Somewhere between the Mickey Mouse Club (sorry, Paul, it made me retch) and I Led Three Lives (ask Tavaron about the 'isotope') I developed a healthy suspicion that nobody on public media was ever telling the truth. Besides that, they probably didn't have my best interests at heart.

When I was a little kid I had my hypocrisy filter turned up so high that I got feedback. This makes sense because I was born in the early 1950s, which was Ground Zero for fact-twisting and outright lies. The unspoken subtext was so thick on the ground you needed snow boots. If the weatherman said it was raining, I'd look outside.

I developed my own fact-checking mechanisms when it came to the past. For example, I'd watch old movies on television with my parents, ask them to explain things, and pay attention to what they said. This allowed me to check for parallax between the way the film was representing past reality and the way an actual person had experienced it.

I've kept this habit to this day. One time, while I was supposed to be writing a history lesson, I called my dad.

'What did you think of Politician X?' I asked.

'He was a Communist,' was the prompt reply. I didn't argue with him: I was just checking on the claim that labeling the candidate a communist had been a successful strategy for defeating him. Obviously, it still worked, 50 years after the fact.

I'd do more of this kind of fact-checking these days, only people who are older than I am are getting thinner on the ground. I rely more on written sources these days. Hot tip: the Library of Congress has old newspapers and good letters, and even interviews with Americans who had been enslaved. I recommend their excellent archives for your perusal.

These days, I, too, can be an informant. I remember things. Mind you, I remember them my way. Which is not the way anybody else would want me to. I may or may not be an unreliable narrator. You might want to stop and think before you ask me, 'What was it like?' I can only tell you what it was like for me. Mine is a very particular – and most would insist, peculiar – point of view.

For example: How popular were the Kennedys? I remember these things:

• During the presidential campaign, my friend Charlie McLaughlin and I held our versions of the 'Nixon/Kennedy debates' during lunch. We were both eight.
  
  'Nixon'
  
  'Kennedy'
  
  'Nixon'
  
  His parents liked Kennedy, mine liked Nixon. Neither of us had a clue.
• The following year, the Kennedy family became the topic of much conversation. So my friends and I role-played the Administration during lunch. We were now nine years old. One boy played Kennedy, one 'Bobby', one girl Jackie, another girl Caroline, yet another 'Caroline's nurse', an original invention. I moderated the discussions, which mostly consisted of Caroline's interrupting high-level political talk.
• For some reason, we lost interest in domestic politics the following year and went back to discussing NATO. There was a fun series on television set in Paris.
• I was in sixth grade in Chicago. The Kennedys were way more popular in Chicago because they were Catholic and so was Chicago, it seemed. A girl I knew bought a pill-box hat because Jackie wore one. She kept asking, 'Don't you think I look like Jackie?'
• One day at school, the grownups got very solemn and sent us home. Some of the teachers were crying. Somebody had killed the president. I thought, 'That's sad. Also, a terrible thing to do. But why are they crying? They didn't know him personally. They should send condolences to his family.'

That's parallax. Things affect us the way they affect us. My childhood and the Zapruder film had very little overlap.

Philip K Dick, who had his own take on things, wrote a novel called The Penultimate Truth in 1964. It's a great book about public memory. In this story, the entire world population has been tricked into thinking there's an ongoing nuclear war and they have to live underground for their own safety. For years, they live in bunkers, manufacturing robots for the 'war effort'. All the while a few privileged people live on the surface, which is a paradise, unbothered by quarrelsome fellow humans. They make deep-fake war films to show the populace.

According to Dick, all this started when people watched documentaries about the Second World War. The filmmakers noticed that nobody questioned their version of events – not even people who had lived through the war and should have remembered it differently. They had conditioned themselves to believe what they saw on a screen.

If that sounds alarmingly familiar, perhaps we should pay more attention to our own memories, lest we find ourselves reminiscing about the Bowling Green Massacre.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

25.03.24 Front Page

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