STACEY
GIBO
P
OF
THE
ARADOX
HISTORY
A
N IRONY OF HISTORY IS THAT
whether someone is aware of it or not,
everything they do is dependent on and
reflective of what has preceded them.
It might have no interest to the per-
son living in the present, but his-
torical precedent has a massive
influence on what they do in the
here and now. History might be
bunk, as Henry Ford said, but it is impossible for
anything to exist without it. But what someone
does in the present can repudiate the lessons of
history. Making history is the breaking of the
rules set by precedent. The paradox is that
making history means nullifying it.
For most people, the idea or study of his-
tory is pretty boring. History in general
doesn't excite the imagination of most
skateboarders, and that includes the
chronicles of their own art form or
sport or whatever it is that skating is
to them. History is what is taught in
school, and that's enough of a rea-
son for most people to be adverse
to it. There are facts in history and
the deeds of great men and
demonized monsters who have
affected the course of human
events. There are the exploits of
Alexander the Great and
Hammurabi, of Charlemagne
and Napoleon, of Toussaint
L'Ouverture, of Stalin and
Franklin D Roosevelt. Remote
forgotten soldier who crossed the Rubicon with Julius Caesar?
What about the nameless woman who fed him or the boy who
tended to his horse? They are all forgotten, but Caesar
couldn't have gone on to take Rome without their help.
Their contributions weren't recorded by Plutarch or
Gibbon. We are taught to put faith in the construct of his-
tory that has Caesar singlehandedly winning that battle.
Why not put faith in the other players and their history,
the one that has fallen by the wayside?
Not only are there thousands of years of forgotten bit
players whose achievements might have been monu-
mental, but there are those who innovate and have rev-
olutionary thoughts that go completely uncredited.
Does anyone remember that Alfred Russel Wallace
came up with a theory of evolution and natural selec-
tion at the same time Darwin did, and that it was only
when Darwin was sent Wallace's manuscript that he
went ahead with the publication of The Origin of the
Species? Does that make Wallace any less of a radical
thinker than Darwin? It is myopic to believe in the
authorized version of history. There is a lot more to the
past than what filters down to the present, and there
are a lot of unknown individual actions in the past that
changed the course of human events.
No matter how ignorant one is of history, they reap its
benefits. Air conditioning and indoor plumbing and auto-
mobiles make everybody's lives easier and better. People
don't have to worry about getting smallpox because Edward
Jenner put cow blood into humans and made vaccination a
reality two hundred years ago. These examples and billions of
others directly affect everyone alive today. They make modern
life possible. History and its advances are inescapable, no mat-
ter how ambiguous and untrustworthy the recording of it is.
That is the gist of the paradox. Why care about history if there
is no choice about living according to
its dictates? Why care about the
past at all? Maybe it's worth con-
sidering the first proto-human
"STANDING UP ON
AND RIDING
A BUCKBOARD WAGON CAREENING
DOWN THE
CHATSWORTH DROP"
and uninteresting stuff to most.
These are the figures who inhabit the
timeline of history. They are prime
movers in the textbooks. But history is a
lot more fluid and broader in scope than just
these famous names; it has a lot more nuance
than is normally thought. History can be some-
thing of an illusion, a realm of make-believe.
Napoleon, who was making it, asked, "What is his-
tory but a fable agreed upon?" Our collective past is
cyclical and circular, mysterious and ultimately
unknowable. It can be thought of as something that
never happened, reported by someone who wasn't there.
Within the chaos and deceptions of the authorized version of
history are great numbers of secret and personal stories that are
just as valid as those of the "great men" and their deeds.
There are many unrecorded aspects of the past that are just as
important as what makes it into the official story. What about the
who imagined a different time and place from when and where
they were at a precise moment. That first glimmer of conscious-
ness led down a path to flights of fancy, of humans doing more
than just living at the most basic level. Those imaginings brought
wheels and ships and dreams of places nobody knew existed.
Places and things were realized by flights of fancy becoming real
actions. Somewhere down the line a Scandanavian slid down a
snowy slope on two boards attached to their feet and a Hawaiian
or Latin American stood up on a board propelled by a wave. And
then some kid broke the apple cart off the front of his or her
scooter and rode it standing up without holding on to anything.
What does all this have to do with skateboarding? Well, at some
point skateboarding entered history. For the sake of argument,
about forty years ago. Why should any contemporary skater care?
Does it matter today that Frank Nasworthy made the urethane
wheel feasible in 1973, and that all skateboarding is dependent on
that breakthrough? To the skater today that's just boring history.
And that's just the canonized part. What about the forgotten
90 THRASHER
91