how people waken and listen to heed
Apr. 20th, 2009 09:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
adrian_turtleor not, as the case may be.
Every year on Patriot's Day (the Monday nearest April 19th) towns in Massachusetts have parades and pancake breakfasts. I don't know why pancakes, in particular, but they seem to be a regional Thing for the kind of occasion where a small town would have a parade. In Lexington and Concord, costumed enthusiasts re-enact battles before the traditional pancake breakfast. In 2002, friends visiting from upstate NY got up early and went to see the spectacle. They were MIT alumni, and had seen it before, years ago. They knew what to expect, and told their kids what it would be like.
When the whole point is to repeat something that happened more than 200 years ago, one doesn't expect a decade or so to make much difference. It was 7 years ago now, and I can't even remember if they were going to the Lexington or Concord re-enactment (ie, if they expected the pretend-Redcoats to shoot blanks at the pretend-Minutemen and advance towards Concord, or if they expected them to break and start running back towards Boston.) I slept late, and only heard about it when they came back to our house. The children were full of pancakes, wildly excited, waving wooden approximations of 18th century rifles. The parents were stunned by how the spectacle had changed. In 2002, Minutemen and Redcoats marched towards each other, then turned to march together and all fired in the same direction (presumably still firing blanks, for safety) over the river.
As we sat down to eat something other than pancakes, we dismissed it as a bunch of nonsense. How silly to try to change history just because a country that used to be our enemy is now an ally. They couldn't possibly fool anybody. Please pass the tea. Of course, the alliance was hardly breaking news. In retrospect, I don't know if the change was an attempt to turn the focus away from seeing England as the enemy, or if it was a more general attempt to celebrate the Minutemen without celebrating war. It's impossible to judge the tone of a spectacle, when I was sleeping 10 miles away. I was about to say something about how creepy it is to celebrate the beginning of a war, and how I can see the desire to twist it to something a little less gleefully adversarial. But then I came around to the fact that we don't usually celebrate the beginnings or the ends of other wars, we commemorate them. The battles we celebrate today are safer to celebrate because they were so small.
Every year on Patriot's Day (the Monday nearest April 19th) towns in Massachusetts have parades and pancake breakfasts. I don't know why pancakes, in particular, but they seem to be a regional Thing for the kind of occasion where a small town would have a parade. In Lexington and Concord, costumed enthusiasts re-enact battles before the traditional pancake breakfast. In 2002, friends visiting from upstate NY got up early and went to see the spectacle. They were MIT alumni, and had seen it before, years ago. They knew what to expect, and told their kids what it would be like.
When the whole point is to repeat something that happened more than 200 years ago, one doesn't expect a decade or so to make much difference. It was 7 years ago now, and I can't even remember if they were going to the Lexington or Concord re-enactment (ie, if they expected the pretend-Redcoats to shoot blanks at the pretend-Minutemen and advance towards Concord, or if they expected them to break and start running back towards Boston.) I slept late, and only heard about it when they came back to our house. The children were full of pancakes, wildly excited, waving wooden approximations of 18th century rifles. The parents were stunned by how the spectacle had changed. In 2002, Minutemen and Redcoats marched towards each other, then turned to march together and all fired in the same direction (presumably still firing blanks, for safety) over the river.
As we sat down to eat something other than pancakes, we dismissed it as a bunch of nonsense. How silly to try to change history just because a country that used to be our enemy is now an ally. They couldn't possibly fool anybody. Please pass the tea. Of course, the alliance was hardly breaking news. In retrospect, I don't know if the change was an attempt to turn the focus away from seeing England as the enemy, or if it was a more general attempt to celebrate the Minutemen without celebrating war. It's impossible to judge the tone of a spectacle, when I was sleeping 10 miles away. I was about to say something about how creepy it is to celebrate the beginning of a war, and how I can see the desire to twist it to something a little less gleefully adversarial. But then I came around to the fact that we don't usually celebrate the beginnings or the ends of other wars, we commemorate them. The battles we celebrate today are safer to celebrate because they were so small.
