[In honor of National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, a repeat post on how we remember that attack and days
like it. Add your thoughts, please!]
On the complex, challenging, and crucial question of how we remember our
infamous days.
Few presidential statements have been proven as accurate by the subsequent
decades as Franklin Roosevelt’s description of December 7th,
1941 as “a date which will live in infamy.” We have a fair number of national
memory days of one kind or another, of course, but I can’t think of another
that remembers anything that’s anywhere near as explicitly negative and
destructive as does National Pear Harbor Remembrance Day (although of course
Columbus Day would qualify from the counter-argument side). The only potential equivalent would be September 11th, which
doesn’t currently have an official remembrance day but likely will get there—and for that reason, along with many others, it’s worth considering how we
remember an event like Pearl Harbor, and what the stakes are.
In the Atlantic essay that I
hyperlinked under “likely will get there,” historian and educator Kevin Levin argues that, as the essay’s synopsis puts it, “Over
time, our memory of national catastrophes becomes less personal and more
nuanced.” But Levin’s comparison for September 11th is to our
national memories of the Civil War, and I would argue that there’s an overt and
key difference between that horrific event and either 9/11 or Pearl Harbor:
everyone involved in the Civil War was an American (whether they wanted to
admit it at the time or not), and so after the event it became and has
continued for the next 150 years to be important (for
better and for worse reasons) for us to find ways to produce more nuanced and less divisive
memories of it. Obviously there are American communities of which we could say
the same when it comes to Pearl Harbor (ie, the
Japanese Internment) and 9/11 (the
anti-Muslim backlash), but the fact remains that those infamous events were caused by
nations and entities outside of America, and so it’s entirely possible for us
to continue to define them through a more explicitly divided, us vs. them
frame.
Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily, or at least not absolutely—Pearl
Harbor and 9/11 were both, in their definitely distinct ways, attacks on the
United States by such external forces, and there’s no way we can or should try
to remember them outside of such a frame. While I would certainly emphasize
remembering those who were lost in the attacks, rather than focusing our
attention on the attackers, that shift wouldn’t change the fundamental frame so
much as (potentially) produce different emotional responses to it (mourning
rather than anger, for example). The White House statement hyperlinked at
“National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day” in the intro section above illustrates
this kind of emphasis and emotion nicely, I’d say. But to come back to Levin’s
argument, I would agree with him that more nuance—more understanding of the
multiple perspectives and histories contained in an event, and the various and
often competing causes and elements that lead up to it, and the equally varied
and in many cases still unfolding results—should always be part of our goal for
such remembrance as well. That it’s far more difficult to reach for such nuance
when it comes to these external attacks (compared to the Civil War) only makes
the effort that much more valuable.
Next series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? How should we remember days and events like this?
memory.loc.gov
ReplyDelete