They were all at it last week – what were you doing when Kate and Will got married? And now, like clockwork – what were you doing when you heard bin Laden was no more?
Began I guess with the death of JFK. As it happens I can remember where I was – standing in the kitchen of the home I had grown up in, a transistor radio on the table, an announcement made. Yes, sorry, that’s it.
I remember the room where I saw the moon landing (at work at the university, a number of us had managed to find a tv in a common room).
Remember 9/11 (watching a sheep give birth and care for a lamb, while horror unfolded on the tv screen) clearly. Odd how the events you are meant to remember your locality for are mostly American ones now. Only natural I suppose. Once upon a time the British would have been asking where were you when you heard Mafeking had been relieved. The Romans I suppose noting their position when Julius Caesar bit the paving stones.
Where was I? Oh yes. The “you will never forget where you were when you heard …” media entertainment narrative, for that is all it has become, serves these days to underline our role in society. First there are the actors, the big men (and occasionally women) who are presidents, prime ministers, kings, and who make things happen, while we, the little people, simply receive and observe the results of those actions. Know your place, little people.
And secondly the media reflect and reinforce this view, presenting “history” as it unfolds, as a series of events created by the powerful rulers. No linkages, no contexts, no cause and effect, simply isolated events, a passing caravan, moving on after the dogs bark.
And they were certainly barking after bin Laden, that whole awful crew you had hoped were safely in crypts – Howard, Blair, Bush, Cheney – suddenly, the sun safely set, appeared on tv screens again, all claiming to have personally pulled the trigger, the bullets just having taken a long time to reach the target. Howard crowing about how this disproved the “naysayers”. And all of this retrospective triumphalism, thanks to the media’s “where were you” moment, conducted without any serious questioning of these self-serving narratives. Like, if, as many people said at the time and since, bin Laden could eventually be stopped by a combination of good intelligence gathering and a kind of law enforcement/special ops approach (a team in just 2 helicopters!), then why on earth did these appalling people make such a mess of Afghanistan, and an even greater mess of Iraq? Why the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of economy and society in those countries? Why the lies about WMDs and oil?
Do any of us know what we were doing as each civilian was killed or maimed in the name of a phony war on terrorism?
If not, why not?
Don’t play the media game any more. It’s time they asked what Obama was doing while I tended my sheep; what William Windsor was doing while you had a significant event in your life. All of our actions and events contribute to the flow of history, the construction of society, more than the actions of the few big players. In the long run, anyway.
