“Those Who Cannot Remember the Past . . . .”

Politicians — and reporters — love comparisons. Even more, they love parallels. Everything has a precedent, if you go back far enough, and history is filled with counter-intuitive accidents of fate that handily dissolve the “never” and “always” statements that are so common in politics. As soon as Eric Cantor proclaims that “Republicans are the party of tax cuts,” the left trots out their favorite inconvenient truth: Reagan raised taxes 11 times. Citing historical examples makes pundits look smart and perceptive: If you think that’s weird, let me tell you about the Taft-Roosevelt primary of 1912! When the AP sagely notes that Yemeni president Saleh’s decision to seek medical treatment in the U.S. “brought back memories from three decades ago, when President Jimmy Carter allowed the exiled shah of Iran into the U.S. for medical treatment,” you have to wonder who — other than a showboating AP reporter — is bringing the memories back. This sort of smugness is at its worst in what I call bait-and-switch openings — or maybe “false starts” would be a better term — to stories. The Gipper-the-tax-raiser meme seems to crop up most often, but almost any political event can inspire attempts to trick the reader into realizing that, gee, today isn’t so bizarre after all. But “history repeats itself” is a cliché for a reason, and reiterating the old chestnut adds little to the discussion. Perhaps the worst aspect of the technique, however, is that it’s just downright annoying. Consider these two ledes, from two media outlets — the paper of record and, uh, the runner-up paper of record — that should be above such tropes. The first, from the New York Times:

A Democratic president running in a bitterly disputed presidential race faces a fateful national security decision: whether to approve an airstrike to thwart an adversary bent on becoming a nuclear-weapons state.

Conservative hawks deride the president as weak. In the West Wing, advisers debate the risks: a strike could lead to open conflict, but doing nothing would change the balance of power in a volatile, war-prone region.

And the second, from the Washington Post:

The setting: An election-year State of the Union address before a hostile Congress. Since the last one, the world has changed fundamentally, a war with Iraq has ended, and the nation’s economy is fragile and worrying to a majority of Americans.

Both introductions strive to pull the wool over the reader’s eyes, but neither really succeeds. Given the vague descriptions (“an election-year State of the Union address”) and broad language (“a fateful national security decision”), it doesn’t take a genius to get wise to the deception. By the time the Post reporter fesses up to the fact he’s talking about George H.W. Bush and not Barack Obama, the reader has smelled a rat. Has anyone ever put down the morning paper — or pushed his desk chair back from the computer monitor — and exclaimed, “Well, I’d never thought of it that way before!” No wonder Newt Gingrich’s snarks about the media elite have gained such traction; the entire professorial set-up talks down to the reader and fairly drips with condescension.

“False start” openings tend to be lengthy, as the examples above demonstrate. Because readers tend to skip straight to the “reveal” once they realize a game is afoot, they’re also a waste of precious column-inches. Take this stem-winder from the Post:

The Supreme Court was ideologically split but trending decidedly conservative: It routinely struck down expansive government programs passed by state legislatures and an emboldened Democratic Congress.

The game-changing Democratic president was determined to reimagine the federal government and have it play a more active role in the lives of suffering Americans.

The program under the high court’s microscope was unprecedented in scope and revolutionary in concept, providing a national safety net that was argued to be far outside the constitutional boundary of the federal government’s powers.

We’re obviously meant to think of Obama’s health care reform, but if the reporter were writing about the Affordable Care Act, we’d get specifics. Instead of a “game-changing Democratic president,” the article would simply refer to President Obama. Instead of the vague “federal government,” the Post — given its ideological leanings — might mention the “out of control, metastasizing Medicare system which is bankrupting America and raising the federal deficit.” But we’re not talking about health care at all. What instructive parallel does the Post have in mind? Why, the Social Security Act of 1935, of course.

Bait-and-switch is not the exclusive province of old-school broadsheets, however. The Associated Press, with the down-home, colloquial style that must be drilled into new reporters at orientation, is a fan as well, though its examples are typically folksier and topped with what it assumes is a rhetorical flourish. In one case, it likens Mitt Romney to John Kerry, a comparison made by countless media outlets. Instead of simply pointing to the parallel, however, the AP dramatically sets the stage:

A beleaguered president seeks re-election. His challenger, a candidate with Massachusetts roots and a presidential demeanor straight out of central casting, has to fight through a primary contest fending off charges of flip-flopping. In the end, the challenger’s strength also proves his vulnerability.

Election 2012 is looking a lot like the presidential race of 2004.

History is rich with aspiring politicians who just couldn’t make the connection to average voters. Romney isn’t the first wealthy white guy to be tripped up by retail politics; in fact, the AP could have chosen from a pantheon of awkward forebears, from George H.W. Bush to Michael Dukakis. Political journalists have, if not minds like steel traps, at least sharp-as-steel Google skills. Hardly an article on the 2012 race is written without a mention of a similar candidate or situation. After Newt Gingrich trounced Romney in South Carolina, journalists even employed color-coded graphics to show that no nominee had lost the state since 1976. The comparisons themselves are not what I find objectionable; rather, it’s the patronizing, didactic attempt to communicate those comparisons through bait-and-switch introductions that annoys me. I should, I suppose, cut reporters some slack; they’re likely just trying to find an interesting opening for their one-millionth article about the Republican primary. But I’d still prefer a simple, direct contrast to an overused gimmick. Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor of the Times who also blogs as the “Loyal Opposition,” comes up with a compromise that grabs the reader’s attention while still acknowledging the constructed nature of the set-up:

Here’s a scene you may find familiar: Government experts carefully study a problem, and come to a conclusion based on scientific evidence. They get over-ruled by bureaucrats who seem more concerned about politics than science. This isn’t a historical anecdote from the Bush administration. I’m talking about the Obama administration.

I’ll admit, however, that in some cases the gauzy scene-setting of the bait-and-switch approach can actually be preferable to the alternative — which often takes the form of a laundry list of precedents. Journalists can sound too much like campaign researchers compiling an election-season playbook. Similarities are reeled off in a jumble of names that gives little insight into the validity of the comparison. Discussing primaries in which an Option B emerges to challenge the presumptive frontrunner, as Newt Gingrich has done to Mitt Romney, Times reporter John Harwood writes:

In 1996, Senator Bob Dole of Kansas confronted Senator Phil Gramm of Texas and former Gov. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. Eight years earlier, Vice President George Bush faced Mr. Dole and Representative Jack Kemp of New York. In 1980, former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California had to defeat the elder Mr. Bush.

All these names and dates may be meaningful to Romney’s campaign manager, who has probably spent hours immersed in the strategy of earlier Republican success stories, but an average newspaper reader won’t make the effort to recall the details of 1996’s Dole-Gramm-Alexander race. It’s better to find a middle ground, as the Post’s Dana Milbank ably demonstrates when he likens Romney to Al Gore:

To see Romney, in his Gap jeans, laughing awkwardly at his own jokes and making patently disingenuous claims, brings back all those bad memories of 2000: “Love Story.” Inventing the Internet. Earth tones. Three-button suits. The alpha male in cowboy boots. The iced-tea defense. The Buddhist temple. The sighing during the debate.

With more color than Harwood’s list, yet less generic blather than the AP’s implied comparison to John Kerry, Milbank’s example also has the benefit of not talking down to the reader. It’s less a bait-and-switch then a genuinely interesting comparison. The best examples of the genre, however, tend to pair this cliched structure with an equally cliched situation. This Times article milks the vagueness of the opening paragraph for all it’s worth; in fact, so many monogamy-challenged politicians fit the description that the reader doesn’t leap to a specific conclusion.

A public figure at the top of his game is suddenly tripped up by reports that he sexually harassed female employees. Whispers ensue, speculation abounds, details are unclear, his statements shift.

Here we go again.

Twenty years after Anita Hill testified against Clarence Thomas in televised Senate hearings on his nomination to the Supreme Court, sexual harassment in the workplace is again part of the national conversation, prompting outrage as well as dismissive eye-rolling.

By the third paragraph, readers have probably gathered that we’re talking about Herman Cain, but the initial “public figure” conjures memories of everyone from Bill Clinton to former HP CEO Mark Hurd. It’s slightly disturbing to realize how many men the article could be referring to. The topic of story generates the same reaction as the bait-and-switch technique:

Déjà vu all over again.

Making the Past Present

“Digital Maps Are Giving Scholars the Historical Lay of the Land” (NYT, 7/26/11)

“Spirits of the South Pole” (NYT Magazine, 7/21/11)

“A Whiff of History” (Boston Globe, 7/17/11)

Three recent articles delve into new ways of exploring history. None of them are exactly Mr. Peabody’s Way-Back Machine, but once the stacks of books have been written about battle tactics and 18th-century politics, I suppose researchers start looking everywhere for new material. Those dissertations won’t write themselves, you know.

As part of its occasional “Humanities 2.0” series, the Times explains how digital mapping software — think Google Earth and GPS devices — helps historians recreate the minutiae of the past. Want to know exactly what General Lee could see as he surveyed the battlefield at Gettsyburg? It’s cliche, but yes, there’s an app for that. The new field is called “spatial humanities,” and it leverages technology to provide a new look at historical events in much the same way that some scientists are applying pattern recognition software and computerized authorship verification to quantify literary criticism. Some of the supposedly revolutionary uses of technology seem like things that could have been done by less flashy methods fifty years ago; indeed, one wonders if there is anything unique about the research beyond its pretty graphs, and if the embrace of technology is anything other than jumping on the iEverything bandwagon. By mapping the spread of witchcraft charges across Massachusetts during the Salem Witch Trials, historian Benjamin Ray noticed that ““It looked like a kind of epidemic, almost a disease.” The article goes on to say that, “after adding church affiliation to the map, he saw there was also a correlation between church membership and the accusers, which reflected a rift in the village over support for the minister.” There is nothing new about such a conclusion, and Ray hardly had to employ snappy mapping software to reach it. Disagreements over the ministry of Reverend Parris have long been implicated in the outbreak of witch hysteria in Salem Village.

Of even less practical import is the research detailed in a Boston Globe article entitled “A Whiff of History.” Reporter Courtney Humphries marvels that, “despite [scent’s] primacy in our lives, our sense of smell is often overlooked when we record our history.” We look at museum dioramas of wagon trains and listen to scratchy recordings of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, “but our knowledge of the past is almost completely deodorized.” True, but our ignorance of the way history smelled hardly constitutes a gaping hole in our knowledge of the past. Science has allowed perfumers to capture previously-ephemeral scents, but do we need to recreate the precise aroma of Sinclair Lewis’ hog factory to know that lots of pigs produce a big stink? Historians are replicating old perfumes based on written descriptions, much as brewers are attempting to recreate the taste of the whiskey left at the pole by Sir Ernest Shackleton. At least the whiskey enthusiasts, described in a recent article in the NYT Sunday Magazine, are up front about their desire to turn a profit. Science may be a nice side effect, but it’s hardly the motivation behind the fact that, “for $160 or so, collectors in America will shortly be able to buy, nestled in a little crate made in China to look authentically Scottish, not a rarity, exactly, but a replica of one.” By contrast, the scientists interviewed for the Boston Globe article speak of the historical significance of recreating an ancient Egyptian perfume or the stench of a Viking village. It’s a relief when one researcher, who is working on the Viking project, points out that a smell, even one engineered to match an ancient aroma, is nothing without context. “The smell of a Viking latrine may disgust us,” Humphries writes, “but it doesn’t tell us how the Vikings experienced it.” Furthermore, she continues, smells carry different connotations in different groups of people:

[F]or instance, wintergreen became popular in chewing gum and toothpaste in the United States after World War II, but to the British, the smell would have evoked sickness, since it was used in ointments to treat the wounds of soldiers. If we don’t understand these meanings, we’re just smelling the past as we would now – not as people did at the time.

It’s a caveat worth remembering. Bringing technology into the humanities department can produce interesting results, but “interesting” is not the same as “meaningful.” The best history teacher I ever had — the one who introduced me to Mr. Peabody’s Way-Back Machine — was as computer-savvy as the average eighty-year-old. In class, we watched film strips, the kind that featured droning narration over a series of still pictures that advanced with a click-whirr sound of a projector straight out of the 1960s. There weren’t even dry-erase boards in the room; this was a man who preferred old-style chalk. And yet — without the aid of digital maps or Smell-o-Vision technology, that teacher could bring history to life because he understood that the past is not a foreign country: it is a slightly off-kilter version of today, a world that is nothing if not a dirty, confusing and ultimately fascinating story.