I Remember it Well

I remember we were in the van in Minneapolis when we found out that Michael Jackson had died. The radio chirped with rumors that he was still alive…no, dead…no, he’s alive…and now, not alive. We all received text messages from friends, voice-mails listing all of the bulleted information they had received, and phone calls from family members urging us to get to a television soon.

I’ll admit, my mind was elsewhere when we heard the news. And when I did zone back in to the news, I was fairly apathetic. It sounds terrible, but I was never a fan of his music, even as a child star, I didn’t respect many of the decisions he had made in this life, and I wasn’t looking forward to the next three weeks of “continuing coverage regarding Michael Jackson’s sudden death”. I may be going to the special hell for being so…unsympathetic, but at least I’m honest.

It did get me thinking, despite my lack of sadness over Jackson’s death. How we commemorate history, and figures long past. From Graceland and back to Nashville, where Steve McNair’s death still hit hard for so many people, celebrities were hard to ignore. They were featured on t-shirts, shot glasses, and cardboard cutouts. I can honestly think of only three cities where I saw no evidence of Elvis (I thank you for that, Seattle, San Francisco, and El Paso). Not a day went by without some reference to canceled sitcoms and old Disney films.

It was impossible to escape celebrity, especially after the death of Jackson. Every aspect of his life was exposed on twenty-foot screens with looped archival footage, broadcast on the sides of buildings in Chicago, scrolling at the bottom of every newscast, featured front and center in every publication. The dark side of celebrity is that there is no end to the publicity. Every corner of life is thrown up in the air for anyone to grab.

Historical figures are treated slightly differently. If they were minor characters in American history, they get a reenactment. A history buff adopts their costume and portrays their culture at public events, such as the reading of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. As a man read the Declaration aloud, men and women dressed in timely garb and dispersed themselves throughout the crowd of onlookers, hurling cries either for or against the document. Some cried “Treason! Long Live the King!” Still others threw their hats and shouted “Huzzah!” as the crier’s voice raised to announce, “We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America…solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States”.

If they are major characters, we get a puzzling number of plaques announcing that a major person lived there, or visited it, or passed by on their way elsewhere, or mentioned it once in a speech. Boston and Philadelphia were both riddled with historical markers for founding fathers, giving you a haphazard quilt of their lives…and offering you a t-shirt to accompany and commemorate your visit.

If they were important enough figures, we built huge neoclassical temples to commemorate their greatness. Abraham Lincoln draped in Grecian robes…Washington’s obelisk…Jefferson’s Corinthian pillars. They are linked in imagery and architecture to the founders of civilization and made to look like gods. After seeing the Lincoln Memorial, it’s odd to consider the tiny plaque in my hometown’s square commemorating his great debate with Stephen Douglas. A man carved to emulate the temples of Zeus couldn’t have fit into my town square…

But if they were of no importance…just immigrants, slaves, and poor workers who actually built this country…we barely remember them at all. At Ellis Island you can have your face photo-shopped into historical shots of immigrants who passed through the island, superimposing your own face over an unimportant Polish farmer, an Italian seamstress, or a group of young Irish girls.

Soldiers who died serving their government are marked only by their names. Their lives, their families, their faces don’t matter, unless they were generals, or well known for later careers. The great tragedy now is that so many soldiers have died, there’s no room for their individual stories and faces. There’s barely room for their names.

In Boston and Philadelphia you can see the grave markers of slaves, known only by their first names. They’re right next to the massive, ornate markers of their famous owners, buried with the family, like a pet.

In Charleston they’re not even marked by their names, but by a square divot in the ground and a few personal items laid as markers.

They say history is written by the winners, and judging by the way we treat our dead, we have a very skewed definition of success. When Michael Jackson gets a $4.8 million funeral and a century’s worth of fame, but the soldiers who died in Afghanistan on the same day get no mention at all, we’ve taken a wrong step somewhere along the way.

So I wonder about our memorials. I wonder who, and what, and how we will remember the great minds of my own generation. I wonder what our achievements and losses will say about us when tourists come to buy our t-shirts. When every memorial built in the last ten years (that I can think of, at least) has been built to mark a great tragedy, is it because we are getting better at honoring our dead? Or is it because we have no great successes to commemorate next to them?

I wonder if I will be a part of something worth commemorating, and if not, who will be remembered. I wonder where they are right now, and how they feel about Michael Jackson.