Apparently, "The Holocaust" is the name the museum goes by in Washington circles. That locution was changed to "The Holocaust Museum" in the news reports about the shooting of a guard there by a Holocaust denier and all around anti-Semite and racist so as to spare their audiences any confusion about whether it was the event or the memorials to the event which were the subject of the news story. A visitor to the museum from Texas who had been escorting her teenage daughter around the place caught the difference very well. She said that here they were engaged in reviving memories about people being shot and otherwise executed and then they were shocked into dealing with their own security, shots going on around them. A nice way to put the metaphysics of the thing: there are various ways of making present events that occurred in the past. There are museums and there are parades and then again there are people who act out for real in the present those events they thought there were not enough of in the past. So in that sense Brunn succeeded: he did get us all to revisit the past on his terms. He got more hits on his web site than he ever had before, and his mantras were cited by all the news media.

Brunn did not count on someone as eloquent as the current wife of ex-Secretary of Defense Cohen appearing on CNN. Her play about Anne Frank (who, she said, would have been 80 this week) and Emmet Till was to open at the Holocaust Museum last night to an all star audience, including the Attorney General. She pointed out on CNN that the shooting proved that what happened in the past is still not over, that evil people are still out there. She is a modern day equivalent of what was called in the Forties and Fifties "a race man", someone consumed by the injustices done to her own and affiliated races. (She herself is black, having read about Anne Frank in school when she was 15, the same age as Anne Frank, which is the time people of our generation read her book. She knew in her upbringing what the Emmet Till story was about. He was 14.) She also got more air time than would otherwise be the case to state, in short, that we should never forget because those evil people have not gone away.

My first response on hearing the shooter's name was to hope he was not a German national. Germany has done well enough in dealing with its past that it wouldn't need such a setback. My wife pointed out to me that it was also a good idea that he wasn't an Arab, a group that also doesn't need this burden, though I can't help but wonder why Al Qaeda hasn't been able to place some shooters along West End Avenue where they would be sure to get a number of Jews, far more than they would have gotten at the Holocaust Museum, which is visited by busses of school children and also by gentiles from all over the country. The shooter was not smart enough to wait till the evening when he would have bagged some important people. But our home grown terrorists don't seem to be all that good at plotting. Maybe that is an occupational hazard of terrorists: long on emotion and except in rare instances, such as Al Qaeda in its best days, short on planning.

Chris Matthews was appropriately horrified but immediately jumped to the conclusion that something larger is going on, what with the killing of the abortion doctor and the military recruiter. Maybe it is all that pent up rage against the Obama victory. We know the Department of Homeland Security is worried about that. But then Chris Matthews is one of those, like me, who has not recovered from the Kennedy Assassination. He still thinks there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedys. It couldn't have been a series of flukes. People like me think history is more clever than assassins. It, not plotters, is what arranges things.

Calmer judgments were expressed this morning, or maybe it is just that the New York Times tries not to vent. It went with the story on an inner page, only a picture in the bottom right hand corner of the front page. The network morning talk shows treated it as yesterday’s story. Yet the thought lingers that the lady visitor to the museum yesterday had it right. The past keeps trumping the present. Obama has been so successful in introducing a new agenda that is full of new topics and surprises about old ones that we are lulled into thinking we live in a new age. He has shifted the talk in the Middle East from how bad America is to how Arabs and Iranians can live up to his noble Cairo rhetoric, the shoe set on the other foot for a change. America debates bailouts and compensation packages rather than the rights of the free market. Taxing health care benefits is certainly a radical idea—or, I would say, a regressive tax—but it certainly moves the discourse away from whether to back a single payer plan or not.

So it is all the more shocking to watch the afternoon news yesterday and find we are not in a new age at all, but back in Kennedy land. There are leftovers, residues, of past conflicts that will simply not go away. They are appreciated less as a matter of shock than distaste. Isn’t shooting Jews, or trying to, so last century?  Any visitor to the Holocaust museum might have wanted to believe that or at least believe that it only happens in Pakistan to Danny Pearl. Obama has not abolished the past; he is just in the midst of his struggle with it, including the struggle with those who have not moved into the post racial phrase of American history which he has worked so hard to foster and the beginning of whose ascendency his own election marked.