I was checking up on the myspace page of this English electronic
music artist called Duke Dumont. I think he's a living genius, or at
least a wunderkind for now, but that's for another write up, one
which incidentally kills me for it's having not been written yet.
Anyway. His latest status on his myspace page is: "a fist bump, a pound, a terrorist fist jab.."
For those of you to whom this doesn't ring a bell, this is a
reference to a question that Fox News presenter E. D. Hill raised
about what the fist bump Senator Obama gave his wife at some
convention 'meant'. Bizarrely, she even brought a body-language
expert in to discuss.
To me, the whole thing just came off as rather comical. Getting
fist-bumped by your wife on a podium is weird, incredibly silly to make it
a news issue, and faintly ridiculous to have to come in defense of it,
which in the end you probably do (see above, starting from first
comma). But it was news on the news channel which generally doesn't
make more news, so I assumed it's largely an internet blogger thing,
and moved on.
Never mind that I'm actually wrong, which is interesting enough as
it is. But I'm surprised. We have Mr. Adam Dyment, aka Duke Dumont, a
fairly minor English electronic musician living in England, quietly
raising a slightly-interested eyebrow to all this as well.
Somehow, this brought it home, and now I know, and if you didn't?
Ladies and gentlemen, this is history in the making. We are living
through things that will take history hundreds of years to forget. And
here we are, all paying attention.
How does it feel?
And it's not a cliche yet, so you and I get to feel it as it's happening, without any pre-existing idea of how one should take it. Me? I say that it feels just like
this. Nothing more than an occasional taking of note, here and there.
Nothing to feel that is worthy of posterity. Until many years hence,
when a historian wants to aggregate us into a statistic. Or a novelist
isolates out something close enough to be one of us, and marvels about
how we were able in the face of 'monumental historical events' to be
our mildly-interested selves instead of 'people of our time'.
Anyway, you never really think about history you read about in
textbooks or see in movies in the same way. That the people then were
just as unimpressed by it as we can't be of it today. I'm really
fascinated by all of this, and would love to soliloquy on, but I'm
already well beyond the borders of the land that my title named. But
I'm going to go forth and re-read Doctor Zhivago and The Tin Drum, two
Nobel-prize winning books (yes, the writers won their Nobels for
almost no other reason) about this sort of thing...