Remember Remember

I’m not saying I don’t get why people outside of England say “Remember remember” to each other on November fifth, and I’m not saying that people should stop (it is kind of fun. Why else would I put it in the title?), but it did get me thinking a little bit about how holidays or remembrances change over time. This isn’t even like Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play levels of change over time (or, more recently, a joke about Illumination’s minions in Mortal Engines) as those are both a longer timespan than I’m talking about (yes, the four-hundred-plus years since the gunpowder plot counts as a not a long time in this instance), this is more looking at how pop-culture changes a thing.

And I bring this up now because of how obvious the inciting incident is. Without Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta, I doubt people would have ascribed much significance to the fifth of November, even within England. At the very least, I imagine it’d probably stay around the significance of Cinco de Mayo if the same rhyme managed to permeate popular consciousness.

But at the same time, wasn’t that one of the points of the book? One of V for Vendetta’s major themes was attacking complacency in the inner workings of its country. The newscast sequence (for both the book and the film, though your mileage may vary on the effectiveness of either) basically spells it outright. And yet…

And yet now it’s V for Vendetta day. A chance to post Guy Fawkes masks on the internet, and even that’s generally devoid of the more anarchist-friendly side of the work. Do people know about the treason that inspired it anymore? That’s really the thing I try to wrap my head around. But then again, isn’t it fine if they don’t? Perhaps it isn’t in some sort of “people who forget history are doomed to repeat it” sort of way, but at the same time, that’s just culture, isn’t it?

-F