The Enola Gay and the politics of representation

Abstract

With Marshal McLuhan dead and buried, perhaps it was inevitable that so many of those embroiled in the Enola Gay controversy would have forgotten how much the medium is in fact the message. As if debating colleagues around a seminar table, the historians involved did what historians do, sifting evidence and arguing about how best to read it. In contrast, opponents of the proposed exhibition of the restored bomber at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum focused on the exhibit as such and the impression it would make on those who saw it. What they wanted was both simpler and more far-reaching than either the museum or its allies ever fully grasped: to control the imagery with which Americans remember the devastation rained on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and its place in what is still called the “good war.”