Mr. President, Tear Down This Mall! / What History Looks Like

Over the years, logging thousands of hours on the Weird Wide Web, one of my favorite little corners of the internet is this site dedicated to "dead malls." It's one part sweet requiem, one part socio-economic commentary, one part nostalgic microhistory, one part mockumentary kitsch.

In a recent online conversation with my friend Conor, we talked about Obama (what else?) and the odd feeling of watching a "movement" take place. He & I both come from history backgrounds and we remarked that one of the greatest obstacles to studying the past is the distortion-by-compaction that occurs to moments and patterns.

We talk in generalities about zeitgeists because historians, like anyone else, need a form of shorthand. Hence, the narrative of a decade like The Sixties becomes a fixed amalgamation of conventional analysis, oscillating ever after between orthodoxy and occasionally persuasive revisions. The standard tropes - rock n' roll, hippies, civil rights, social upheaval - receive the lion's share of attention. But what did the observer on the ground witness?

My mom was twenty-five years old in 1968. The lazy reductionist (having never met my mom) might surmise that she let her hair down, railed against the Vietnam War, tried pot, or maybe absorbed the message of books like The Feminine Mystique. The truth, however, is that my mom was tending to an infant while pregnant with twins. She liked Joan Baez well enough, but her domestic responsibilities had her burning the midnight oil, not her bra. Not exactly a microcosm of the counterculture.

The point is: history in situ is far more expansive, far less susceptible to facile categorization. That my mom doesn't fit easily into the pre-packaged consensus on that decade does not in itself discredit the standardized version. But it reminds me that history as it is lived is stranger, more complicated, more boring AND more interesting than we usually allow. The watershed moments will continue to exert an inordinate degree of influence on our memories, but we would do well to remember that the focus of our lives is more often than not fixed upon the mundane. I have no doubt that we will all remember where we were on 9/11/01 and what that date symbolizes. However, it might be more instructive for us to research what we were doing on 11/9/01. That information is liable to tell us a lot more about who we are.

So is the Obamomenon the genuine article? Is this what history looks like while it's being lived? My instincts say 'yes.' I have never seen anything like this.

Right, well, my meandering thoughts lead me back to our poor, departed shopping centers. Perhaps the best counterpoint for the ascent of Obama is the decay of these crumbling monuments to consumerism. What could be more banal than the slow disintegration of a Montgomery Wards? So, raise your Orange Julius and drink to your favorite dead mall. They, too, are part of our history.

For those of you who care, yes, Mohawk Mall is on the website.