It has long been a focal interest of mine to see how cause and effect operate in human history. And it has occurred to me that this Northam Yearbook Affair may be one of those strange times when big history can hinge on tiny things.
A couple of past examples of this mismatch of cause and effect:
Had Palm Beach County in 2000 presented voters with a normal ballot that wouldn't confuse a whole bunch of people who thought they were voting for Gore, American history would have taken an entirely different course: with Gore as President, the Iraq War never have happened.
Had Archduke Ferdinand only taken a different turn, the history of the 20th century would have been completely different.
And now with Northam, there's a scenario -- representing a similar mismatch of cause and effect -- that seems to me entirely plausible.
It seems entirely plausible that Northam's second take on the picture -- that he was NOT one of the men in that picture, and thus should not have been on his page in the yearbook -- is valid.
One can imagine how the yearbook is getting assembled by these med students -- overworked for years -- and as they're going through their stack of pictures, they come across this picture of someone in blackface and someone in a Ku Klux Klan outfit.
Being the kind of guys they were, they thought, "This picture is hilarious. We simply must get it into the yearbook." (The fact that the picture is in the yearbook -- whatever Northam's role -- gives us a glimpse of the racism-influenced mindset of a time not so terribly long ago when a bunch of graduating Virginia Medical students could regard such a picture of race-relations as some sort of joke. And they could like the idea of such a picture being part of their self-presentation.) In this scenario, we can infer how much they valued the picture because they were not deterred from publishing it by the problem they faced: "Who the hell are these guys?" Not deterred, I'm imagining, because they figure, "Nobody can tell anyway, so we'll just put it on somebody's page. It doesn't matter if he's one of the guys or not. And this is too good," these young men think, "not to use." So in that spirit, these time-pressed, overworked med students -- seeing no need to exert themselves to find out who the guys in the picture were -- just found a spot and put it there, secure in the assumption that it didn't matter whose page got the picture. And then, 35 years later, this casual decision -- this small and random event -- explodes in the life of an important political leader, and indeed for a time onto the national stage. "What does it matter WHERE we put it?" Cause and effect can have the strangest shapes. The unexpected time bomb. The small gesture that, by some sort of grace, yields great fruits. Part of how history gets made. A tiny act can sometimes have major consequences.