Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit

Author:Rebecca Solnit
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Current Affairs, Politics, ebook
ISBN: 978-1-60846-579-8
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2016-03-15T16:00:00+00:00

13

The Angel

of Alternate History

Benjamin wasn’t always so optimistic. In the most celebrated passage of his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” he writes,

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed, but a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them.

History, in Benjamin’s version, is a being to whom things happen, a creature whose despairing lineaments are only redeemed by the sublimity of the imagery. It’s not hard to imagine why Benjamin would picture a tragic, immobilized history, for the storm of the Third Reich was upon him when he wrote his “Theses,” and it would destroy him later that year. And tragedy is seductive. After all, it is beautiful. Survival is funny. It’s the former that makes the greatest art. But I want to propose another angel, a comic angel, the Angel of Alternate History.

For several years I served on the board of Nevada’s statewide nonprofit environmental and antinuclear group, Citizen Alert (another consequence of meeting Bob Fulkerson). I wrote a fundraiser for it once, modeled after It’s a Wonderful Life. The angel in that movie, who has the pointedly unheroic name Clarence, is hapless but not paralyzed, hopeful and bumbling. Director Frank Capra’s movie is a model for radical history because Clarence shows the hero what the world would look like if he hadn’t been there, the only sure way to measure the effect of our acts, the one we never get. The angel Clarence’s face is turned toward the futures that never come to pass. In my fundraising letter, I described what Nevada might look like without this organization fighting the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump and various other atrocities visited upon the state by developers and the Departments of Defense and Energy. After all, most environmental victories look like nothing happened; the land wasn’t annexed by the army, the mine didn’t open, the road didn’t cut through, the factory didn’t spew effluents that didn’t give asthma to the children who didn’t wheeze and panic and stay indoors on beautiful days. They are triumphs invisible except through storytelling. Citizen Alert’s biggest victory is almost forgotten: the cancellation in the 1980s of the MX missile program that would’ve turned eastern Nevada and western Utah into a giant sacrifice area to soak up the Soviet missiles in an all-out nuclear war (and pave over pristine desert to make the tracks the missiles would travel on).

Benjamin’s angel tells us history is what happens, but the Angel of Alternate History tells that our acts count, that we are making history all the time, because of what doesn’t happen as well as what does. Only that angel can see the atrocities not unfolding, but we could learn to study effects more closely.

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