A little history on a Wednesday morning
Every so often, I give extra credit "quizzes" in my classes that are really just glorified excuses for giving people a few points on days when about half the class fails to show up. These usually take the form of a modified Trivial Pursuit-ish question set where I ask one question from pop culture, one from history, one from science, etc. My first history question of the year is "Who was president during WWII?" (Get ready to be appalled.) Last semester, the most frequent answer I got was "Ronald Reagan."
I'll give you a minute to breathe.
When I was not-so-quietly boggling about this to anyone who would listen, someone brought up what she saw as the reasoning behind it. Reagan had been in the news a lot, what with, you know, dying and all, and since few of them could actually remember him being president, he was therefore president at some point in "history," and…well, yeah. Not saying that excuses it, but it was an interesting instance of just how hard it can be to conceptualize time frames prior to our own lifetimes. Just the other night, isthewa and her spouse were over, and they and my Other Half and I were comparing grandparents' ages, and there was a moment of disbelief when I mentioned that my maternal grandfather was born in 1898. I had to do some age-math to convince them ;).
And then just yesterday, I had that kind of driven home again. I was reading a story that mentioned Vietnam, and I was thrown for a moment, doing some mental math to make it add up. I couldn't quite make the timeline in the story itself add up to what I was pretty sure was the character's age, but it was a lot closer than my instinctive sense. The thing is, even though I was three when the U.S. officially pulled out of Vietnam, I have no memory of the conflict at all. My first real memory of Vietnam was the veterans protesting the grand welcome the Iranian hostages were given, or rather pointing out that they'd been given no such welcome. I've therefore always kind of slotted Vietnam as something that happened before, well, me, so to speak, and until I started living with a guy with an M.A. in American history and a nearly obsessive habit of figuring out whether a character could actually have been in Vietnam (Walter Skinner gave him some fits, mostly because Mitch Pillegi is now playing a character who doesn't seem to be 10-12 years older than Skinner was then), it never really occurred to me that people only 4-5 years older than me would have clear memories of fathers coming home. I knew some of my friends' fathers had been there, but for all of them, it was before my friends were born.
Interestingly, if you watch enough 80's tv, you'll notice how often characters on crime shows have "was in Vietnam" in their background. If you watch enough shows now with ex-military characters, you'll see a gradual historical progression of Conflict In Which Something Bad Happened to Our Hero. Just saying.
Every so often, one of those, "Yeah, this'll make you feel old" things about what 18-year-olds have never experienced comes around, and it's interesting to me to see first hand the process by which things that happened in my lifetime become "history," and in a fannish sense, to experience that gradual progession of a character's past being something I don't remember to it being something I do, and yet realize that for some viewers, that past is as much "history" as Vietnam is to me.
So, um, conclusion…don't really have one. Just kind of something I was ruminating about.
I'll give you a minute to breathe.
When I was not-so-quietly boggling about this to anyone who would listen, someone brought up what she saw as the reasoning behind it. Reagan had been in the news a lot, what with, you know, dying and all, and since few of them could actually remember him being president, he was therefore president at some point in "history," and…well, yeah. Not saying that excuses it, but it was an interesting instance of just how hard it can be to conceptualize time frames prior to our own lifetimes. Just the other night, isthewa and her spouse were over, and they and my Other Half and I were comparing grandparents' ages, and there was a moment of disbelief when I mentioned that my maternal grandfather was born in 1898. I had to do some age-math to convince them ;).
And then just yesterday, I had that kind of driven home again. I was reading a story that mentioned Vietnam, and I was thrown for a moment, doing some mental math to make it add up. I couldn't quite make the timeline in the story itself add up to what I was pretty sure was the character's age, but it was a lot closer than my instinctive sense. The thing is, even though I was three when the U.S. officially pulled out of Vietnam, I have no memory of the conflict at all. My first real memory of Vietnam was the veterans protesting the grand welcome the Iranian hostages were given, or rather pointing out that they'd been given no such welcome. I've therefore always kind of slotted Vietnam as something that happened before, well, me, so to speak, and until I started living with a guy with an M.A. in American history and a nearly obsessive habit of figuring out whether a character could actually have been in Vietnam (Walter Skinner gave him some fits, mostly because Mitch Pillegi is now playing a character who doesn't seem to be 10-12 years older than Skinner was then), it never really occurred to me that people only 4-5 years older than me would have clear memories of fathers coming home. I knew some of my friends' fathers had been there, but for all of them, it was before my friends were born.
Interestingly, if you watch enough 80's tv, you'll notice how often characters on crime shows have "was in Vietnam" in their background. If you watch enough shows now with ex-military characters, you'll see a gradual historical progression of Conflict In Which Something Bad Happened to Our Hero. Just saying.
Every so often, one of those, "Yeah, this'll make you feel old" things about what 18-year-olds have never experienced comes around, and it's interesting to me to see first hand the process by which things that happened in my lifetime become "history," and in a fannish sense, to experience that gradual progession of a character's past being something I don't remember to it being something I do, and yet realize that for some viewers, that past is as much "history" as Vietnam is to me.
So, um, conclusion…don't really have one. Just kind of something I was ruminating about.