I was just watching the obituary segment on ABC news. They compiled some clips of interviews he had given throughout the years, and this comment really stunned me: "People die in war, and that's too bad. There is no morality in war. War has nothing to do with morality, and I've never made the comparison. I sleep well every night."
Maybe this points to some of the reasons for the commemoration of the Bomb that Ben and Masco wrote about--the morality, the ethics of war and killing are necessarily separated out from the thing that is being historicized and remembered. It also brings me back to Thomspon's argument that reenactors playing war has very little to do with the violence and death of actual war. Or even to stretch the insight a bit further--how does the plantation consumption fetish depend upon the dislocation of plantations from the violence of slavery? Or how does the unity of the civil rights movement as represented by MLK dependent upon the sifting out of controversy, inequality and other ethical issues? What is it about certain sites or memorializations of historical events--the very ones that are imbricated in violence and death--that require violence and death to be filtered out of the ethical landscape of the commemoration?
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A few days before Tibbets died, Randall Forsberg passed away, a leader of the anti-nuclear movement ... She led the largest-ever demonstration against nuclear weapons: http://www.townhall.com/news/us/2007/11/02/obituaries_in_the_news
Sorry the link does not work. This is a website which has both their obituaries on the same page. You can just google their names and you will find it. We might say that only after their deaths have Tibbets and Forsberg begun to enter into a much-needed conversation.
My sense is that this sentiment about the a-morality of war has increased in the post-Vietnam age, and that it is part of the more frequently articulated imperative to "support the troops" as a separate activity from supporting the war. This came to matter as a part of the 80s reconcilation over Vietnam, and then became the mantra of the first Gulf War. I have never done this research that would back this up, but I don't think either of these positions were tenable during WWII itself. At that time, the public message in the United States was that the U.S. war effort was in fact a morally correct one -- and certainly all the PR efforts that I know talked about supporting the soldiers and supporting the war effort in the same breath. I had never connected the "support the troops" logic with the rise of war reenacting, and it is interesting to think of them as being coincident.
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