Memorials Make Tools

Japanese America Claiming his Americanness after Pearl Harbor.  Sneaky Jap.
Photograph by Dorothy Lange

Memorials are made to help us remember certain events, not always a tragic, or people, most likely dead.  That seems a fitting way to honor people and events that have had great significance for posterity.  It keeps the memories of these people and events alive long after they occurred.  However, I have a problem with people using memorials either to obscure certain facts that occurred or worse; completely change or omit the facts about past events.  What comes to mind, apropos, is Pearl Harbor.  The Memorial and all other celebrations surrounding that day don’t consider the events that led up to and followed that wretched day; American expansion into the Pacific caused an inevitable confrontation between the two big dogs in Michael Vick’s cadre of dogfighters; and after Pearl Harbor, the horrible policy enacted towards Japanese Americans, placing them in concentration camps, although we refer to them as internment camps now (concentration camp has such an ugly reverberation to it because of those Nazi dicks).  People will just assume that the treacherous Charlie Chan'ed mustachioed, bucktooth Japanese had nothing better to do on December 7th.  I am not trying to excuse the actions of the Japanese, it was cowardly yet well planned attack (think of the logistics involved, put UPS to shame) but we must not look at this event with rose colored glasses: it showed the world Americas resilience.  We must look at this event in conjunction with other concurrent crucial events.  It is necessary for people to remember antecedents and what they mean to us as individuals and as an amalgam of disparate peoples.  But we must not let memorials be used as tools of deception and indoctrination, best way to do this is to read as many books on the given subject, that way you can have your own informed views on the events that said memorial is memorializing.  To reiterate: I implore everybody to read because if we don’t, through underuse, though could become a vestigial structure.