I was driving home and listening to one of my least favorite shows on National Public Radio – Marketplace – when they did a short feature on history-buff tourism in the United States. A nice break from endless musings on the meaning of housing markets, loan rates, control of inflation, etc. The sort of stuff that bores me, but that’s just me. Also a nice break from the idea of tourism as simply blanking out one’s mind at a beach or amusement park. People going somewhere to learn something or see something they were taught about. Or, better, something about which they taught themselves. I like that. Read the rest of this entry »
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We still have some months left in 2007, so we surely haven’t heard the end of the nostalgic chit-chat about the Summer of Love. You know, how it’s been forty years since “that generation” was defined by certain rock albums, protest movements, and sexual liberation. Todd Gitlin’s fantasies have spilled out everywhere in the popular media. And so on. I’ve already talked about this stuff in a few write-ups: on the “demise of pop music,” celebration of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s album, and that other anniversary, the thirty years since The Clash’s self-titled album. Let me add another critical site: the anniversary this week of the Detroit riots. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the purposes of this writing space, for me, is to draw out the real implications of what seem, initially, to be really rather mundane phenomena. Or to draw connections between what seem to be disconnected cultural obsessions – for example, my claim that immigration border-anxiety is at work in our periodic obsession with celebrity crotch-shots over the past two years. The death of Tammy Faye Messner – a.k.a., Tammy Faye Bakker – is an occasion for a lot of thoughts. I’ll just offer a few here… Read the rest of this entry »
It takes a lot to get people suspicious these days. I mean, seriously, think of all the strange goings-on with Libby, et. al. and how presidents somehow stay in power. So it shouldn’t surprise me that Borders booksellers refuse to stop selling racist cartoons of Tintin in their stores, opting instead to move them to the “adult” section in the U.K. (Does Borders have an adult section in the U.S.? Don’t think so.) Read the rest of this entry »
What curious things we do with history, no? On the one hand, the United States (by no means an exception, here) is so much a culture of forgetting. We’d rather imagine the pain of the past to be from another world entirely (it’s not) than engage in a difficult conversation. On the other hand, there is stuff like this: the (re-) sailing of the Amistad, retracing the old slave trade route. That seems like a desire to remember. How couldn’t that (re-) sailing remember? Forgetfulness and the desire to remember. Both typical and unexpected. At the same time. Read the rest of this entry »
I posted a week or so back on the two Flight 93 memorials – one actual, one in plan – in Shanksville, PA. In remembering so much sadness in one site, everything is at stake. This is only more urgent when we consider that this is our memorial, a national site of memory. And so The Weekly Standard’s headline was right to propose this statement, which is then the question answered by the article: “The Memorials We Deserve.” Read the rest of this entry »
So, Alabama has joined Maryland, North Carolina, and Virginia in offering official state apologies for slavery. Very interesting. It is easy to be snarky about these sorts of gestures or read in them cynical aims, etc., but I think apology deserves a serious bit of consideration. Apology is no small thing. The fact that no Republican supported this apology reminds us that there is real symbolic something to public apology. More directly, as we know from our personal lives, a sincere apology can transform a friendship or love relationship by reckoning with a hurtful past event or events. How this translates into the political realm, however, is where things get even more complicated. Read the rest of this entry »
Of all places, The Weekly Standard has a really interesting article on memorializing the plane crash in Pennsylvania on 11 September 2001. The “Flight 93″ site. I find the article compelling because it brings out just how impossible such memorials are in terms of mass consumption. To be honest, I’m always puzzled about what might be the proper strategy. That said, I have a few ideas about what is wrong with both of the existing memorials…and maybe any national memorial whatsoever. Read the rest of this entry »