Horizon

Prerelic

I've been reading Bernard-Henri Lévy's American Vertigo lately. It's less reminiscent of Democracy in America than it is of the more freeform notes de Tocqueville took during his travels. (Regarding which, could anyone point me to the passage where Tocqueville meets Sam Houston as he's leaving Tennessee?) One of Lévy's fascinations is with how Americans interact with history, and I thought I'd share this passage:

The give me, at the Hotel Fort Des Moines, the room that's reserved, eight days from now, for John Kerry.

I write down this detail because it's the first thing the receptionist tells me as I'm registering.

Better than that, they've taken care to display on my night table, next to a framed photo of the candidate playing the guitar, a plate of cheese wrapped in cellophane identical to the one that will be served to him on the evening of his arrival and, in another frame, a copy of the fax sent by his press secretary detailing his minibar preference: "Mixed nuts; chocolate chip cookies; diet soda (preferably Diet Coke in the can); bottled water; plain M&M's (no peanuts); regular Doritos."

The craze for the relic, this time. A taste for preservation and for the museum, taken to the n^th degree. No longer, as in Cooperstown, the artificial as opposed to the authentic. Nor is it as in Dearborn, where, the other day, I visited Henry Ford's Americana museum: everything that has existed will, one day or another, end up in a museum; even if it's under the heading "fake," we might as well make a museum of everything right away. But, even more striking, more extravagant: yes, everything is becoming a relic; a mere plate of cheese is becoming a museum piece, but the museum piece is a plate of cheese that has not been eaten yet, or even served — it's a kind of antemuseum, a prerelic, an extension into the realm of memory of what has not yet taken place.