"Fascination With Failure"

I'm in the middle of working on a paper for my 19th Century Europe class about the Chartist Movement. I know none of you care two bits about history, so I'll be brief, because this stuff is sorta necessary to understand the rambling which follows. See, the Chartists were a group of working class boys who got together and demanded political change in the 1830s. They failed. Miserably. They had six points they wanted to see implimented in Parliament, and got none of them. Mind you, five of the six eventually did get passed (they never got annual elections), though not by the Chartists and not for a few decades at the least. But Chartism itself failed completely. Anything on their agenda that was passed wasn't passed because of them.

Funny thing is, historians are fascinated with this movement. This failed movement. Why, I've been wondering? Is it because they shouldn't have failed? Is it because this movement formed the basis for the Marxist interpretation of how proletariat revolutionary movements ought to be organized? Is it because Chartism paved the way for every single working class political movement that followed in England? Or maybe because their goals were eventually realized, even if not by them? Actually, I think it's a combination of these and probably much, much more.

But that's really not the point. The point is that historians are obsessed with this failure, with this movement that petered out because the working class got some social improvements (better wages, shorter hours, etc.) and completely lost interest in politics. History is supposedly written by and for the victors, so why do we care about the losers in this case?

Really, my whole life has been caring about the losers. Well, it's been about casting myself as that proverbial loser, as the martyr who sacrifices his own needs and wants to the greater good. I'm like a Utilitarian, allowing my own happiness to be superceded by the overall greater happiness of the group. All very noble and crap, but why do I allow myself to wallow in my failures so much? Because I do--I am fascinated with my own failures, allowing them to consume me, especially the failures in the romance department. Like the historians who keep writing about Chartism and its impact more than a century and a half after it stopped being relevant, I keep thinking about and dwelling on the wrong turns I've made in my love life over the past five or six years. And there have been many, let me tell you.

But why does any of that matter? Why do I keep thinking about the girl who said "no" my freshman year of college (sorry, girls, plural), or sophomore year, or junior or senior year? Shouldn't it all be water under the proverbial bridge by now? I mean, hell, it wasn't as if any of them were serious prospects, right? Not like I wanted a long-term relationship with them or anything.

Okay, that last bit is a lie, and probably the reason I keep dwelling on this crap. I did want a long-term relationship. In the worst possible way. But it never happened. Why? There were a few girls (three, maybe four or five) who would have thrown themselves at me sans clothing if I'd wanted them to. But those were never the girls I wanted, were they? No, I had to go after the ones who weren't interested in a relationship, or who liked me as a friend, or who thought that God hadn't designated me as "the one" even though they might have feelings for me anyway (which I always thought of as maybe God's subtle way of cluing them in. I dunno, I've always been an advocate of God giving you common sense so that you could use it. That's how God tells you things, not by miraculous brilliant flashes of inspiration). See, years later, though I feel no animosity toward the girls who said such things, I still dwell on their words. Why? It makes less than no sense, really. It's like I'm incapable of moving on with my life, incapable of accepting that these girls were not interested in me the way I was interested in them.

I'm not sure how to deal with this, actually. I'm not sure how to tell the girls I'm interested in that I'm interested in them, or the girls I'm not interested in that I'm not interested in them. Like the historians of Chartism, I'm too busy focusing on the failures to see anything else. I've got bloody tunnel vision.

There's probably some sort of cosmic lesson buried in this. I'm probably supposed to learn to let the past be the past, to recognize when it's time to move on and accept things. But that can be damned for all I care. I like dwelling in the past; hell, I majored in it. And I can't help thinking of the things that could have been had one of those girls said "yes" instead of "no," just as the historians can't help asking "what if the Chartists had succeeded?"

~chaos cricket

Song of the Moment: Toad the Wet Sprocket, "Hobbit on the Rocks"