Stephen Kessler | Future history as seen from the wrong end

Enterprising historians of the future, if the world lasts that long, will have an interesting time reconstructing the American experiment in democracy, which ran for almost two and a half centuries, and retracing its collapse under the crushing weight of dictatorship. I can almost imagine the excitement of scholars hundreds of years hence as they uncover the true stories buried beneath layers of lies and obfuscations imposed by presidential diktat on universities, museums, libraries and other institutions entrusted as guardians of collective memory — until a mythmaking megalomaniac came to power and gold-plated everything in his own image.

Taking that long view backward from the future and following the trail of tears and bloody footprints deep into our national origins, I see the origina