Trying to
make sense of the two very different, and even opposed, public roles served by
San Diego’s most unique historic site.
Floating
in San Diego’s harbor, just a few hundred yards away from the city’s downtown,
is a hugely singular and compelling public space: the U.S.S.
Midway, a formerly operational aircraft carrier that has (since 2004)
served as a naval and aviation museum. The museum offers visitors at least
three distinct visions into the lives of naval sailors and aviators: on the
flight deck, a number of actual planes and helicopters, many of which the
visitors can sit in; in the hangar beneath (alongside a few more planes),
flight simulators and other re-creations of piloting and wartime experiences;
and below-decks, an elaborately preserved and re-created vision of everyday life
aboard the carrier for its officers, aviators, and sailors. My boys were
particularly struck by the laundry room, with loads of fake clothes tumbling in
the giant washers and dryers, and detailed depictions of the sailors whose job
it was to carry the hundred-pound bags of laundry around the ship.
That
laundry room illustrates what is to my mind the most significant and inspiring
public role of the Midway museum: to
help 21st century visitors understand the experiences and identities
of those men and women who served aboard the carrier and its many sister ships,
at all times but most especially during times of war. As I wrote in my first
Veteran’s Day post (in analysis of the post-World War II film The Best Years of Our Lives), when it
comes to American Studiers and our connections to the American past, there are
few acts of empathy more important than such understandings of what the
experiences of war and military service have entailed; obviously such
experiences are hugely varied, both in different periods/wars and for different
individuals, but nonetheless a museum like the Midway offers a very striking and effective means to create those
connections with past servicemen and women. I’ve visited a number of
battlefields and other wartime historic sites, and would rank the Midway (and particularly its below-decks
exhibits) among the most effective such connection-creators I’ve encountered.
There’s
another side to that connection, though, and it’s one that is to my mind much
less historical and more propagandistic. On the Midway I found it illustrated most succinctly by the placard in
front of one of the flight deck planes; the placard was describing the plane’s
role during the Vietnam War, and noted that it was frequently used for
“close-in bombing” in the war’s later stages. Which is to say, although the
placard was careful not to say this: these bombers almost certainly
participated in President Nixon’s often secret, likely illegal, and thoroughly
despicable carpet-bombing
campaigns of Cambodia and Laos; even if they didn’t, they most
likely dropped napalm and
other weapons of mass deconstruction indiscriminately on North Vietnamese
villages. Such bombings are quite possibly, as I wrote
in my post on Dresden, an inevitable part of war; but that
inevitability does not in any way elide their horrific brutality, and it most
definitely did not make me view the plane being connected to such bombings with
anything other than horror. But in the context of the Midway, with its stated motto of “Live the Adventure, Honor the
Legend,” Vietnam and its bombing raids are folded into that adventurous, honorable,
legendary history—which is perhaps just as disturbing as the bombings
themselves.
A
multifaceted, complex, and vital American Studies, public historic site for
sure! Next Pacific-inspired post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Thoughts on these issues, on the Midway, on historic sites, or on
any related themes for the weekend post?
12/4 Memory Day nominee: Cornell
Woolrich, the crime
and suspense novelist known as the father of noir, not
only for his
books but for the many
influential films that came from them.
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