History

Lost Causes, Lost Effects

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Jeremiah Wright was  back in the pulpit Sunday,  pontificating on the tragic  December anniversary of the 1941 bombing of Hiroshima;  this was  shortly followed, he told his congregation,  by the bombing of Nagasaki.   Wright himself was born in 1941.    Of course,  as  Leno’s untutored-man-in-the-street questions  indicate, we are losing our understanding of  events within our own lifetimes.

Losing dates,  we lose  our understanding  of history for we are less likely to see that ideas have consequences and  effects follow causes.   We  also lose  gratitude for those that went before – whether for  Shakespeare’s words or the bravery of Washington’s troops or  the beauty of ideas that impelled the Puritans or gave  the founders their wisdom.   We don’t understand real courage nor how tolerance comes to us.   Most of all, we lose the sense we only reach the heights we can because we stand on other’s shoulders.   Such ignorance gives us a false pride.

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Pearl Harbor – 67

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Let’s not forget.

If you want information, the Naval Historical Center archive that we linked in last year’s post is as good a place to start as any.

Maybe it’s normal for cultures to lose their memories, or at least to roll them forward to more-recent events. By that logic, perhaps September 11, 2001 should serve as the current generation’s version of December 7, 1941. Does it? I don’t think so. I think we’re losing the memories, old and new, as we lose cultural self-awareness. We’re losing cultural self-awareness because we are losing cultural self-confidence. We are losing cultural self-confidence in large part because we allowed our educational system to be taken over by people who see cultural self-confidence as a crime.

From the Naval Historical Center:

By late November 1941, with peace negotiations clearly approaching an end, informed U.S. officials (and they were well-informed, they believed, through an ability to read Japan’s diplomatic codes) fully expected a Japanese attack into the Indies, Malaya and probably the Philippines. Completely unanticipated was the prospect that Japan would attack east, as well.

Change the details and this story becomes generic. The most important events tend to be unanticipated, and not for anyone’s lack of trying to anticipate them. We should remember this truth even if we fail to remember specific events, though I suspect that the forgetting of events begets the forgetting of principles.

Interesting times ahead.

UPDATE: Via David Foster, this excellent post from Neptunus Lex.

My Annual Duty

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heh

— is to remind us all of this anniversary. Slogan swiped from Rockwell ca 1978.

Gentrification… and the Lie of History

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In the NY Times this weekend they had an article about a one man show by Danny Hoch. The topic of his show was gentrification, and how it impacted natives of New York City. In the article they reviewed him and he had the following quote:

“I did a lot of community arts work through the 90’s, really believing that we were making a difference socially…. Within the last 10 or 15 years, those communities have virtually been erased.”

On a seemingly unrelated line, there is a history of the neighborhood that I live in, the River North neighborhood in Chicago. Here is a link to a document summarizing River North history, notably its time as a manufacturing area called “Smokey Hollow”. This article summarizes the demographic changes in the Near North neighborhood of Chicago by decade.

These types of documents talk about the history of a neighborhood as if it was continuous, with links between each era. However, the reality of urban areas like River North (and the New York of Mr.Hoch) is really quite different. Aside from some projects just north of Chicago Avenue near Cabrini Green, the neighborhood has turned over to a degree that most US residents would find astounding. There are literally no individuals living in River North that were even here ten to fifteen years ago.

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