{"id":66102,"date":"2014-02-04T11:58:07","date_gmt":"2014-02-04T16:58:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=66102"},"modified":"2014-02-04T11:16:40","modified_gmt":"2014-02-04T16:16:40","slug":"the-attic-of-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/02\/04\/the-attic-of-empire\/","title":{"rendered":"The Attic of Empire"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remembering the National Air and Space Museum and the nation\u2019s guilty conscience.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Air_and_space_museum_2,_21\"<\/a>

Photo: Sailko, via Wikimedia Commons<\/p><\/div>\n

People think of Washington, D.C., as a transitory place\u2014a city of four-year leases, tourists, and revolving doors\u2014an impression that dates back to the earliest days of the federal capital. The city fathers, desperate to counter the District\u2019s reputation as a provincial backwater, fought back by building monuments. Think of it as overcompensation, the attempt to create an illusion of age-old power. Why else plant a fifty-story Egyptian obelisk in the center of town?<\/p>\n

For those of us who were born and raised in Washington, there was both a pride in living near the nation\u2019s symbolic center and a nagging feeling that the city didn\u2019t really belong to us. A drive down Massachusetts Avenue, past the mansions of Embassy Row, was a reminder of how much of the town was actually built on foreign soil. Even the parts that were supposed to be ours were somewhat foreign, in the sense that they belonged to the whole country. Our Fourth of July fairground was the National Mall; the church in which I sang was the National Cathedral; and our local museums were the Smithsonian Institution\u2014the \u201cNation\u2019s Attic.\u201d<\/p>\n

The museums were the best part of living in Washington. My friends and I took a proprietary interest in them. This might not be our town, exactly, but these were our<\/i> museums, none more so than the National Air and Space Museum, which opened when I was nine years old and obsessed with outer space. <\/p>\n

The ribbon cutting was a grand affair, timed to coincide with the nation\u2019s bicentennial celebration. The robotic arm that cut the ribbon was activated by a signal from the Viking 1 spacecraft en route to Mars. President Ford, applauding this bit of high-tech theater, called the museum \u201ca perfect birthday present from the American people to themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

The museum quickly became the most visited attraction on the Mall; it\u2019s now the most popular museum in the world. But in those early days, it seemed to have been built just for me. The moment I squeezed through the glass doors and stood at the sun-blasted edge of \u201cMilestones of Flight,\u201d the crowds melted away. I\u2019d make a beeline for the Apollo 11 Command Module, which was encased in a clam-shell of ballistic plastic, just like the commemorative miniatures in the gift shop, and run my fingers over the scorched heat shield, imagining the astronauts\u2019 fiery reentry.<\/p>\n

But most of my go-to exhibits were military machines. I took a special interest in the trophies of war: aircraft that had been delivered to the United States as restitution. I never left the museum without visiting the biplanes of World War I, the Fokker and the Pfalz, with their wire struts and fabric-covered wings; or without shaking a self-righteous fist at the German V-2 rocket. I hated the V-2 as a weapon of Nazi terror, but I had to admire its elegant silhouette and the perfection of its paint job, a kind of abstract checkerboard in gleaming black and white.<\/p>\n

The war trophies looked brand new, even the V-1 \u201cbuzz bomb,\u201d which dangled from the ceiling trusses like one of the scale models that patrolled the airspace of my own bedroom.<\/p>\n

I could almost imagine that winning a war was simply a matter of confiscating the enemy\u2019s favorite toys.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

The Air and Space Museum was conceived as a hanger on a monumental scale, an \u201cattic\u201d for famous and noteworthy aircraft. But by the late 1980s, the museum, under the leadership of a new director, began to explore a fresh line of inquiry: didn\u2019t these masterpieces of technology have something to teach us about our nation and its place in the world?<\/p>\n

The fiftieth anniversary of the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima was the perfect opportunity to unveil the newly restored Enola Gay, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress that delivered Little Boy on August 6, 1945. With the Enola Gay as a hulking backdrop, visitors to the museum would be asked to reflect on the facts of the case, to treat the Enola Gay, and, by extension, the atomic bomb, in the cold light of history. Photographs would display the consequences of the bomb side by side with its brilliant delivery system.<\/p>\n

As a child, I\u2019d seen full-scale replicas of Little Boy and Fat Man, the Nagasaki bomb, in the old Arts and Industries Building. I was terrified of nuclear war\u2014Washington was ground zero!\u2014and the bombs\u2019 cartoonish shapes had given me nightmares. Now that the Soviet Union had fallen apart and the threat of mutually assured destruction was finally starting to fade, it seemed more important than ever to remember the horrors of Hiroshima.<\/p>\n

I liked the sound of the proposed exhibit, but Air Force veterans of World War II\u2014and the politically powerful veterans\u2019 groups they belonged to\u2014were outraged by its \u201cneutral\u201d character. Where was the pride? What did the victims of Hiroshima have to do with displaying an airplane? Instead of tarring our noble airmen with a war crime, shouldn\u2019t we be down on our knees thanking them for the countless lives they saved by ending the war so quickly?<\/p>\n

The controversy escalated to Congress, which supplies about two-thirds of the funding for the Smithsonian. Various members accused the Air and Space Museum of political correctness, intellectual dishonesty, revisionist history\u2014of foisting a guilt trip on the American people. The Senate passed a nonbinding resolution against the exhibit, and the museum\u2019s innovative director was forced to resign. A month later, a vastly simplified exhibit opened without much fanfare. A single succinct sentence described the Enola Gay\u2019s role in the Hiroshima bombing:<\/p>\n

\n

On August 6, 1945, this Marin-built B-29-45-MO dropped the first atomic weapon used in combat on Hiroshima, Japan<\/i>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

In the years that followed, I needed my museums more than ever, but in new ways: as a reminder of happier times, as a refuge from the pettiness and ego I encountered in my daily grind, and above all as source material for my stories. My imagination had always been drawn to obsessives: people who collected, categorized, curated, and fetishized. Thanks to family and friends who worked behind the scenes, I\u2019d toured preservation labs, storage vaults, and stripped galleries. From an early age, I\u2019d seen just how much artifice was involved in the illusion of authority.<\/p>\n

Until the Enola Gay, I hadn\u2019t fully absorbed the role of politics in museum-making. History was written by the victorious; museums were simply shrines to that history. It was hard to blame the Air Force veterans for feeling that their shrine was being desecrated. They saw the quashing of the exhibit as a patriotic victory, but I experienced it as the triumph of vanity over introspection.<\/p>\n

As I was writing my novel Marshlands<\/i>, which explores, among other themes, how an empire consecrates its military history, I drew on the shame I felt after the Enola Gay controversy. I made my characters feel what it is to have an important exhibit ruined by political exigency, to lose a museum that felt like theirs<\/i>, and with it, a crucial claim to their own past. In Marshlands<\/i>, the loss is particularly traumatic, since the civilization commemorated in the exhibit has vanished, a casualty of one of the empire\u2019s foreign adventures. The woman organizing it is a refugee of that great disaster and comes to understand too late that there\u2019s no room in her museum for a nation\u2019s guilty conscience.<\/p>\n

I wish the Air and Space Museum still retained its magic for me. These days, trudging up the marble steps and passing through the security gauntlet, which was tightened after those gleaming 767s decimated the twin towers, I feel like I\u2019m entering an airport rather than a museum, like I\u2019m finally, after all these years, leaving my own city.<\/p>\n