Saturday, May 16, 1998

As disposable as a burger wrapper

By Bob Greene

APPOMATTOX, VA. -- Driving down Highway 460 in south central Virginia, you have a number of choices available.

You can buy a fast-food cheeseburger; you can get your laundry done; you can comparison-shop for appliances. The same kinds of things you can do on any stretch of American road.

Or -- if you have a little time -- you can pull off the highway and visit Appomattox Court House.

Appomattox Court House -- now the Appomattox Court House National Historical Park -- is where Robert E. Lee, commanding general of the Army of Northern Virginia, surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, general-in-chief of all United States forces. It is where the Civil War ended.

It's history -- you can't get much more officially historic. A sign on the outskirts of Appomattox County proclaims this is "where the nation reunited" -- and although there are many days when Americans would seem to have the right to question just how reunited we ever really did become, that's not the only thought on the mind of a visitor who passes through Appomattox County.

There's this, too:

A hundred years from now, 200 years from now, what will America's historic sites be? Will they still be the ones tourists stop at now -- the Liberty Bell, Gettysburg, the Alamo? Or will they be replaced by locations that, in the centuries ahead, will emerge to claim their own weight and eternal significance?

At times, it seems doubtful. History -- real history, the kind in commemoration of which they erect signposts -- in an odd way often appears to be something of an endangered species itself. We are constantly being told the world is changing more rapidly now than it has since time began, that with our new capacity for instant communication an earthshattering event in a distant part of the globe can be seen by all of us at the moment it happens. That history is routinely delivered to us at the speed of light.

Yet, at least here in the United States, if you had to make a list of historic sites of recent vintage, places your grandchildren and their grandchildren might some day want to visit, what would you include?

The Watergate? The townhouse where O.J. Simpson's wife lived? Kenneth Starr's courthouse? Latrell Sprewell's birthplace?

On the surface this sounds like a trick question. Of course those are not places where tourists in search of history two centuries from now would choose to stop off. Of course those are not places around which families would plan a vacation.

But what is? Think of the momentous events of our century -- the ones that define the recent American experience. World War II? Certainly -- and it was fought somewhere else. The Great Depression? Yes -- but you can't visit it: It was everywhere. The race to the moon? Maybe the most stirring recent American event of all -- and people can travel to the space centers in Florida and Texas. But that's not where the indelible moments happened. They happened in space.

There are places, to be sure -- the southern roads of the great Civil Rights marches, the first schools to be desegregated, the stretch of street in Dallas where John F. Kennedy was assassinated, the motel balcony in Memphis where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot down. Places we already know must be remembered.

But they're different -- different from the history that formed the nation. Perhaps this is all just a product of America becoming a mature republic -- a republic that is no longer beginning but instead continuing. Perhaps this is merely the nature of all civilizations; they can only be founded once, and everything else is anticlimax.

History -- the way we define it now -- is quickly packaged into commemorative magazines, and late-night special reports, and souvenir videocassettes that are in stores within days of the headline-making events. History is evolving into something disposable, and events are often declared to be historic before they even have concluded. It's history as the NBA Finals: Place your order for your official historic video now -- our producers will put it together for you just as soon as we find out who has won.

We promise you it will be historic -- we'll put a label on the front that says so.

Cheeseburgers on the highway, history by the side of the road. And all the years and centuries to come, waiting for us up ahead.

Chicago Tribune