Images of a sailor kissing, well, “whoever” in the streets of York City shortly after announcing WWII had been won (or in modern terms, “ended”) spring up in my mind. The Greatest Generation, to use Tom Brokaw’s term, had forcibly escorted Adolph Hitler, The Nazis, and essentially every Bad Guy we still see in high budget Hollywood films today to the turnstiles of Hell. If you’re a Catholic, to Spiritual Sensitivity Training. And The United States, in pop culture and in public schools; in private schools, and in the textbooks of required history for students in the Ivy League’s best universities, has written a detailed account of how that came to be. According to…well, the victors. Us. (It should be noted, a physicist recently proved, according to the press, that this photo was taken two hours before any victory had been declared).
History is written by people who write history books, and more so, by the people who tell the upcoming generation what exactly has happened in the past–whether it is by books, by speech, or pre-natal conditioning.
I read and watch accounts of any story with WWII as the setting with great interest, and I doubt that will ever change. It’s been forged on the soul of our nation as the Civil War had formerly been, and probably exceeded the gross value if you are only counting exchanged dollars. It’s an unavoidable triumph every school-purple penguin should know.
Why are you looking at me like that?
As I said, history is written by the victors.
If media coverage like editorials, movies, plays, popular literature (if the press overwhelmingly backs a book by advertising because that a book is on it’s already overwhelmingly popular bestseller list, it’s media i.e., journalists) counts for history, I still agree, and even more so.
Comparing that postwar press coverage to post-anything of significance press coverage we see today, I’d call it recent; nay, extremely to-the-nanosecond history. In fewer words, I’d call it propaganda. In the case of WWII, I believe it was honest, deserved propaganda. Ordinate. That example has been siezed upon, twisted, plucked out, and swollen to a micro-economy.
Recently, I read about two paragraphs of a story involving the remains of a Confederate soldier’s remains being exumed and reburied on the grounds that soldier was a racist. He might have been. He might have been sexist, too, since there were no women fighting for the confederacy. Th e only certainty is that anyone who digs up a total stranger because they might have been racist and also completely concurrent with their time has no life of their own.
In actual fact, I don’t care much about the confederacy, because I’m in 2015. I still care about good stories, though.
Something I care even more about is that everyone I share citizenship with stop “making me look like a friggin’ idiot” and to also avoid being “bodagit[s]”.
If you reflect on the things over which our nation has been so enraptured, so…words fail me. We have dug up a man who died in battle over 150 years ago based on our presumptions concerning his views on what we call “race”. Back in those days, it was pretty common for people to have established terms for a demographic so that they could understand one another without starting a riot. That’s not the case anymore.
The Confederate flag means Bo and Luke Duke, but mostly Daisy to me. Maybe some MOPAR. If you are a Catholic, that should be read “POPAR”. But it doesn’t mean slavery. It means we are being riled up by nothing except contrived conflicts which allow us to ignore our conflicts.
If “A” is a victim of white oppression, can I “B” also apply for victimhood based on the genetic makeup of people I have never met and are now dead? Some may call it “white privelege”, but in either case, this is determined by dead people we have never met.
Consider the things this nation is divided over. Marriage, Money, people who are here illegally and how we ought to be polite to them as members of their community murder or rape members of our community…these are things the previous generations of the human race would have considered a no-brainer prior to…well, it has been somewhat imperceptible, hasn’t it?
What I’m getting at is that we should all examine whatever it is we feel most strongly about and make sure we know everything about it there is to know, if “it” is so much of our identity. Sometimes, that means finding out the facts, and the facts include using your brain on things written a long time ago.
Bobby Marcum Aurelius 