Book Review: The History of the Future by Edward McPherson
Reviewed by Ryan Boyd
The History of the Future: American Essays
Essays by Edward McPherson
Coffee House Press, May 2017
$16.95; 288 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1566894678
Subtitling one’s book “American Essays” is an ambitious move. What essay could encompass or explain America’s vast, violent energies? Can there even be a form of written witness that is distinctly “American”? But these are strange times in the republic, and ambition is no flaw if you can produce essays like Edward McPherson does in The History of the Future, his startling collection of prose from the 2010s, the wicked bleeding edge of American culture.
McPherson’s book might wander geographically (each essay concerns a particular place) but it has two consistent themes: the extraordinary density of violence in America, particularly at the hands of corporate and state institutions, and the unnerving overlaps of past and present. For McPherson, history is a bruised palimpsest. The digital era only deepens this challenge to narrative historiography, because “Nothing ever ends. It is only a click away.” In turn, our sprawling archives of the present bleed into visions of possible futures.
One of McPherson’s primary devices for evoking all this is an enthusiastic use of catalogs—paragraphs crammed with ideas, events, things, and people, held together by the author’s roving eye, which delights in accumulating knowledge, however unpleasant. We encounter the “Dallas of the mind,” a salmagundi of physical landmarks and televisual touchstones (the Kennedy assassination, the Dallas TV phenomenon) in what early-twentieth-century boosters called “the City of Splendid Realities.” There is a bullet-pointed list of historical documents and keepsakes from the McPherson family homestead in Gettysburg, which dates to just after the Civil War that bloodied the ground near what is now “The house, with its almost unbearable, unknowable inventory.” “Open Ye Gates! Swing Wide Ye Portals!” takes us to St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904, which offered teeming crowds “a taxonomy of knowledge” about the universe, a system of American discourse in which “cultural and political imperialism were given a scientific gloss; the virtues of white, western assimilation were roundly praised.” A melancholy post-9/11 reflection on young adulthood, subway tunnels, and New York contends that “to be a city dweller is to conduct a love affair with a past that is being endlessly eroded, to inhabit a string of vanishing cities,” while the eerie closing essay, about people planning for the end of the world in Los Angeles, hauls before the reader a catalog of apocalyptic nightmares—state collapse, zombies, nukes, electromagnetic pulses, climate change, pandemics—and closes by suggesting that “there might be a pattern borne out across the universe: civilizations develop to the point where they have the power to do themselves in—and then pull the trigger.”
The two most terrifying essays in The History of the Future concern energy and America’s rapacious consumption of nature. We have cracked the planet open, exploiting and poisoning it as well as ourselves. Modernity is a slow-motion suicide, because what the literary critic Stephanie LeMenager calls “petroleum culture” is part of a larger planet-killing web of human activities, including what we might label atomic culture.
“How to Survive an Atomic Bomb” is a succinct history of how the US government secretly planned, built, and tested the first nuclear weapons in the New Mexico desert—tests that involved intentionally exposing soldiers and civilians to radioactive fallout. “We just assumed we got away with it,” confessed a doctor involved in the project. Indeed, everyone on Earth is now “standing downwind of history, ongoing casualties of a never-ending Cold War,” carrying traces of novel isotopes in our bones and teeth thanks to US and Soviet nuclear testing. The United States alone detonated over a thousand such weapons until these operations ceased in 1992; that, McPherson points out, is an average of one blast every 16.5 days after the bombing of Japan. The military gave these operations names that lurch from cute to downright weird, and which wouldn’t leave my head after I read them: “Castle Bravo, Ivy Mike, Dormouse Prime, Little Feller, Diamond Fortune, Buster/Jangle, Tumbler-Snapper, Teapot, Wigwam, Redwing, Plumbbob, Romeo, Nougat, Gnome, Zucchini, Muenster, Diablo, Shasta, and Sugar—countless atomic suns born across the land.” It’s like a list of roses or racehorses. (Also: the first nickname for the weapon that leveled Nagasaki was “the Introvert,” before the military changed its code name to “Fat Man.”)
“Chasing the Boundary: Boom and Bust on the High Prairie” is equally haunting. Since the beginning of this century, oil and gas firms have leveraged new drilling technologies to turn North Dakota’s Bakken shale fields into Saudi Arabia North, and in the process they have rearranged the culture, politics, and society of the region, mostly for the worse. Now that we can inject high-pressure chemical stews through rock to get at the sweet crude beneath, America is more of an oil behemoth than ever, devouring itself daily. Money is surging into the plains. A fresh generation of corporate scoundrels and craven politicians are getting fat. The lights of gas-flaring rigs are visible from space. Meanwhile the body count is rising, and McPherson feels himself drawn to the inferno:
The narrative had somehow gone awry. . . . Men were murdering women and rumored to be raping other men. Prostitutes and strippers flocked in from out of state. Cartels were moving meth and heroin. Citizens were killing themselves at an alarming rate. Trucks were crashing, trains exploding. People weren’t just disappearing—they were vaporizing. A Facebook page called ‘Missing Persons & Property from the Bakken Oilfield’ offered a litany of loss: dogs, trailers, mothers, minors, fugitives, tools, trucks, more dogs, equipment, ATVs, snowmobiles, and men, men, men.
What he finds is a microcosm of American life in the twenty-first century, where a lucky few pocket all the profits and the rest of us choke on fumes, told to be happy with the wages we’re given, the homes we can afford to rent, the votes we are allowed to cast, the water we drink. The future is coming; the future is almost here; it doesn’t look good. This is a thoroughly American book after all, one of shocking kinetic force and cultural insight. I look forward to more of McPherson’s work, frightening as it is.
Ryan Boyd (@ryanaboyd) is a poet and critic living in Los Angeles, where he teaches at the University of Southern California.
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