Lest We Forget

January 14th, 2010

I’m getting to the point in reading Great Expectations where Pip is starting to settle into his new life as a gentleman and to forget his days as a blacksmith’s apprentice back near the misty marshes and the working class. Having recently returned to Paris, I am beginning to wonder if a voluntary amnesia is something we come down with from time to time when we’ve left one world behind in order to immerse ourselves in a new one. Like Pip, I’m not purposefully forsaking my old life, but I do feel as though there is some sort of portal hovering over the Atlantic that serves as a gate between two completely different worlds. There’s the quiet, pastoral existence I’ve led in Vermont, which I love, and there’s the more cosmopolitan life here in Paris full of hustle and bustle and steeped in history, literature, and the culture of a millennium or two. At first glance, it seems like these two modes of operation are so incompatible that it would take two different people to lead them, but evidently not. After all, here I am.

This somewhat forced memory loss, this redefinition of self at the drop of a hat, is apparently more common in our culture than I had once thought. After an enjoyable birthday dinner for my father, it became clear to me that, as a society, we have largely forgot the foibles we have committed in the past in favor of the more easily digested claptrap that is taught in basic history classes. I know that history is written by the victors and that there’s a lot more story there than anyone would like to admit, but in many high school classrooms, the history that is taught borders on outrageously one-sided. It might not be propaganda if the only sin you commit is omission, but it still sways the hearts and minds of the next generation in a questionable direction.

What am I talking about? Well, it all started with that bomber from Yemen that ended up blowing off more of his junk than any part of the plane while landing in Detroit. Surely these terrorists are just God obsessed nut jobs who are completely off their rockers and take some sort of masochistic pleasure in offing themselves for Allah, right? Well, maybe so, but I think it’s important to realize that it wasn’t really all that long ago that we people of the “modernized” West were waging our own holy wars. Just look at the speech that Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor during the Renaissance, gave to the pope when his nemesis (there is a GREAT, quasi-epic story here which you really need to learn if you don’t already know it) François 1er teamed up with some Turks to foil his imperialistic plot. This great Christian king talked about “killing the infidels” and fighting to restore the righteous rule of God, who he served with every breath (naturally). Actually, not that long ago, it was quite fashionable to send troops into the Middle East to kill off the “heathens” who had done nothing to provoke we “civilized” Christians. It seems we were not only doing the same thing a few centuries ago, but we were using the same language as the terrorist groups are now. If it works, don’t fix it, right?

Don’t get me wrong, I certainly don’t condone terrorism in any form, whether it’s Christians killing Jews or Muslims during the Renaissance or if it’s al-Qaeda trying to kill off the West nowadays; killing to forward religious or political ambitions (which often amount to the same thing) is always, always wrong. I just think it’s important to realize that this type of “lunacy” which the American media vilifies (and rightly so), is one of the skeletons in our closet too. We’re no better, we’ve just moved on to new tricks.

It’s also important to remember where we all came from. Many people in America have clenched their teeth and set themselves steadfast against immigrants, illegal or otherwise, that are “invading” their country. Not only does this not make sense financially as immigrants do a lot of the work that must get done but Americans are no longer willing to do, but it wasn’t so long ago that many of our ancestors were those immigrants coming to the U.S. looking for a better life. In fact, in the middle of the last century, it was common for French Canadians to come down to the U.S., much as Latin Americans do through Mexico these days, in search of work. America was founded by those who were persecuted in their home countries and who sought to create a more perfect union. Identifying oneself now as a “real” American as opposed to one of the “invaders” is the truly un-American thing to do. We are a nation built to welcome the downtrodden and oppressed, a policy which has been largely responsible for ensuring our success as a country, and yet one we so easily forget about when we go to vote (or, more often than not, don’t go to vote).

Maybe amnesia is the only way to move forward. Maybe the weight of history is just too great and there’s just too much to know (God knows every time I learn something new, I realize I know far less than I should). But, as frightfully dull as learning dates and royal family trees can be, there are lessons to be learned there, tucked in dusty tomes on dark shelves in the back of libraries. As humans, we tend to repeat ourselves instead of inventing new tricks, so while the technology might be different, we seem to have been using the same strategies to get what we want for centuries. Learning these patterns means being able to outsmart them.

All of this build-up brings me to what I really wanted to talk about: a little movie called Enemy of the State starring Will Smith and Gene Hackman. It’s a decent action-suspense type film where a senator is murdered because he tries to block new legislation that forwards the political ambitions of a sinister director of an Orwellian agency, blah, blah, blah. It’s entertaining, but we’ve seen this sort of conspiracy theory before. What makes this movie interesting is that, at first glance, it looks like a writer took what the Bush Administration did after 9/11 to civil liberties with the Patriot Act and made a film: a director of the NSA has bypassed the legal process necessary to get phone taps, and is using the full brunt of network technology to track and destroy anyone that gets in his way. Screw warrants and judges, let’s just let the government listen to any conversation they’d like. After all, friendly Uncle Sam would never abuse the privilege, right? Terrifying.

The whole thing seems so obviously based on the Patriot Act and the results of 9/11 that when the bad guy’s birthday is 9/11/1940, it just seemed intentional. I mean, he is destroying civil liberties with his legislation, and the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centers on 9/11/2001 was the beginning of the same erosion of rights in America. It’s just a semi-transparent allegory, right?

Wrong. What sent shivers down my spine is that this movie was released three years prior to 9/11. Cynthia and I were both shocked since when we found out on IMDB as we both had drawn the same conclusion about the movie. It made us wonder if, like airplanes, submarines, and videophones, the plot of this movie went from fantastic fiction to reality when the time was right. No, I’m not suggesting that someone took this movie and said, “Gee, what a great way to bypass those pesky rights Americans have! Let’s use this movie as a blueprint for a totalitarian regime!” (though if anyone was going to do something so obvious, it would have been our former president), but it does make you wonder: what else is lurking out there in the past that explains the present and possibly the future?

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Tags: 9/11, al-Qaeda, America, amnesia, Bush, Charles V, Christianity, Dickens, Enemy of the State, François 1er, Gene Hackman, Great Expectations, Islam, Judaism, Mexico, Orwell, Patriot Act, politics, Quebec, terrorism, Will Smith
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