The century’s sun has set in blooded clouds.
— Rabindranath Tagore, “Sunset of the Century,” December 31, 1900
[Today’s situation] is historically unprecedented, in the sense that simultaneously huge swaths of global territory are dominated by populist unrest, anger, and effective loss of state control.
— Zbigniew Brzezinski, in an interview with Foreign Policy, July 21, 2014
To follow the news that summer was to be reminded continually of how violent a place the world had become. On some days, brutal clashes taking place in totally different regions made headlines simultaneously. To follow the news during that distressing season was also to be reminded of how technological breakthroughs had shrunk the planet and made different countries more tightly entwined. Both information and new and old kinds of weapons moved across the globe over distances and at speeds that not long before would have seemed possible only via magic. Befitting a confusing and globally minded time, people trying to understand, defend or decry things happening in one locale alluded not just to events that had occurred there before but also sought parallels and connections to past and present tragedies associated with far away parts of the world.
IT IS EASY to imagine these sentences being written at some point in the future about the summer that is coming to an end. It has been a season of so many overlapping tragedies that Laila Lalami, a novelist and commentator on cultural and political affairs, was moved to compose this poignant tweet on August 3: “These days, you have to have a heart of steel to get through the front page of the newspaper.” In dealing with gut-wrenching reports from around the world, those interested in comparisons and connections have looked in many directions. The general situation in the Middle East now, for example, has inspired allusions to the Thirty Years’ War (including by Brzezinski, in the same interview quoted above), while specific actions by ISIS have been compared to the 9/11 terror attacks. Michael Brown’s death and the subsequent riots in Ferguson led some to recall Selma or Watts in the 1960s, while others, noting the common use of tear gas, compared the situations in Missouri and Gaza.