Public discourse and remembrance: how could we forget?

[lemit]

Let me get a couple of things out of the way:

 

First, I am guilty of what I want to discuss here: check out my thread on the Holocaust. I have become more sensitive since I started that thread and have realized that many people seem not to have forgotten the Holocaust after all. In my own defense--against myself--I wanted to focus on the dangers of repeating the Holocaust (the event, not the word) and how some German writers dealt with remembering things so unpleasant that people wanted to forget, and by forgetting might have endangered that repetition. But in general terms, we haven't forgotten the Holocaust, thanks in part to the people who deny it ever happened, bless their shriveled hearts. Second, the nervousness I felt about starting the Holocaust thread is nothing compared to my nervousness in starting this one, but here goes:

 

The current Newsweek (June 15, 2009) is edited by Guest Editor Stephen Colbert. I am a fan of his work, but a line of his that is used as a caption for the title page got my attention:

 

"My character and I both think it's a shame that we're not talking about the troops anymore."

 

With apologies to just about everybody in the U.S., when did we stop talking about the troops? It seems they are discussed by all the media all the time. It seems that you can't go to a store without seeing something about remembering the troops, or about how we've forgotten about the troops.

 

But the troops aren't my main focus here. (That doesn't mean that I've forgotten about them or that I wish I could forget about them.) The discussion I want to start here is about the buzzwords that make us lose focus and are thoughtlessly repeated despite their loss of value. If we constantly talk about the troops and having forgotten about the troops, we create the danger of devaluing that discourse to the point that we do in fact forget about the troops except as an abstraction. Talking about the troops or talking about talking about the troops (or the veterans or the children or even the "fallen") eventually becomes just so much white noise. If you think that can't happen, try listening carefully to the noise your car makes and just how loud that noise really is. You don't notice it when you're driving, do you?

 

So, am I insane, unpatriotic, evil, or some combination of the three? If you agree the phenomenon exists, do you think it poses a danger to public policy? Do you know of other people or things that are in danger of being over-remembered?

 

--lemit

 

p.s. Do you remember the Alamo or the Maine? Really? (I know there are other examples of that kind of patriotic slogan, but I can't remember them right now.)