"Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?"
About this Quote
Time runs both ways in John Leonard's line, but only one direction gets to write the press release. "Isn't it amazing" sets a conversational trap: the voice sounds casually dazzled, yet the amazement is barbed. What follows is a quiet indictment of how we retrofit memory to flatter whatever comes next. The future doesn't just arrive; it edits. It reaches back and sands down the rough parts of the past until it looks like destiny.
The genius is in "appropriate". Not true, not accurate, not even "real" - appropriate: socially useful, narratively tidy, made to match the needs of the present moment. Leonard is pointing at a cultural habit as old as mythmaking and as modern as a campaign ad: once an outcome is known, we start treating its prehistory as inevitable. Revolutions acquire precursors, artists get labeled "ahead of their time", disasters become "warnings we ignored". The past is reordered into a moral story where the current winners look like the natural heirs and the current values look like they were always waiting to happen.
As a poet-critic writing in the long wake of mid-century upheaval - Cold War narratives, civil rights, Vietnam-era spin - Leonard's context is a society addicted to coherence. The subtext is less about memory's fragility than power's convenience: institutions, media, even families curate backstories that justify the now. The line lands because it refuses the comfort of chronology. It suggests that history isn't just what happened; it's what later eras can successfully market as having happened.
The genius is in "appropriate". Not true, not accurate, not even "real" - appropriate: socially useful, narratively tidy, made to match the needs of the present moment. Leonard is pointing at a cultural habit as old as mythmaking and as modern as a campaign ad: once an outcome is known, we start treating its prehistory as inevitable. Revolutions acquire precursors, artists get labeled "ahead of their time", disasters become "warnings we ignored". The past is reordered into a moral story where the current winners look like the natural heirs and the current values look like they were always waiting to happen.
As a poet-critic writing in the long wake of mid-century upheaval - Cold War narratives, civil rights, Vietnam-era spin - Leonard's context is a society addicted to coherence. The subtext is less about memory's fragility than power's convenience: institutions, media, even families curate backstories that justify the now. The line lands because it refuses the comfort of chronology. It suggests that history isn't just what happened; it's what later eras can successfully market as having happened.
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