December 7^th, 1941

6 comments

1 paintedjaguar { 12.07.11 at 6:31 pm }

I once met a man who was around to see the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk. It’s always sad to see any part of “living history” pass away.

I was struck by this post from Stonekettle Station – Remembering December 7th .

Now far be it from me to deny these guys a measly license plate, but there’s something about this one … of course these specialty plates always trigger my E Pluribus Unum hobbyhorse, but what I’m mainly thinking about right now is this: Why do we venerate (some of) the survivors of catastrophe?

In this case, as with 9-11, there is a tinge of the militaristic nationalism that permeates American culture. But we also often celebrate rape victims, cancer patients, etc. Strikingly, I don’t recall any celebration of the Katrina refugees. And although some of these people may have displayed courage or determination, the primary common denominator is plain old good luck.

So – is it just about poster boys & girls? Convenient props to reinforce national myths and moralizing? Is it the streak of Calvinism in our history? (You can tell who the “good’ people are… God just likes them better). Or do we just hope that some of that luck will magically rub off on us? I can’t help but think, too, that this whole business is related to the way people think about the wealthy among us. I know, I know, it’s a lot to squeeze out of a license plate, but this is a phenomenon that’s always rather puzzled me.

2 Bryan { 12.07.11 at 7:43 pm }

The thing about people who were actually at an event of significance, is that it makes the event more real to those who meet them later. [BTW that was another December event I note here, on the 17th].

The plate is an easy one – multiple large Navy facilities in Florida. thousands of Navy veterans, and a feel-good move by the politicians. The plates are free, like the Purple Heart, POW, Medal of Honor, and Disabled Veteran plates. Veterans tend to be voters, which is important to the politicians and why we have all of these free veterans plates.

I have a special plate, but it is a way of making an annual contribution to Hospices.

Katrina was a preventable disaster caused by a government that refused to act until forced to do so. Politicians don’t want people reminded of that.

3 paintedjaguar { 12.07.11 at 9:44 pm }

Yeah, I’m aware that most of these plates are intended to finance various things. Still don’t much like ’em, but that’s partly just nostalgia for a time that was a little less driven by non-stop marketing. Seeing the picture just got me thinking about this other little quirk of the culture.

I wonder sometimes what the average American in 1941 really thought about Pearl Harbor. The widespread shock and panic over 9-11 surprised me, though it shouldn’t have I guess. Granted, I was on the other side of the country and didn’t know anyone who was personally involved, but the event itself didn’t surprise me much. I’d often wondered why something of the sort hadn’t happened here a decade or two earlier.

4 Bryan { 12.08.11 at 12:43 am }

The thing about Pearl Harbor is that WWII was already in progress, but the US had just managed to stay out of it for two years, despite a lot of effort on behalf of both sides to involve us, and now we were in it. The country became even more isolationist after WWI, and a lot of people felt that we had done what was needed in the First World War, and the Europeans went and started another war. People were on edge, and Pearl Harbor was the other shoe dropping.

We were finally improving from conditions in the Depression, and now we had a war. Based on what my parents and grandparents generations said, people wanted to get the job done, once and for all. There was no way to avoid war after the attack, but we were only going to fight Japan, when Germany decided to declare war on the US, a decidedly stupid move as things turned out.

There were a lot of things that did happen, including an earlier attack on the WTC with a truck bomb that wasn’t big enough to bring it down, but the system still worked and people were caught and prosecuted. Until the Shrubbery was selected, we took these things seriously, but that all changed under Dubya.

Yes, Florida has definitely gotten carried away with the proliferation of license plates.

5 Badtux { 12.08.11 at 7:23 pm }

Well, actually the U.S. had been in it, unofficially, since at least June of 1941 — the U.S. had taken over protecting convoys to Britain, handing them over to the Royal Navy near Iceland, and there had already been multiple shooting incidents between U-boats and U.S. destroyers as well as at least one U.S. merchant vessel sunk near Africa, well out of any combat zone. Not to mention U.S. war materials assistance to the Brits, Soviets, and to the Chinese, who were in the process of receiving 100 P-40 fighters and the pilots and mechanics to fly and maintain them several months before Pearl Harbor. But there wasn’t an overt declaration of war, just sort of a “warm” kinda series of skirmishes, because the Republican minority in Congress wanted nothing to do with anything that could hurt the enormous profits they were making in Nazi Germany, and were joined by sufficient leftist pacifists to prevent any overt declaration of war.

Well, plus the fact that the U.S. was ramping up to produce war materials was making life comfortable for a lot of people who’d been in utter misery before, and they didn’t want to leave that comfort to go fight for some Chinks and Frogs. This being before a high-tech military, when if you went to war, you needed a *lot* of bodies, not just a few hundred thousand volunteers with a few trillion dollars in weaponry accumulated over the past thirty years the way the U.S. makes war now… meaning that war would mean a lot of discomfort, for a lot of people.

In the end, the Japanese and Germans gave the U.S. no choice but to go to war. One wonders exactly what would have happened if the Japanese and Germans had been sane… after all, Japan didn’t need to attack America in order to conquer the Indonesian oilfields that they needed in order to offset the loss of U.S. oil to the U.S. oil embargo. They did so only because they feared that the U.S. would declare war against *them* and use the Philippines as a dagger in the middle of the tanker line between Indonesia and them to cut off their oil *again*… a fear which was a case of projection on the part of the Japanese, because the actual chances of that happening in the absence of Japan actually attacking American ports or ships was pretty much nil, there just was no will on the part of the majority of the American people to get involved in outright war. As for the German declaration of war… Japan had not declared war against the Soviet Union when Germany invaded the Soviets (a fact which later allowed the Soviets to regroup at Stalingrad with the forces withdrawn from the Far East), why did Germany not return that “favor”? But Hitler did declare war against the U.S., and the rest is history…

– Badtux the History Penguin

6 Bryan { 12.08.11 at 10:24 pm }

There was certainly ‘war-like program activities’ under way since 1940, including the draft being restarted, but the US Congress wouldn’t have voted for a declaration without the attack.

There was a lot of money being made by not being in the war, and simply supplying goods.