A powerful drum break, reminiscent of the Dixieland format for ending a jazz performance, sets up the animated final ensemble which speeds to a rousing conclusion. Ever since human beings invented it, Time has remained a mystery to us as perplexing and enigmatic as life itself. Things may happen now but the moment now is elusive. Even in an age when information travels through cyberspace at the speed of light, there is no such thing as instant communications. All news is history.
All news is old.
Rooted as we are in traditions, ceremonies, and ideas that date back for centuries and millennia, our beliefs and value systems, our ways of thinking, can become reflexive, ritualistic, and repetitious. As a nation America needs to comprehend the fact that our history is replete with baggage, junk that we transfer from one generation to the next, junk that forms a legacy of political corruption, hypocrisy, racism, sexism, violence. The dilemma that confronts us as culture is how to break out of this destructive cycle. Perhaps the answer lies in how we study, learn, and teach history. If we learn about the connectedness of events, the underlying root causes, then perhaps we will come to recognize that such things as prosecutorial witch-hunts and impeachment trials are not aberrations but the natural outgrowth of seasons of political failure.