First of all, a very large 'thank you' from moi to any and all who have served our country, and to those who are currently doing the same. We owe you a debt so great, much like the current federal debt, I doubt it will ever be fully repaid.
Thank you.
Second, I will point you to an interesting opinion piece by Niall Ferguson from this weekend's Financial Times. Ferguson makes the claim that too much remembrance is a bad thing.
A small sampling:
{...}All acts of remembrance are religious in origin. The great monotheistic faiths practise ritualised commemoration of their founders, their heroes or martyrs, their trials and tribulations. In any global list of holidays, it is still the holy days that predominate. A characteristic feature of modernity has been the effort of political entities – first empires, then nation states and more recently political parties and pressure groups – to create secular versions of commemoration. The British remembrance of the first world war is just one of the more successful bids to sacralise the political..Commemoration and remembrance are, you might be forgiven for assuming, better than amnesia. But they should not be confused with memory or folklore, much less with history. Nor should we overlook the fact that, in certain contexts, official remembrance may have the effect (often intentional) of keeping old grievances and ancient hatreds from fading.
Our memories are more or less spontaneously constructed as we store experience in our brains, though we are in some measure taught how to do this (how to think historically about our own lives) as we grow up. Folklore is what our relatives and older friends tell us about the past. History is – or should be – the accumulation of verifiable knowledge about the past as it is researched by professional scholars and disseminated through books, other media and institutions of learning.
An act of commemoration is something else. It is usually initiated by elites (King George V took a keen interest in Remembrance). It nearly always has a purpose other than not forgetting something or someone. And yet its success or failure – measured by its endurance over time – depends on how far it satisfies human appetite for myth. Precisely for that reason, commemoration can involve the systematic misrepresentation, or even outright invention, of past events.
In the case of Remembrance, the mythical invention was that the industrialised slaughter of four and a quarter years had been a worthwhile sacrifice for the sake of “civilisation”. The possibility was firmly suppressed – though raised at the time by a rebellious minority – that the war could have been avoided and had done nothing to resolve the fundamental imbalance of power on the European continent. It was precisely this insistence that the war had been a necessary tragedy, not a futile blunder, that gave Remembrance its potency. Without the tragic undertone, the rituals and symbols might have lacked force.{...}
Go read the whole thing.
I can see his point but I'm not sure he drove it home in the correct way.
Discuss.
Third, also in this weekend's FT is Mrs. Moneypenny's column, which, for my devoted UK Cake Eater readers, might be of interest. Mrs. Moneypenny, for those who might not have heard of her, is a weekly columnist in the FT and is an investment banker (I think. That she deals with finance that's WAY above my head is pretty much all I can say for certain.) with a fondness for the Chelsea Garden show, Krug Champagne, and shooting parties. She is married and a mother to three offspring, who are named Cost Centre #1, Cost Centre #2, and, obviously, Cost Center #3, due to their expensive nature. I usually enjoy Mrs. M.'s column, as she makes some rather salient points about life.
Anyway, Mrs. M. is on a bit of a crusade. To wit:
{...}You may recall from a previous column that I remain astonished that Sir Keith Park is not personally commemorated – Park ran the air defence of London and south-east England, and it was largely thanks to him that so much of London, including so many Wren churches, remains with us today. The Battle of Britain monument on the Embankment bears his name, but no statue of the man himself exists anywhere.Since I wrote that piece, on Battle of Britain Day, things have moved on. A benefactor has offered (through the letters column of the FT) to underwrite the cost of erecting a statue, and a campaign is under way to position it on the vacant fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, at the heart of the city that Park saved and within sight of New Zealand House (Sir Keith was born in New Zealand).
Trafalgar Square is under the control of the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, and he has delegated the decision on what occupies the fourth plinth to a group of commissioners, who seem convinced that what London needs is a series of increasingly abstract works of art. None of those commissioners could enjoy a free London now were it not for Sir Keith and those who served in the RAF in the summer of 1940. Perhaps we, and they, should listen to our monarch and thank those who fought so hard for our freedom – and what better way to do so than with a statue of Sir Keith Park?
To join me in campaigning for the statue, write to the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group, c/o Greater London Authority, City Hall, The Queen’s Walk, London SE1 2AA.
You can read more about Sir Keith here.
I'd write a letter to the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group, but I doubt, with a Minnesota postmark on the envelope, they'd pay much attention. So, if you live in the UK and think that the gentleman who saved London from burning to the ground deserves his own statue in Trafalgar Square, by all means send them a letter stating so.
If not, well, you've got issues. But I hereby authorize you to send them a letter for no other reason than to verbally whip them for organizing under a name like "Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group." Bleh.
Posted by Kathy at November 11, 2007 10:36 PM | TrackBack