The Laboratorium : Laying Down History

What's happening in these few days is that we're laying down an iconography. We're picking out the details and the the phrases that will fix these days in our minds. For every "where were you when" point in history, there are the accompanying details, the grassy knolls and bombs homing in on elevator shafts and schoolteachers and lone students facing down lines of tanks. So too, with butterfly ballots and exit polls, and retracted concession calls. These are the symbols that will stand in for this week, the telegraphs of memory.