This week I started reading a wonderfully thought-provoking book by Thomas de Zengotita entitled Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It. The book opens with this intriguing thought:
Ask yourself this: did members of the Greatest Generation spend a lot time talking about where they were and what they did and how they felt when they first heard the news from Pearl Harbour? People certainly remembered the moment, and a few anecdotes got passed around - but did a whole folk genre spontaneously emerge? Did everyone feel compelled to craft a little narrative, starring me, an oft-repeated and inevitably embellished story-for-the-ages reporting on my personal experience of the Event? Or did they just assume that Pearl Harbour and its consequences were what mattered, and talk about that.
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So what made the difference? Why the emergence of that folk genre, there "where was I when the Event took place" story? Why didn't members of the Greatest Generation craft fables of their personal experiences of the Attack on America in 1941?
Because they weren't there, that's why? (There are other reasons too, but they are derivative, you'll see.) For starters, be assured that people who were physically at Pearl Harbour on the Day of Infamy did have stories of their personal experiences, and told them to each other, to reporters, in letters home - and repeated them as the years went by, be sure of that. Such stories are primal, anthropologically grounded. But people who just heard about Pearl Harbour on the radio and read about it in the papers didn't feel inclined to tell those stories because it didn't feel as if it had happened to them, personally, at all. At bottom, that's the difference. It's that simple.
I would encourage you to read this book too. To find out more, visit the book's website here, or Amazon.com here.
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