packages. For the past is now something that we often experience vicariously, thanks to the notion that some pasts are somehow more valid than others — that if you weren\’t there at a certain event you need to own everything to do with it and then you can pretend like you were there. For nowadays we don\’t just learn about history, we have to locate ourselves within it — there must be some way to shoehorn yourself into the picture. All the real classics will slowly lose value as that whole notion loses cache. Does this mean though that the future will be full of bright hiny objects? No, of course it doesn\’t — the future will be choke with bric-a-brac that was old before its time. We do not invest something with meaning by exagerrating its worth before it has had time to accrue any — we actually stunt its growth — it becomes like the living dead, sleepwalking through the rest of time with its fakely applied merit badges for all to see.
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