Collective Occlusion: American Narratives and Silencing of Important Cultural Memories

"First, occlusion conveys a sense of blockage; it is not that these memories are erased or forgotten but they are not salient or easily seen.  Second, even when memories are occluded, they are, in historical and archival cultures. Available in books, on the Web, and often taught in specialized university seminars. "Amnesia' misrepresents the complexity of social memory by conveying monolithic, socially uniform processes.  The partiality and opacity of "occlusion' conveys this complexity more fully [p.58]."

Weinburg, et. al. wrote the following concerning the need to have awareness of collective occlusion in our curriculum development in history and social education in America by noting: "When we began this work, we hypothesized that there would be significant points of tension between the history taught in schools and the history available in film, music, and TV in the culture at large.  This may be the case but it is not what we found.  In fact, rather than forming a separate sphere, the school often became the purveyor of the history curriculum offered by popular culture, the place where young people first sat and sampled its wares:  Hollywood movies, made-for-TV documentaries, and the like. [p.57]"

I should add that the researchers spent hundreds of hours observing classrooms at three different high schools in the American Northwest for their research.  This enabled them to observe what kind of interaction the students under  investigation had with teachers in their own "official" history classes. Based on their home and family discussions (as well as blindly submitted written reports submitted from the two cohort generations in each household), the researchers  wrote, "Similarly, the home" has become "a venue in which parent and child often shared in the joint experience of the past by turning on the VCR [nowadays the CD/DVD or digital memory of mass media sources] and together [have been] witnessing a celluloid version of it."  

Importantly,  the child-generation (or younger of the two cohort generations), i.e. who had had no personal direct experience living in the Vietnam War Era, seem to have absorbed the biases and misleading information of mass-media rather than relying more on what expert witnesses and expert researchers tell them about history on-the-ground in the Vietnam era. Note: Some of these expert witnesses may have even been the parents of the very high school students under study--hence, there have certainly been some disagreements between or among the generations as to how to interpret images and history. For example, the movie Forrest Gump crept up in 60% of the interviews conducted with parents and their children, i.e. concerning the topic of the Vietnam War era.  In other words, for some of those youth interviewed "the sequences of images and dialogues, invented by director Robert Zemeckis [creator of the film Forrest Gump], was the sharpest and clearest recollection of the entire Vietnam era.[Ibid.]"

One example of occlusionary memory  (or exclusionary memory) presented by Weinburg has been the absences of information in films concerning the massive support for the Vietnam War in the USA throughout the 1960s. From watching movies and some documentaries in recent years, one often has the view that the Vietnam War was proceeding along for a decade or more with only a few supporters. This was, in fact, generally not true. Throughout the Cold War, too many Americans bought into the government's and CIA's domino theories about communism. This occlusion of memory is important because the biggest lesson of the Vietnam War is for individuals and society to not any longer simply follow our leaders (like lemmings over the next cliff).  When they try to lead us off to fight the Great Communist Myth--or the Great Eternal War on Terror Myth we must be more analytical and do our homework on the facts.  American youth have to be more introspective, question our leaders very tough early on, and stand up for what is right early on--and not stop fighting to end war and other global nonsense until all our children are brought home again.

According to Weinburg, et. al., "As late as 1972, the war . . . . having spread to Cambodia and Laos, still commanded overwhelming support in public opinion polls." This reality reflects the same lacks attitude that people have had in the USA in putting up with 13 years of endless war on terrorism that we are experiencing in 2013. Weinburg and his fellow researchers noted that despite fact that Americans had allowed themselves to be hoodwinked en-mass for so very long about the Vietnam War's importance in the greater scheme of things, "Domestic support for the Vietnam War was rarely mentioned in our interviews." 

In short, this important detail has not been made clear to subsequent generations of America, i.e. in post 1975 America. These sort of discoveries about "occlusion" and American memory led the authors to these conclusions: The belief that the "family as educator" is a dominant source for moderating or revising media, textbook and school history lessons is less of a reality than has been perceived. In short, the family's role as "history educator" is possibly not as important as it was before the age of electronic media. 

Instead of mediating the media, families are often transmitting stories to one another that more often replicate Hollywood or the many mainstream documentaries on history, i.e. rather than actually taking time to pass down the real context of the family's or country's lived-out  history to younger generations. Weinburg notes, "The family still educates, to be sure, but not in some stylized Norman Rockwell way": the family mediates the larger cultural narrative provided by Hollywood [p.57]." History lessons in school must be reconceptualized to take into account the deficits leading to the occlusion of important historical facts in dominant historical narrations.  This is true whether the history stems from mass media, textbooks, or from the family's misdirection or occlusion of memory. History books and history courses need to make sure that students understand the discrepancies between everyday-knowing and other forms of knowing or knowledge.

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