UNCOVERED DOCUMENTS FROM 1988
Time is difficult to grasp, but history is even trickier to hold on to. It sometimes seems like reality is stranger than the worlds we imagine in stories and films, it takes cues from fiction and makes the imaginary seem comfortable in comparison. I love the foggy areas in between fact and fiction, where we're not sure what's going on. The above bulletin board comes from just such a place. In the face of epochal climate change, it sometimes feels like we are an audience watching an ecological endgame - surely something worthy of the history books. But current threats are outside the
jurisdiction of historians, we can only live through them; unless we write our own histories.
Uncovered Documents from 1988 displays a series of correspondences between President Reagan and then UN secretary general Javier Perez de Cuellar. The complete letters can be read below, followed by a summary of the events at hand:
Complete Correspondences Between the UN and USA (pdf file)
In 1988 the UN became aware of a report on global warming (1988 having the highest average temperatures yet recorded) and took swift action. With the threat of nuclear destruction the UN demanded complete and uncompromising change in the global economy. Many nations acceded, but President Reagan shook off the UN's threat and cited their general lack of authority of the Superpower of the West. Unbeknownst to Reagan, the UN had been constructing a secret missle facility on an unnamed Pacific island, and was proved to hold no bluff as they proced to anhilate the American Midwest and hold major cities and production sites at atomic gunpoint unless the US halted its wasteful lifestyle and adopted a renewable economy. Judginf from the fire-scorched letter concluding the bulletin board, things did not end well for President Reagan and the US.
Is this fiction less believable than reality? How hard is it to imagine the current climate crisis resulting in nuclear destruction? And just what does it say about us that world powers have not taken global warming as seriously they did in this fantasy? In creating this alternate history I fabricated letters, maps, and illustrations; resulting in an attack on the idea that history can be easily read from archival documents. Our world is not simple, and the relationship between its reality and imaginings is a complex one.
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