Watching the Opening Ceremonies With David Lowenthal

Tonight I invited David Lowenthall over to watch the Opening Ceremonies of the 2014 Winter Olympics. We played a drinking game where we drank beer from Minneapolis while we watched the same interpretation of Russian history seen by millions around the world.

Dave pounded his Day Tripper and observed:

Venerated as a fount of communal identity, cherished as a precious and endangered resource, yesterday became less and less like today. Yet its relics and residues are increasingly stamped with today's lineaments. We may fancy an exotic past that contrasts with a humdrum or unhappy present, but we forge it with modern tools. The past is a foreign country whose features are shaped by today's predilections, its strangeness domesticated by our own preservation of its vestiges. 

Then the local news came on and it turned out that the past is a foreign country in south Minneapolis.