2011 seen from 2001

There’s a mental exercise I often perform to limber up my imagination a bit. What I do is look at an important recent news story and try to imagine that I were reading it at some point in the past. What would I have been able to make of it at the time? What would I have misunderstood, and what would have totally confused me if reading it some years ago?

I was thinking of this yesterday while reading Wikipedia’s DEATH OF OSAMA BIN LADEN article.

Obviously, if you had read this article in a crystal ball on April 1, 2011, you’d have understood all of it. And if you had read it in the year 1600, it would mean nothing to you at all.

But try to imagine that you are reading the following on the morning of September 12, 2001:

“Osama bin Laden, the founder of the al-Qaeda organization responsible for the September 11 attacks in the United States and other attacks worldwide, was killed by gunshot wounds to his head and chest on May 2, 2011… in a 40-minute raid by United States special operations forces. The raid, code name Operation Neptune’s Spear, also known as the Abbottabad Operation in the Pakistani press, took place at his safe house in Bilal Town, Abbottabad, Pakistan. At the conclusion of the raid, U.S. forces took bin Laden’s body to Afghanistan for identification before burying it at sea within 24 hours of his death. The operation was authorized by President Barack Obama and carried out by members of the United States Navy SEALs from the Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU)…”

All right. Remember, it’s September 12, 2001 when you’re reading this. What would you make of this story? Here’s how I would react.

1. It will take ten years to catch bin Laden? Wow, that sounds like a long and bloody global war.

2. He’s found in Pakistan? Oh man, what happens to the Pakistani government between now and then? It sounds like they’re going to go Taliban themselves.

3. But most importantly: President Barack Obama? Who on earth is that? And how did someone with a name like that get elected President of the United States?

You have to remember that Obama first came to national consciousness in 2004, as the Illinois Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate against a Republican opponent who was imploding in a marital scandal, and later that summer as the keynote speaker at the Democratic national convention where John Kerry was nominated.

In 2001, Obama was just an obscure Illinois State Senator from Chicago. Now, I lived in Chicago throughout the 1990’s, read both Chicago newspapers every day, and somehow never heard of Barack Obama, or if I saw the name thought nothing of it. A couple of my DePaul friends claim to have heard of him in the ’90s. But the point is, by the time I left Chicago in 2000, Barack Obama was not a household name even in the city itself. (One addendum: a few years ago when Obama was a candidate they reprinted the “Harvard Law Review elects its first black president” article, and I did have a vague memory of having read it at the time. But it didn’t stick in my mind.)

But back to the point… On September 12, 2001, you had most likely never heard of Barack Obama. So when you read the following in your crystal ball, you wouldn’t be sure what to make of it: “The operation was authorized by President Barack Obama and carried out by members of the United States Navy SEALs from the Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU)…”

Here you find that, 10 years from now, bin Laden is still alive. He’s eventually knocked off by a famous special ops team, under the orders of a U.S. President you’ve never heard of, who has a rather non-white-sounding name. What would be the most probable scenario you would have come up with for the next ten years?

Well, there’s one segment of society that can turn people into national heroes rather quickly under the right conditions, and which also has pretty good minority representation: the military.

If I’d had to invent a scenario for a President Barack Obama on September 12, 2001, based on the above paragraph, it would probably have gone something like this…

“The war after 9/11 goes on for a very long time. bin Laden is driven out of Afghanistan but al-Qaeda is hosted by Pakistan. Things must be going pretty badly, because the U.S. chooses as its President a currently unknown person with an unusual name: Barack Obama. He is no doubt an obscure colonel or brigadier general in 2001, and does something extremely heroic within the next few years that makes him Presidential timber. And, tough military guy that he is, he succeeds in sending a special forces team in to kill bin Laden.”

Of course, all of this would have been completely off the mark, even though it would probably have been the best guess at the time.

And that’s only ten years. Just think of how next-to-impossible it could be to correctly interpret the major news story of 100 years from now, or 500 years.