Unmaking history--Burmese, er, Myamar style

I'm gradually reading Emma Larkin's  Finding George Orwell in Burma, and came across this interesting passage:

"'Mandalay' is one of the few place names in Burma that has not been changed by the Burmese military government. In 1989 the regime renamed streets, towns and cities across Burma. Maymyo, the old British hill station that Orwell visited, became Pyin-Oo-Lwin, and Fraser Street in Rangoon became Anawyatha Lan in Yangon. Most of the old names were Anglicized Burmese names that had been used by the Birtish colonial government and the regime claimed that the changes were a long-overdue move to discard these colonial tags. But there was a deeper-rooted motive. The generals were rewriting history. When a place is renamed, the old name disappears from maps and, eventually, from human memory. If that is possible, then perhaps the memory of past events can also be erased. By renaming cities, towns and streets, the regime seized control of the very space within which people lived; home and business addresses had to be rewritten and relearned. And, when the regime changed the name of the country, maps and encyclopedias all over the world had to be corrected. The country known as Burma was erased and replaced with a new one: Myanmar.



"The crucial event which triggered this rewriting of the past was the people's uprising of 1988. At eight minutes past eight in the morning on the eighth day of the eighth month of that year, students launched a countrywide demonstration against almost three decades of poverty and oppression under military rule. Thousands of people flooded into the streets of cities and towns all over Burma shouting, 'Dee-mo-ka-ra-see! Dee-mo-ka-ra-see!' The government response was brutal: that evening, soldiers marched into the streets and strafed the crowds with machine-gun fire. In Rangoon, doctors and nurses, overwhelmed by the wounded, hung a sign outside the general hospital begging the soldiers to stop killing people. The sign was written with the blood of the wounded and dead. When a column of nurses joined the protest in the streets, wearing their white uniforms, they too were shot. Among those who died during the days of chaos that followed were high-school children, teachers and monks. Smoke billowed from crematoriums as the authorities rapidly disposed of their corpses. The uprising did not end until more than 3,000 people had been shot or bludgeoned to death by government soldiers."

As if we didn't have enough  problems with memory without governmental forces actively working to undermine them...

Haiti--Six Months Later

Even though this blog has turned out to be about a lot of other things related to memory, my apparently faulty memory of its inception is that it was going to be to revisit event, once riveting, that had fallen off the media charts. Sadly, I don't seem to have been much 'on task' when it comes to this project. But luckily, when it comes to Haiti, Ray Suarez of the PBS Newshour has. He's got a week long series in which he accesses how Haiti is doing right now. Tonight's interview with the Haitian president Rene Preval brought out the interesting concept that the Haitian government should actually be involved somehow with the coordination of priorities of how to use the money that flooded into Haiti directly after the earthquake.

Hmm.

Removable Memories

No, I didn't come up with that title on my own. It comes from the  second segment of William Salatan's Slate piece on "The Memory Doctor". This piece focuses first on how pathetically easy it is to get someone to remember something that didn't happen, and then goes on to dissect the life of Loftus herself. Loftus comes across as a bit queasymaking, but it's also a kind of clumsy piece, which surprised me a little. It's as if Loftus herself was a subject hard to remember long enough to accurately record.

The main thing I got from this excerpt, though, is that memory is not like a recording machine. It seems to resemble something more like silly putty--pliable and infinitely ready to take whatever image is impressed upon it. Frankly, I don't get it, and I don't in the end really believe it. I start to feel as though there is a surface memory function that you can lie to and implant with things but beneath that a deeper memory, perhaps a memory of the body itself that is incapable of lying, or of accepting lies. We shall see as this blog goes along.

Slate Magazine's The Memory Doctor

Slate's William Salatan has recently written up an eight part series on false memories. I knew at once that this blog should form a link to it, but wanted to wait till I had at least  had a chance to read a bit. I've now read the first segment, in which Slate conducted its own experiment on implanting false memories by asking people to respond to a questionaire where they were asked about three true large political events and one of four false ones.

Upshot? People will pretty much believe anything you want to tell them about Hilary Clinton. Also? A whole lot of people will believe that they went up in a hot air balloon when they were a child if you have the doctored photo to prove it.

Actually, it's a lot more interesting than that if you check out the link. But coincidentally, I've just been reading a fun mystery novel,   A Dog About Town, by J.F. Englert. The series is narrated by a supersleuth labrador retriever named Randolph, and this is what Randolph has to say about memory:

Memory is a fickle thing. Ask ten people at the scene of a traffic accident what each saw and you will get ten different stories. The car was red. No, the car was black. The driver was old. No, the driver was little more than a child. The victim dove in front of the car. No, the victim slipped on a banana peel. This phenomenon is the bane of attorneys and the playground of neuroscientists and all those interested in the workings of the brain. The question is further complicated by emotion. Even those with the best memories should be aware that there is a process that colors what they remember with feelings. It is not simply a question of wanting to remember something a certain way, but of the hidden connections between positive and negative feelings, sometimes long past, that change the way we perceive the present even as it is happening.

I'd spell it out in alphabet letters if I could, but TRUST RANDOLPH.

Bringing Them Back

(The photo, Memorial Day at Arlington National Cemetery, is by John Moore, via Getty Images)

In honor of Memorial day, I thought I'd post this link to a Wall Street Journal article that came out a couple of days ago. Came across it by chance and thought it would be fitting for this post over this weekend. Basically, we may assume that bringing back the bodies of the fallen was always considered necessary. But that's a collective lapse of memory. It's a fairly recent development. Of course, seeing those massive graveyards of American dead in European ground from World War II should have made that obvious. But of course we forget...

Oil, Oil Everywhere

It's funny, but this is the blog I often have the most trouble thinking up ideas for. Right now, though, I am spoiled for choice. As the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is perhaps the most pressing at the moment, though, I'll mention two sources that show how we have already been here time and time again. The first comes from a Talk of the Town piece by Elizabeth Kolbert about the 1968 accident off the California coast, showing both that we knew everything we needed to know about this stuff way back when, but also mentioning how such catastrophes can, at the right cultural moment, be catalysts for change.

That seemed enough, but then I caught the Rachel Maddow show tonight, which shows how, in 1979, we went through a very similar experience in the Gulf of Mexico. (No, I don't remember it either--that's sort of the point around here, though.)

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

volcanoes

I'm not sure that this April's eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull really ties into the theme of a lapse of memory, since it's hard to forget something that you've never heard of before. Still, I found it quite intriguing that something we don't actually think about all that much was able to so swiftly bring much of the European economy to a halt and through something that most of us had never heard of--the vulnerability of jet engines to spewn volcanic ash.

But obviously it's someone's lapse of memory, otherwise either it would have been common knowledge, or no one would have known it and whole airline fleets would have flown out, none the wiser on the potential peril. It always interests me when knowledge that some people had all along suddenly emerges and becomes our common knowledge so quickly. It happens when presidents have major or even minor surgery, for instance, and it's always rather heartening me that, given the right incentives, people of all ages and opinions can be like sponges in their capacity to learn.

Anyway, in stumbling around for ideas that might link to why I thought volcanoes might be a good Lapse of Memory post, other than the fact that I haven't posted here for awhile, I came across this site on the top 10 volcanoes in geologic history. As these type of memory tests are supposed to be good for the brain, why not test yourself and see how well you do?

I only knew a few and one of them was due really to a wonderful children's book that imprinted it vividly on my memory. If anyone's curious, just drop a note here and let me know.