I just watched the American Experience episode “Influenza 1918.” Good lord. Are you kidding me? I was always vaguely aware of it, but I had no idea that in the ten months of the epidemic 600,000 Americans died. More than all the wars of the century combined – as I’m watching it, all I could think was “how is it possible I didn’t know this? Am I just an idiot (always possible), or for some reason has this just been overlooked, forgotten somehow?
Of course, it was overshadowed by World War I (or, as GIHYB calls it, “The War.”) But finally at the end of the hour I found I was not alone in this thinking.
NARRATION: As soon as the dying stopped, the forgetting began.
CROSBY: It is in the individual memory of a great many of us, but it's not in our collective memory. That, for me, is the, is the greatest mystery: how we could have forgotten anything so horrendous, so massively horrendous, as this, this epidemic which killed so many of us, killed us so fast and our reaction was to forget it.
FANNIN: Why? Why wasn't that part of our memory? Or of our history. I think it's probably because it was so awful while it was happening, so frightening, that people just got rid of the memory. But it always lingers there. As a kind of an uneasiness. If it happens once before, what's to say it's not going to happen again. The more we find out about influenza virus, the more real that fear becomes.
Almost completely forgotten. Amazing. I’ve always cast a skeptical eye towards how we’ve acted following 9/11. It’s all NEVER FORGET!! NEVER FORGET!! etc; you can’t go a day without someone bringing it up to remind us of the horror of it. Yes, it was certainly tragic. But 3,000 people were killed. I read once that 749 US troops being killed during a D-Day TRAINING session. I don’t mean to be callous here, but 3,000 is not 600,000. But as a nation, we seem to love nothing more than wrapping ourselves up in flag-waving, tear-inducing ceremonies and moments to NEVER FORGET the day.
But the above quotes back up what I’ve always kinda thought. 9/11 was bad, sure; but what nobody wants to say out loud is that it wasn’t THAT bad. It was just bad enough for us as a country to embrace our very own “tragedy,” to give ourselves a JFK Assassination date if you will. To give ourselves a reason to practice rituals of collective mourning. It was a tragedy, but it was small enough that we don’t mind commemorating it with any gift shop piece of crap that we can sell. I don’t see shot glasses with pictures of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and I certainly have never seen wifebeaters with INFLUENZA 1918: NEVER FORGET pictures on them. Something that "real" I guess it's easier to just try and forget it. Anything "real enough," we love to collectively hurl ourselves on the casket during the funeral and cause a scene. Fascinating to me.
8 comments:
You liberals can't have it both ways. Iraq is little more than 4-5 D-Day training sessions. The fighting in Iraq would have to continue at its very fiercest for thirty years to equal the death toll in Vietnam. No comparison, no matter what the "reliving the glory of the 70s" protestor-hippies try to do. YORF!
interesting. i dont believe i mentioned iraq. only 9/11. and yet you, MORF, leapt directly from 9/11 to Iraq. hmm. HMMM!!
Apples and oranges...
eggszackly
The connection between 9/11, Iraq, and the 1918 Influenza virus is that this war has killed an estimated 600,000 Iraqi civilians.
last night I was thinking geez, can you imagine something like that, hovering over an entire population of people, children becoming orphans in the streets in the time they go from breakfast to lunch; can you even imagine that happening now?
and then I remembered the Iraq citizens and thought oh yeah, it has. (cue Lee Greenwood video here.)
It's more like comparing Americans and foreigners. The same narrow perspective invades everything that Americans prioritize. We expect the world to stop breathing if a thousand New Orleaners stop killing each other long enough to die in a flood. Yet 70,000 Thais die in the annual monsooons and mudslide and we barely look up from page 9 of the A section. And if we want to prove our skewed causes, we act like the 3000 Iraqui deaths in pursuit of world peace (or domination) are the precious lives of sinless babes, instead of people who willingly put themself in harm's way for something they (and not you the Obama-voting cognescente) believe in. Besides all Republicans know that 9/11 and Iraq are intrinsically connected. YORF!
Assignments
Read Barry's "The Great Influenza"
Stop linking historical, natural disasters with statecraft; the former can educate you as to the precarious nature of man in his state at that moment in time as he grapples with germs; the latter implicates policy choices, be they wise or foolish, vis-a-vis man-made and directed threats emanating from philosophies and interests, such as those of extremist Islamofascism. Otherwise, a Nazi menace becomes no more than polio.
This admonition is non-ideological. Continue with Bush-era hysterics as you deem enjoyable and edifying.
Additionally, stop equating the loss of foreign lives with American lives. We live in a time and place of American exceptionalism, and if you don't subscribe, feel free to cast off your imperial garb for a more appropriate "David Woodley: Super Bowl MVP" T-shirt.
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