Déja-vu: Redux

A couple of people have asked me what I was talking about in the previous post when I referred to the past couple of years feeling like déja-vu. The answer deserves a much fuller post than I can provide right now, and I might try to get to it this evening when I return to Brussels, but in short I was just referring to the historical retread of the past couple of years. For example: the renewed interest in terrorism (a la late-70s and early 80s); another Bush in the Oval Office; another Gulf War on its way (with many of the same faces in the fray -- most notably, of course, Cheney and Powell; less notably, but no less important, Joint Chiefs like Adm. Vern Clark and Gen. James Jones); two Ford administration retreads in charge of our economy; another recession, another drought in Ethiopia, and, yes, another space shuttle explosion.

Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno argued, from different perspectives, as has Jean Baudrillard after them, that our modern culture of "mechanical" reproduction, i.e., repetition, (simulacra, says the latterr) has a desensitizing effect on us as consumers of such images and products. Now, we might be able to take on Benjamin's optimism that this repetition frees us from the tyranny of one interpretation; but, all the same, this does not absolve us from considering the potential effects of this kind of socio-political repetition, particularly upon our interpretations and, thus, our reactions. The inescapable truth, it seems, is that the future we're trying to mold now is always the product of how we deal with what has happened in the past. Or, to say it another way, the repetition that keeps us looking to the past as well as the future folds the three tenses of time into the moment of a (repeated) decision. I'll think about this more on the train.