The Angel of Alternate History
Benjamin wasn’t always so optimistic. In the most celebrated passage of his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” he writes,
This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed, but a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them.
History, in Benjamin’s version, is a being to whom things happen, a creature whose despairing lineaments are only redeemed by the sublimity of the imagery. It’s not hard to imagine why Benjamin would picture a tragic, immobilized history, for the storm of the Third Reich was upon him when he wrote his “Theses,” and it would destroy him later that year. And tragedy is seductive. After all, it is beautiful. Survival is funny. It’s the former that makes the greatest art. But I want to propose another angel, a comic angel, the Angel of Alternate History.
For several years I served on the board of Nevada’s statewide nonprofit environmental and antinuclear group, Citizen Alert (another consequence of meeting Bob Fulkerson). I wrote a fundraiser for it once, modeled after It’s a Wonderful Life. The angel in that movie, who has the pointedly unheroic name Clarence, is hapless but not paralyzed, hopeful and bumbling. Director Frank Capra’s movie is a model for radical history because Clarence shows the hero what the world would look like if he hadn’t been there, the only sure way to measure the effect of our acts, the one we never get. The angel Clarence’s face is turned toward the futures that never come to pass. In my fundraising letter, I described what Nevada might look like without this organization fighting the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump and various other atrocities visited upon the state by developers and the Departments of Defense and Energy. After all, most environmental victories look like nothing happened; the land wasn’t annexed by the army, the mine didn’t open, the road didn’t cut through, the factory didn’t spew effluents that didn’t give asthma to the children who didn’t wheeze and panic and stay indoors on beautiful days. They are triumphs invisible except through storytelling. Citizen Alert’s biggest victory is almost forgotten: the cancellation in the 1980s of the MX missile program that would’ve turned eastern Nevada and western Utah into a giant sacrifice area to soak up the Soviet missiles in an allout nuclear war (and pave over pristine desert to make the tracks the missiles would travel on).
Benjamin’s angel tells us history is what happens, but the Angel of Alternate History tells that our acts count, that we are making history all the time, because of what doesn’t happen as well as what does. Only that angel can see the atrocities not unfolding, but we could learn to study effects more closely. Instead we don’t look, and a radical change too soon becomes status quo. Young women often don’t know that sexual harassment and date rape are new categories; most forget how much more toxic rivers like the Hudson once were; who talks about the global elimination of smallpox between 1967 and 1977? If we did more, the world would undoubtedly be better; what we have done has sometimes kept it from becoming worse.
On the west side of the Sierra Nevada is the pristine land that would have become Mineral King, a huge Disney-owned ski complex, if the Sierra Club had not fought it. On the east is Mono Lake, which has had its tributaries restored and is halfway back to historic water levels after decades of being drained by Los Angeles. The Mono Lake Committee fought from 1979 to 1996 to get the court decision that restored the lake’s water and still works to protect the lake. South of there, in the Mojave Desert, near the Old Woman Mountains, is Ward Valley, which was slated for a low-level nuclear waste dump that would’ve likely leaked all over creation. A beautiful coalition of the five local tribes, other local people, and antinuclear activists fought in the deserts and the courts and with the scientific facts for ten years before defeating it definitively a few years ago. On the West Texas–Mexican border is the small Latino community of Sierra Blanca, where another nuclear waste dump was planned but defeated. Go east to Oklahoma and you’ll arrive in the sites where in 1993, after years of work, environmentalists, including the group Native Americans for a Clean Environment, and the Cherokee Nation shut down 23 percent of the world’s uranium production. All these places are places of absence, or at least the absence of devastation, a few of the countless places in which there is nothing to see, and nothing is what victory often looks like.
The Angel of History says, “Terrible,” but this angel says, “Could be worse.” They’re both right, but the latter angel gives us grounds to act.