Dan Ackroyd and Jane Curtin in the Point / Counterpoint segment on Saturday Night Live: Jane would make some serious point, only to be dismissed by Dan with a response beginning “Jane, you ignorant slut”
This posting is about not knowing, about ignorance — but not about the ignorance of “Jane, you ignorant slut” (call this ignorant, sense a), instead the ignorance of my helper Isaac, who turned out to be ignorant of the Great Depression (call this ignorant, sense b); well, he’s Fijian and more than a generation younger than me. On the two senses, see NOAD:
adj. ignorant: [a] lacking knowledge or awareness in general; uneducated or unsophisticated: he was told constantly that he was ignorant and stupid. [b] [predicative] lacking knowledge, information, or awareness about a particular thing: they were ignorant of astronomy. …
Unfortunately, the odium of sense a tends to overwhelm the simple not knowing of sense b (negative associations tend to crowd out positive ones). Meanwhile, I am famously ignorant of almost everything having to do with sports, while also being famously knowledgable about a few things having to do with language.
Now, the Great Depression, starting with the Wall Street crash of 1929, figured prominently in the stories of my family history (both my parents were born in 1914, and so were teenagers when the world came unglued). Isaac was, in fact, equally hazy on the flu pandemic of 1918 (which claimed one of my grandfathers and his youngest daughter) and on any of the details of the astonishingly savage eruption of World War I or of the Russian Revolution. I’m sure he knows nothing of the Spanish Civil War, and little of the European face of World War II (like the Blitz against the UK, the fire bombing of Dresden, and the liberation of the concentration camp at Auschwitz).
I am now accustomed to encountering young gay men for whom the AIDS epidemic (in its core period, 1981 to the early 1990s, during which tens of millions died) is a rather dim historical event and for whom HIV is now a nasty, but avoidable and usually treatable, sexually transmitted disease, so they simply don’t understand the level of emotion and the starkness of memory that the plague arouses in its now-aged survivors (I am, by some fluke of luck, one of those old guys). I understand their lack of interest and the resulting ignorance, but I still want to shout at them, pleading, Listen! These are things you need to know!
I remember the first magazine photos of the liberation of Auschwitz. I was just a child. The magazine stories altered my life, presented the problem of wickedness to me in the bleakest, most personal terms. I already knew that I was an oddity, and therefore feared and despised by some people; now I learned that these people could band together to erase me — cast me out, imprison me, torture me, murder me. Awful knowledge, shared by Jews, and blacks, and sissy boys, and others. We had to be watchful. We had to protect one another. Warn each other. Be both strong and compassionate. Well, try to do the best we could. And for that, we had to know — know many things, including the evil that lurks in the hearts of men.
By great good fortune, I came supplied with a wide streak of playfulness (see lurking evil, just above), easy joy (even to the point of ecstasy), and empathy. Also, as you can see, an inclination to think well of myself.
Still, I look at those photos from Auschwitz, and weep, and say, I would have saved them if I could. And think, You all need to know this, remember it.
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