1917
For some reason, the past year has all been about the stuff of a century ago. To begin with, Peter Jackson had his project to take the 100 hours of old black & white film footage from the British Imperial War Museum and do his magic. He did more than the usual coloration of an old film. He did something magic to the old footage of stilted and surreal soldiers who suffered through the Great War to end all wars. He called the documentary They Shall Not Grow Old in honor of effectively bringing these seemingly dead soldiers back to life as if they were our cousins and brothers. He used all the latest movie technology to modernize the footage and add appropriate voice tracks to make the men come to life for the big screen. The title was meant to remind us that while the rest of us survivors grow old, the youth that dies in wars live on forever in our minds and now on Jackson’s film. Kim and I went off to New Zealand and Australia on a cruise at the beginning of last year right after Jackson released his movie. Our surprise came during a visit to Christchurch, from whence Jackson hails. He had done a special museum exhibit at the museum there based on his documentary. It was one of the most unusual and startlingly effective exhibitions we had ever seen.
What Jackson had done was to take a dozen compelling shots from his film and turn them into 10X models of that scene. We have all seen dioramas at museums like the Museum of Natural History, but I don’t ever remember seeing one that was at 10X scale….they are usually in miniature. It was amazing how impactful it was to have beautifully accurate 10X versions of a given scene (like a nurse tending to a wounded soldier) and the audio done by Jackson’s team for the movie accompany the mega exhibit. Do that twelve times over and you come out feeling like you are in 1917.
Then, of course, there was Sam Méndes’ award-winning movie about WWI called 1917. That movie was so great and unique because it was shot in one continues run depicting the critically important life-saving mission given to two young British enlisted men running through enemy lines to prevent their troops from launching a potentially disastrous attack that is, in fact, a trap by the Germans. The movie won Academy Awards for cinematography, visual effects and sound mixing and was up for Best Picture, but lost that to Parasite, the South Korean drama that shocked and grabbed the film community. But we had a large portion of WWI war footage between the Mendes and Jackson films.
And then, as soon as 2020 dawned and the Coronavirus turned into COVID-19 and became the deadly pandemic that is still sweeping the world these six plus months later with no signs of backing off. It didn’t take long after the arrival of the virus for the media to start talking about and replaying and making pieces about the Influenza Pandemic of 2017/2018. Before we knew it, we were all back in the WWI era except this time we were not in a world war against the Germans, but a world war against a virus. And here’s the thing, we all learned about WWI in our history classes, with its 20 million deaths (half military, half civilian) and 21 million wounded (the pernicious mustard gas and more), but few had ever heard of the 50-100 million people who succumbed to the Influenza Pandemic.
In 2020 we have all learned more about public health and the vulnerability of the human body like we have never done for a century. And now we have more ability to understand it all scientifically and more ability to disseminate that knowledge through mass media. I think it is safe to say that everyone in the world knows about and understands the danger of COVID…at least all but the most remote tribes in remote places. The Amazon is overrun, the Australian outback is having its problems and Africa is probably juggling all the other epidemics it continuously suffers in addition to COVID. The National Geographic this week published a story about the worst and deadliest disease of all time and explained why smallpox was so devastating. But that may have been so because not only was the world not yet convinced about the validity of inoculation (literally taking a drain from a small pox pustule and injecting it subcutaneously to create a small isolated incidence of the disease that would create immunity in the host), but it was rampantly transmitted to native populations in the Americas that were completely not used to such diseases. This was why the famous anthropological work of Jared Diamond from 1997, Guns, Germs and Steel was so important in describing the impact of germs as deadly as guns in human history.
And today, Donald Trump has given us yet another version of 1917 that adds to our remembrance of what a crazy world we live in and how upside down the world has become. In a press conference done with Trump at a podium, so not impromptu or on the run, Trump showed us yet again what we have for a President in these strange and distorted times. He chose to talk about the COVID Pandemic, something his campaign ads steadfastly avoid since his ratings on his public health management have been abysmal. As he so often does, he talks about things he has just learned or been told as though he knows something that no one else knows. He chose to reference the Influenza Pandemic of 1917 by saying how bad that situation got killing 50-100 million (perhaps the only comparison that makes his handling of the pandemic look good). If he had ended there he would have been fine, even if a bit obvious. But Trump is the smartest guy in the room (at least in his own warped mind), so he went off-script again and said that World War II probably ended because the pandemic killed so many people that they probably couldn’t find enough soldiers to fight.
The man just makes shit up and expects the world not to notice that his abject lack of historical knowledge makes him look like a stupid school kid who didn’t do his homework reading and thinks he can get away with it by thinking on his feet. I suppose we could excuse a politician for mistaking WWII for WWI, but I think it is altogether possible he doesn’t actually know the difference just like he was surprised to learn that there was an Old Testament and New Testament in the Bible. But making up shit like the war ending because we were running out of soldiers due to the pandemic is just plain stupid. There is a conversation that can be held about whether a global pandemic may have sapped the warring parties of their desire to fight. There may have been an epidemic in the trenches, but he knows nothing about any of that. He just made a classic childish leap in judgement and not only thought he could get away with it, but actually thought it would make him look smart. I wish some days that we were back in 1917 to sit Fred Trump down to discuss how to raise children properly.