I'm old enough now, and have a good enough memory, to have lived through several cycles of up/down in the reputation of public figures.  Nixon was a crook!  Yes, but he was a sage geopolitical strategist.  No, he was a paranoid maniac!  Well, he was better than W and his posse. No, he laid the seedbed for Trump!  Similar fluctuations have followed other presidents--Carter, Clinton, Reagan, Obama, even W--my favorite clip that captures some of the ways these things have changed is this one, portraying Reagan as a genius.  Unsurprisingly, there is some evidence to suggest this isn't as far from the truth as "we once believed".

Not to mention writers as well: David Foster Wallace, anyone?  And on the other hand I'm so pleased to see  Shirley Jackson getting more attention, maybe Martha Gellhorn will as well?  James Baldwin is back in action, who will remind us of Ralph Ellison?  When will Saul Bellow come back? Not to mention my teenager's odd affection for the music of the 80s and the 90s. When I was growing up, you were either a believer in the 80s or the 90s.  I still have a hard time imagining being one person and liking both.  (Swing Out Sister and Nirvana?)

What this means is that first impressions are often not accurate.  (Surprise!  It's a platitude!  Then again, we forget platitudes so often, they deserve repeating.  Something about us makes platitudes platitudes. Is that a platitude as well?)  It takes a while for judgment to settle.  Maybe it doesn't ever.  But sometimes the noise of the immediate really clouds our capacity to judge.

(WAIT: not about Trump, of course--it's pretty easy to know a monster when you see one!  Or is it?  I mean, I think it is.  Could I be wrong?  It's hard to see how.  But still?)

Anyway, leave that terrifying, abyss-gazing-also-into-me thought behind.  Think about this interesting conversation with Edward Achorn, author of Every Drop of Blood, about Lincoln's Second Inaugural.  I'm struck by the below:

I’ve read all these books about how Lincoln was hated, but I was still surprised by how disdained and disliked he was by so many of his contemporaries. Liberal Republicans thought he was too calculating, too quick to weigh public opinion. Democrats thought he was a tyrant, a rube, and was destroying the Constitution. I think a lot of this was airbrushed out of history after he was assassinated, when he became a martyr. But when you go back to that day and look at what people were saying, you get a stunning sense of what Lincoln was up against.

This makes me think of the lightning-quick judgments we make now of people, and of their quality.  I'm just as guilty of this as anyone.  (I was so angry at Gov Ralph Northam a year ago.  I still think he should have resigned after the blackface pictures emerged, but am I as angry as I was then?  Has my anger ebbed because it faded, or were judgments involved in it?  Again, I don't know.)  

My basic question is this: we all recognize that in every previous generation, at every previous moment, pretty much everybody got things significantly wrong in the instant that they happened, right?  I mean, this is pretty obvious from the historical record, yes?  If so, why do we seem to think that, just in this one instance, consisting of our moment, this basic historical truism has been suspended?  So that our judgments are almost unique in human history for immediately tracking the truth?

The political primary is red-hot right now.  I wish I knew how to cool peoples' opinions  down about it.  I suppose that is the point of this post--to explain something of the wind-up to me pitching that banality.  

Maybe I just need to go to sleep.  Good night!