Even before the bear-spray residue and splintered glass had been cleaned up, it was clear how January 6, 2021, would be remembered. Most Americans will think of it as the date of democracy’s attempted murder, though some will cling to the myth of a heroic last stand. It was the ultimate commemorable event, confined to one building and one day, replete with rhetoric, rich with historical resonance and physical mementos: flags, logos, helmets, baseball bats, zip ties, armored vests, shattered windows, pelts, and red caps, all ready to be labeled for an exhibition.
The COVID pandemic is the insurrection’s opposite. Silent and invisible, it has permeated everywhere and may never die out. It has no battlefields, no spasm of glory, no indelible footage of flames, not even any universally acknowledged villains. The instant politicization of the crisis made it impossible to agree on how extreme a threat it posed or how strenuously to fight it. “There’s no reason to expect that commemorating the pandemic will be any less political than managing it has been,” says Jeffrey Olick, a professor of sociology and history at the University of Virginia and an editor of The Collective Memory Reader. “The process of making meaning out of past events is a slow one.”
It will be a long time before we can distill an understanding of a calamity that hasn’t abated yet into an idea for a permanent monument: “We need to wait for the deaths to stop before tackling that one,” says Michael Arad, the designer of the World Trade Center Memorial.
A big hunk of marble isn’t the only way to commemorate disease. Memorials can be insubstantial, scraps that cling to the culture, even when we’re not alert to their source. “Where would German literature be without tuberculosis?” Olick asks, citing Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. He sees a sinister echo of the novel’s setting, a Swiss sanatorium in Davos, in the alpine clinics where James Bond’s nemesis Blofeld dwells among beautiful women and nefarious plots in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Spectre. “The disease left remnants in the background of our culture. I call that the ring-around-the-rosy problem,” Olick says. “When kindergarten teachers get kids to sing that nursery rhyme, few of them think about the fact that it’s a Black Death incantation. But that’s a form of memory too.”