By Thalia Gigerenzer
CHICAGO — I have to admit: I’m not used to being part of history. I don’t know how to act; I feel elated but terribly awkward in those rare moments when habit is overturned and the extraordinary happens. I understand the T-shirts, the hats, the buttons—they speak a language my generation knows well—but the feeling of being part of something larger than your immediate circle of friends and family was a rarity to all of us growing up in the ’90s.
Until recently, collectivity seemed a concept confined to the dusty pages of philosophical texts, fossilized in grainy films of the sit-ins and peace marches of the ’60s —an invention of academia, I was certain, to facilitate the writing of smoother essays. When Barack Obama was elected, the sensation that the world had suddenly shrunk—that all over the world, people were thinking the same thing—was something I had experienced only once before, on Sept. 11.
And so, the night before I went to document history-in-the-making at Valois Cafeteria, the modest diner where Obama used to eat breakfast, I watched Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, studying the sea of watchful faces, electrified by the moment, to get an inkling of what it means to really live history. When I walked into Valois the morning of the inauguration, I was ready to be part of history, but what I found was an entirely new way of experiencing history—for never, it seems, have people been so self-consciously part of history.
It started with the seven TV stations that marched into the diner at 8 A.M., brandishing 20-pound cameras and high-tech microphones, so as not to let a moment slip by undocumented. Like astronauts on Mars, the TV crews huddled together in a corner with their bulky gadgets, ready to sample the salinity of the atmosphere. With their backs to the TV screen showing the inauguration, their eyes darted frantically from table to table, scanning for tears. But the reporters weren’t the only ones with cameras—and this, I think, is the main difference between 1969 and 2009: Everyone, from janitors to bankers, was armed with a tool to forever capture the moment.
History was made a thousand times in Valois that morning, with every click of a shutter, every triumphant newspaper cover, every Obama shirt, button, mug, and, of course, with the appearance of an Obama impersonator who was hailed by all as the Man Himself.
I will never forget the one man, sitting in a corner quietly sipping from his commemorative Obama mug, who did not let go of his copy of the Chicago Sun-Times for the entire inauguration ceremony, clutching it tightly to his chest. And that is the bizarre thing about this particular historical moment: The commemoration is preceding the actual lived experience. With the rapid historicization of the present, the moment seems never to occur, trapped in its own symbolism, forever paralyzed in an idealized past or utopian future.
And so, sitting in Valois that morning, frantically trying to document and live history at the same time, I wondered if it had been like this when Dr. King gave his famous speech. Surely not. But perhaps this intense awareness of the moment, this bizarre situation in which everyone becomes a journalist, is not just a result of the rapid pace of today’s consumer-driven society, but a way for us to learn how to be part of something larger than ourselves again.
And halfway through the inauguration speech in Valois, that ever-elusive moment finally came. As the reporters lowered their cameras and turned towards the TV screen, I watched the expressions on people’s faces and felt, for the first time, like I was living history, with the help of a journalist’s eye.
