Replay History

Bestselling historian and author Ken McGoogan delves into dictatorships of the twentieth century to sound this crucial alarm about the possibility of democratic collapse in the United States and its implications for Canada.

Could there have been television without California? California without television? The one shows the other: the ostentatiously novel singularity of the place and the seemingly self-effacing transparency of the medium. Yet if television and California both promise again and again to offer us something new, young, immaculate in its transience — a pure surface that will never get caught in the ditch of time — they are also both haunted through and through: by the itinerant contents of the past that they cannot banish, by memories of the infantile-perverse utopian fantasies that taunt us in constant replay (“If you’re going to San Francisco…,” “two girls for every guy”), by the contradiction played out in the very gesture of dismissing history and leaving the dead to bury the dead.