In 2014, our rapid cultural transformations again seem as real as those of a half-century ago, even if the biggest revolution of our era is digital, not musical�a culture spawned in the environs of Cupertino’s Apple rather than Abbey Road’s. But all bets are off on every other event and phenomenon we regard as seismic, game-�changing, and historic in this year. It’s humbling and in some instances a bit reassuring to know that our current hunches about what history holds are likely to be as wrongheaded as many of the definitive judgments of 1964. �Readers of the full report,� a Times editorial intoned about the Warren Commission, �will find no basis for questioning the commission’s conclusion that President Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone.�
Today you must wonder whether speculation by Leon Panetta that we could have a 30-year-long war against ISIS and its terrorist brethren may be no more on the mark than the Johnson administration’s insistence that no �wider� war would come to Vietnam. The warnings that ISIS is a bigger foe than Al Qaeda � almost immediately rendered inoperative by estimates that Khorasan is more threatening than ISIS � may be worth little more than the intelligence that inflated the hostilities in the Gulf of Tonkin. Putin’s seizing of Crimea � likened in more than a few quarters to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia � is not necessarily the start of a new hot conflict but can also be seen as a desperate feint by a doomed regime. The NFL, presumed to be invulnerable to domestic-abuse and concussion scandals, could yet go the way of boxing, whose heavyweight championship was considered the �most valuable commodity in the world of sports� at the time of the Clay-Liston fight, in the words of the Times columnist Arthur Daley. Isaac Asimov’s old dream of space colonization � if ever achieved � may be realized by Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, or India rather than the United States, Russia, or China. And for all our hyperventilating over who’s winning every morning in politics, America’s right and left may fight each other to a standoff in perpetuity. The undying punditocracy notion of a �centrist tradition� in America remains as much a mirage in 2014 as in 1964.
As James Baldwin said presciently in November 1963, �Americans are the youngest country, the largest country, and the strongest country, we like to say, and yet the very notion of change, real change, throws Americans into a panic.� No matter how many urgent reports on climate change are handed down, or how many vigils call for more gun regulation, reform may advance at a pace as halting as that which Baldwin foresaw for our endless struggle over race. Change we can believe in is less likely to happen overnight than on an installment plan. Even items left behind in the 1964 World’s Fair time capsule (credit cards, a ballpoint pen, plastic wrap, tranquilizers) have barely aged since. If anything, the most representative artifact of 1964 may be a television show that had its debut the month before the fair did: Jeopardy!, yet another American institution that, 50 years on, has proved resistant to all but cosmetic changes and periodic adjustments for inflation.