On sale now, one day only

The Berlin Wall arrived in suburban Maryland in a small velvety bag of deeply hued burgundy pulled tightly shut with a golden drawstring.

At an upscale department store in late 1989, hundreds of these bags carrying bits of the Communist Bloc were shipped in and arranged as part of a makeshift display that was nothing more than a sturdy table with some cheap polyester fabric draped over it. The store employees had placed the display on the table next to a lower-level entrance to the young men’s department because they didn’t know where else in the store they should sell the Berlin Wall. Maybe the second-floor jewelry displays, or the furnishings department. Perhaps the cosmetics counter.

Weeks before, I must have seen images of the wall being smashed with hammers and covered in the beer and champagne of celebration. I probably listened to newscasters intoning serious words with self-aware importance. But all I can remember clearly is receiving my first lesson in geo-politics and capitalism in the form of a chip of concrete in a fancy bag — all of the ideological differences of Cold War existence compressed into that quarter-sized chunk in my 13-year-old hand.

“A commodity is at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing,” Karl Marx observed, “but its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” Standing at the cash register at the mall, holding that bag in my hand, I got a lesson in commodity fetishism long before I read Marx. As the outer reaches of the evil empire were being busted up at its borders, we went to department stores and bought them, or traces of them — the apparent death masks of authoritarian communism. I started to get a sense of how the ideality of history could be transformed into the materiality of the commodity. “Metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” frozen in concrete, historical forces captured in a small bag. Although it must have been hard for many East Germans to imagine, entrepreneurs would turn anything into a trinket at the mall. And we would buy it.

When I left the store and returned home, I placed my bit of Berlin Wall in the top drawer – my own private vault – next to other things that I thought were important but didn’t yet fully understand. It sat next to stacks and stacks of brightly colored swim team ribbons, which I seemed to win for every single race I ever entered, regardless of how well I did. Blue, red, and white were the first three places, of course, but then the color spectrum broke-up in unexpected ways: green, yellow, gold, violet, maroon. How did violet come to symbolize seventh place? And weren’t there only six lanes in most of the pools we swam in?

To the right of the ribbons and the burgundy bag was my baseball card collection, or rather, the cream of my collection — only the rookie cards and the hard-to-find ones with printing errors. I kept my lesser cards in shoeboxes stacked in the closet, but the right side of my top drawer was reserved for the cards that the price guides told me were the valuable ones. I could never really grasp why they were so valuable, but still I kept them organized and preserved in special plastic sheets inside of a hard protective binder. I had a Wade Boggs rookie card because I’d tricked one of my third grade classmates into believing that he’d rather have a ninth-season Dave Winfield. As a kid, I spent hours daydreaming about the value of my mint condition Wade Boggs rookie. After hearing that a single Honus Wagner card from the beginning of the century had recently sold at a higher price than most mansions, I was convinced that Wade Boggs and my other rookies would pay for my first house. I was too young and unsophisticated to know that I had gotten into the market at the height of the great 1980s baseball card bubble and that I was doing my part to inflate it.

Tucked behind the cards was a nice wristwatch that my parents had bought me to wear on special occasions. When my mother first gave it to me (not on my birthday, not on Christmas, not for any minor holiday) I recognized it for what it was: a sign that I was expected to dress-up and look like a respectable middle-class kid every once in a while. Before the wall fell, the watch could have probably bought me a small motorcycle in East Germany, but I took it for granted and didn’t think it was much of a gift. It was just another object to store in my dresser — expensive perhaps, but not truly valued.

The smallest item, but the most resonant and mysterious in my mind, was the combat ribbon my father had won for service in Vietnam. It was a piece of metal covered in colored fabric that you would slide onto a thin metal bar and pin on your uniform, a one-inch representation of warfare. Why I wanted it was as mysterious to me as its meaning or purpose, although I had a vague sense that it offered up some difference between my father’s experience and my life of suburban comfort. It held some remnant of an earlier, more violent phase of the Cold War.

It was still years before I would understand the importance of competition and reward in a capitalist society, the ways that unreasonable enthusiasm could lead to inflated market prices, the relationship between personal appearance and class identity in a “classless” society, or how fears of communism and the theory of containment led young American soldiers into Southeast Asia. But my piece of the Berlin Wall helped me gain perspective on the other curious items in my Cold War cabinet of wonders. As the seriousness of life under authoritarian communism was being dissolved by the fleeting desires of the marketplace, the metaphysical subtleties and ideological niceties of the objects in my drawer became clearer — they stood out in relief against the newly shifting background.

The disparate items in my dresser remained held together in their awkward relationship — only slowly revealing their order and unity — until finally they were pulled apart again. I cleaned out my childhood room definitively soon after graduating college. After two days of marathon sorting, throwing-away, donating, and boxing, I finally moved out of my parent’s house for good. A few of the boxes made their way to my new apartment in Brooklyn. I think my piece of the Berlin Wall is packed away in one of the boxes in the attic.

The Newseum, decked out in all its First Amendment glory

There’s a 4-D movie theatre in the colossal Newseum in Washington D.C. that attempts, with the aid of all the tricks and gadgets of modern-day interactive moviegoing, to paint journalism as the noblest and most exciting of professions. Whether journalism is noble or not, I’ll leave for others to decide (though the preponderance of celebrity-news round-up shows would seem to argue for the latter), but as for its being exciting, that I can vouch for. For the last five years, my life, like those of the three “stars” of the Newseum’s “I-Witness” re-enactments – Revolutionary War chronicler and free-speech advocate Isaiah Thomas; trailblazing investigative journalist Nellie Bly; and Edward R. Murrow, who broadcast radio reports from a London rooftop during the Nazi Blitz – has been an endless stream of explosive moments and high intrigue that only 3-D glasses, B-grade special effects, and bucking movie-theatre chairs could ever do justice to. It’s one thing for a viewer to feel an adrenaline rush while dodging Red Coat fire at Lexington or Luftwaffe fire in England, but just imagine the excitement one would feel experiencing in four dimensions the simulated joy of jumping from my bed directly into my desk chair at one in the afternoon to read e-mails and then stare idly at the wall until the desire for breakfast becomes overpowering.

This way, ladies and gentlemen; please form an orderly queue.

This cinematic oversight aside, whoever came up with the idea for the Newseum is a curatorial genius, if only because its mandate is so broad as to be almost infinite, or perhaps nonexistent. Technically, anything that’s part of “news history” will do, meaning just about anything from human history will do, from explications of the principles of reporting to exhibits about Hurricane Katrina and Woodstock. As long as a journalist was there, or as long as the world of news reporting can somehow be tied in, any exhibit will be welcome. It really is brilliant: a museum with a mandate to cover everything.  And who wouldn’t pay $15 to see everything?

So what do you, the visitor, get for your money?

A 74-foot marble carving of the First Amendment on the museum’s outer wall (just down Pennsylvania Ave. from the White House, like 45 words of warning to anyone who takes up residence there), exhibits on reportorial ethics, a Great Books Gallery featuring “influential and historic works on freedom and the rights of man,” an enormous map pointing out the status of the press in every country of the world, video footage featuring famous newspeople and politicians explaining what a free press means to them, and quotes from Thomas Jefferson, Cato, John Locke, Thurgood Marshall and dozens of other great thinkers spread throughout the museum reminding visitors of the importance of the journalistic independence.

This is the Newseum as institutional defender of America’s Constitutional ideals: a museum for the people, by the people, and reminding the people.

Then you’ve got exhibits on modern-day media bias; video footage of newsmen from Fox, NBC, and NPR defending their impartiality and impugning their colleagues’ lack thereof; a hallway with hundreds of front pages from international daily newspapers; an interactive newsroom, where visitors can sit behind an anchor’s desk or pick up a pen and paper and see what it’s like to be a real reporter; and the Internet, TV, and Radio Gallery, an look at ever-changing technology and the effects it’s had on the industry of news-gathering.

This is the Newseum as timely cultural marker: un-stuffy place-to-be, tuned in to the concerns of the day.

And last you get an exhibit about Woodstock and the birth of rock journalism, chunks of the Berlin Wall and the World Trade Center, an entire room devoted to the hunt for John Wilkes Booth, a sports theatre, a history of Pennsylvania Ave., a South African ballot box, a gallery of Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs …

This is the Newseum as whatever it wants to be and whatever gets bodies through the door. This Newseum features something for everyone: conspiracy theorists, history buffs, nostalgists, sports fanatics, lovers of liberty, lovers of fine art. This Newseum is omnivorous, ecumenical, comprehensive, and diffuse.

At one point late in my visit I was watching footage of Tom Brokaw reporting from the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and when the screen went dark, I was left staring at my reflection. At first I laughed; I had spent the previous hour feeling pretty proud of myself for being part of such a noble profession, but I realized it was ridiculous to think that what I do and what Tom Brokaw has done over the years could even be spoken of in the same sentence. Scribbling notes down in my little notebook in that enormous monument to journalistic integrity, I reminded myself: “This man reports from moments of real historical weight, and you write parodies about playing basketball in your pajamas.”

Then I realized that the distinction didn’t matter. Journalists, writers, reporters, unbiased witnesses, critical thinkers: We’re all getting swallowed up by the black hole of Internet dilettantism, social-networking literary democratization, and up-to-the-second celebrity sensationalism.

And this is the Newseum as natural history museum, exhibiting artifacts from humanity’s past. And journalists as we’ve known them will soon be like those neanderthal tribes in their glass display cases: on the hunt but made out of wax.