BY SOFIA SAIYED

In print | Published October 1, 2009

Today, The Atlantic magazine, the Aspen Institute and the Newseum are holding an event titled “The First Draft of History” in Washington, D.C. An invitation-only affair, the guest list is a who’s who of the hotshots of politics and business. The website and flier announcing the event are stingy on specifics. They proclaim in bold letters, “25 leading journalists, 25 fascinating newsmakers and America’s most eminent historians write the first draft of the history of our time.” Topics to be covered span the usual: health care, economy, foreign affairs, etc.

For starters, what is with the pretentious title? People in D.C. talk a lot about a lot of things, probably more than they do anything else. The 25 lead journalists have probably grilled a much broader array than just 25 “fascinating newsmakers” about the issues listed, enough to fill plenty of books with political fluff alone, not to mention actual historical content. What makes this event so different? It’s all in the frame. Its organizers, I speculate, would argue the point is not merely to look at events as they are occurring in real time, but to place them within the framework of a broader vision of the historical development of all of mankind, or some sweeping statement like that. What else does an authoritative title like “The First Draft of History” suggest, if not some overarching, all-encompassing story of “what happened in the world” as told by the “people who know best.” Before choosing such a title, someone should have told them that writing all-encompassing histories and theories went out of fashion a long time ago, once the people in charge of the world realized that there were a lot of other people here too.

Considering the organizers include the Newseum, they were no doubt basing it on the oft-quoted line that journalism is the “first rough draft of history.”

While journalism may indeed be the first rough draft of the many diverse local histories out there, having an exclusive meeting of the current holders of various types of power in the capital city of the biggest “world power” to talk about a limited range of things they’ve already talked about too much with each other can hardly be called such a thing.

I can’t imagine it being anything more than a mutual pat on the back, nothing more than a meeting where powerful people will talk about the things they have power over, re-legitimizing to themselves their authority and the system that bestowed them with that authority. In the meantime, all the people being affected by that authority live and die by their decisions. And what is so outrageous about these people meeting to have this self-congratulatory session at this particular moment in history is that the systems they run have failed us — are continually failing us — and they have demonstrated that their best responses are at best Band-Aid solutions.

So who are the 50 people who are so important that they deserve to be the authors of our history? A partial list of invitees was published in Slate magazine. The list ranges from the Secretaries of Education, Homeland Security and Treasury to military commander David Petraeus to Alan Greenspan. David Axelrod, Obama’s top advisor since 2004, made the list; he runs lucrative political and corporate consulting firms that have been accused by Business Week of astroturfing (which is when formal political, advertising or public relations campaigns intentionally create the impression of being spontaneous grassroots behavior). Also invited is corporate media executive Jeff Bewkes, the CEO of Time Warner, one of the world’s largest media and entertainment conglomerates; he oversees Time magazine, HBO, CBS, AOL and the cable-television company Time Warner Cable, among other media outlets. Vikram Pandit, CEO of Citigroup, one of the financial firms that received a massive government bailout, made the list as well as Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, Inc. My favorite guest has to be Larry Summers, the current director of the White House National Economic Council for Barack Obama, also known for making sexist comments leading to his ultimate resignation of his post at Harvard University and for signing a memo as head of the World Bank, arguing that toxic waste should be dumped in the lowest wage countries.

Doesn’t anyone see a conflict of interest in the fact that the people being convened to write the “first draft of history” are the very people within whose grasp lies the future of history? I would imagine that a financial guru would be a little biased when writing a history of the financial crisis considering that he takes it as given that the financial sector is an absolute “good.” I would imagine that certain power-holders would be wary of giving bad PR at a time when the future of their domains is still malleable, specifically, General Petraeus and the members of Obama’s administration. Even if there weren’t a conflict of interest, it’s too soon to begin writing the history of our time since “our time” is far from being over. We have no idea what long-term effects the financial collapse begun by banks like Citigroup will have, or the war on terror being perpetuated by the current administration, or the conglomeration of an independent media into corporate giants like Time Warner, or Google’s take-over-the-internet tendencies. Or anything, for that matter.

Beginning to draft “History” suggests that we have gotten through a climaxing moment; it implies that humankind, at this moment in time, has reached that point in the linear progression of historical development at which we may, finally, begin to set the story down officially. It implicitly asserts that the institutions that exist now and the conclusions that have been reached now are the ones that should define “our time,” ignoring the fact that had this meeting been convened eight years ago, the invitation list would have looked far different and the history drafted would have been far different.
Furthermore, it’s telling that of the all invitees listed in the Slate article, all but two were white men — so who are they referring to when they say the history of “our” time? By aiming for some totalizing conception of “History” with a capital H, they are necessarily excluding the many local histories of people on the fringes of society whose stories may in fact better define “our time” by virtue of being excluded from the dominant paradigm.

To summarize, presuming to write a “draft of History,” whether it’s the first draft or the twentieth, is an egotistical undertaking by a group of people self-conscious about the power they currently hold. When it’s done, they can put it up on the shelf next to all the hundreds of other versions of History-with-a-capital-H that have been written by various societies whenever they have perceived themselves to be the most advanced and powerful society in the world.

Sofia is a senior. You can reach her at ssaiyed1@swarthmore.edu.

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