Who needs proof when we can manufacture history?

I’ve been having difficulties with history lately. By that, I don’t mean that I’m doing… I’ve been having difficulties with history lately. By that, I don’t mean that I’m doing terribly in some history class, barely passing tests and having a strange, consistently blank stare frozen on my face as if it were my only expression when a new idea is discussed in class. That would be Latin II. I’m talking about history as more of an abstract. I’m talking about history as an idea and as a constructed sense of reality. I’m talking about “Melrose Place,” the complete first season on DVD.

I’ll understand if right now you’ve hurled the paper across the floor or, more likely, begun to think about what an absolute moron I am. That’s fine. Go ahead and chortle. You’ve earned it, I’m sure. You’ve probably never enjoyed some absolutely horrible show, have you? Never laughed at something ridiculously campy? Never lived the joy of a show that features adultery, catfights and acting so bad it will make you explode into helpless, giddy, all-consuming laughter?

Well, you should. “Melrose Place” is both the best and worst show that I have ever seen, existing in this wondrous Schrodinger’s Cat-like balance for all to marvel at. It’s mindless, vapid entertainment but, like all projects associated with Darren Star, it’s the best banal and campy entertainment one can buy. It’s sweet. It also has a history problem.

The opening credits are an admittedly absurd montage of the main characters walking arm in arm through the streets, dancing, playing pool and doing things that actors do to simulate friendship and togetherness. Halfway through the first season, a character left and a new character, Jo, a divorcee from New York with a seedy past and an addiction to danger, joined the cast. The opening also changed, as shots that contained the departed character were removed.

More troubling, however, is what was added to the opening sequence: shots of Jo, playing pool, dancing and walking down the street in the group, as if she had always been in that opening sequence.

She was filmed doing these things separately and then her image was spliced into the earlier ones. She became part of the group. Not only did the other character leave, all indications of her existence were removed as if it were a surgical operation. The history was doctored and the new history became the only one left.

In the opening of Milan Kundera’s novel, “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” a picture is taken of a Soviet official as he gives a speech outside in the bitter cold. Because of the snow and the weather, a man next to him gives him his hat to wear. The moment is captured on film by many photographers and becomes an important piece of propaganda. However, four years later, the man who gave the official the hat is branded a traitor and hung. His image is retroactively removed from the photo, but, Kundera notes, his hat remains on the official’s head, the only trace of him that still exists.

That isn’t even the fate of the one character from “Melrose Place.” She’s gone. Nothing of her remains in that opening. She is a history that has been removed. She has been replaced by someone else. History here is shown to be something that can be altered, and if we don’t remember our history, we are doomed to have someone make it up for us.

Which brings me to an article that appeared in The Washington Post last Sunday. Vice President Dick Cheney, on the same day that the Defense Department released documents stating that Al-Qaida had not directly cooperated with Iraq before the U.S.-led invasion, spoke on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. Cheney discussed Al-Qaida’s role in Iraq as being present “before we ever launched” and that if the United States did withdraw from Iraq, we would “play right into the hands of Al-Qaida.”

The Post calls what Cheney treats as valid factual information about Iraq an “alleged history” of the conflict, a phrase that really interested me. Is history really so up for grabs? Can we just edit people out of photos, splice people into opening sequences and cherry pick information to create something that isn’t real?

It’s strange to think that all of the past is simply something we’ve organized to advance particular agendas and theories, and that nothing is as real as we would like it to be. I wish the past was actually objective and impossible to manipulate, but I suppose that’s the same as wishing for a B in my Latin class, some sort of hazy, unrealistic, ill-defined dream that will never occur no matter how hard it is thought about.

We make our history every day. What we say happens becomes, in some strange way, what happens. Al-Qaida was involved in Iraq. There was no one next to the official on the balcony. Jo was always on “Melrose Place.” Who needs proof? We can manufacture anything we want. And we do.

Congratulate the hard-working health inspectors of Allegheny County at kjs34@pitt.edu.