While America hasn’t changed much when it comes to its suspicion of intellectuals,…
I found this article humorous, and appreciated the Asimov piece as echoing the thoughts of many of us over the decades, but it reminded me of a conversation in Budapest with three Americans my age off a river cruise. I’d walked up to stand in line behind them at the entrance of what had been the headquarters of the Arrowcross, later the ÁVH, the State Protection Authority. Lining the sidewalk are small portraits of men with names, birth and death dates. As I walked up one tourist was joking, „Here are your bad guys.“ They pondered the photos, wondering who these men were. I pointed out that they were victims of the 1956 revolution – all the death dates were 1958 or 1959. One American is skeptical: if the revolution was in 1956, why did these people die in 1958? They were executed, I say. Why did they wait until 1958 to execute them? How were they killed? I don’t know the answers to these questions. It occurs to me I hadn’t been interested in the manner in which they’d been killed.
We went on to talk about different ways the past is presented. A Swedish woman who had been in Hanoi says in Vietnam the war with the US isn’t described as the Vietnam War, but rather the American War. One American woman asks if we’ve seen that thing on Vietnam by, oh, what’s his name? Ken Burns! I haven’t. Oh! They agree it’s terrific! She learned so much!
I caution them that while I’ve not yet been inside the museum I’ve read several reviews by people who say it can be challenging because of the amount there is to read. There are a lot of documents on the walls, all in Hungarian, and in each room there’s an A4 handout in English with text to read. „That’s ok,“ says one man, „we’ve all got a little Hungarian.“ „Oh good!“ I say, thinking that’s kind of weird – they’re all Americans of Hungarian descent, but know nothing of the recent history. I guess that could happen if your parents didn’t want to talk about the past. No, his face falls. He’s disappointed. I didn’t get the joke. Of course they don’t know any Hungarian.
In talking to the group about the way history is presented in Germany, in Austria, in the US it was clear their assumption is that none of us knows much. One woman is proud of her husband, who reads a great deal on WW II. She reads much more fiction, she says. The assumption is this is normal. Of course none of us know much history. We don’t read other languages. And of course we don’t know how another country presents its history in its language. To know any of this, they seem to suggest, is suspect.
