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Thursday, December 07, 2006
Forgetting Pearl
Harbor
PSAYINGS.5A.19. Someone emailed to take me to task for ignoring the anniversary of Pearl Harbor in today's post. The truth is, I think it's time we all forgot the events of December 7, 1941. There's something nervy, even presumptuous, about commemorating the catalyst for a great national feat of courage and resolve when we have so utterly forgotten the lesson represented by the initiating catastrophe. The people who rose up as one to defeat Nazism and Japanese militarism were not the people we are today, and if we would honor their memory, the best way is to avoid identifying ourselves with their sacrifices and their heroic deeds. Leave that to the U.S. military, who alone deserve this association with the past. Let their memorials be private and closed to our convenient eyesight.
Yes, we've had our own Pearl Harbor, but it's clear by now that it will take two or three of them to reinvigorate the American spine. The events of September 11, 2001, have been reduced in our common consciousness to a mere disastrous loss of life, as essentially causeless and irremediable as a tornado. We don't hold national days of remembrance for tornadoes or earthquakes or plane crashes. The grief belongs exclusively to those who have lost friends and family, and when those who remember the victims are gone too, the events are consigned to the pages of the almanac. In this context, there is no more 9/11, just as there is no more Pearl Harbor. If we as a people are unable to translate the loss into a determination to conquer the enemy who dared inflict the loss, remembrance is none of our business.
Consider the contrast. Television news is still willing to show us footage of the annihilating Japanese air attack on American ships in 1941, but they have conspired together to stop showing explicit footage of what happened in lower Manhattan five years ago. Why? Too traumatic to the family and friends of the victims. Which argues implicitly that all of us other Americans were not victims of 9/11. Remembrance is none of our business. It belongs purely to the isolated and arrogantly separatist American province called New York City.
Those other Americans tolerated 450,000 battlefield deaths to end the threat finally recognized on December 7, 1941. We have conclusively demonstrated that we can't tolerate one percent of that number to resist a threat that is openly bent not just on our conquest, but our annihilation as a culture.
Find something fun to do on 12/7 and 9/11 from here on in. Believe me, that's a far more appropriate response than any attempt to participate. The tears of the faithless can only soil the wounds we refuse to treat.
UPDATE. La Malkin wants you to remember Pearl Harbor. Decide for yourselves which of us is right.
