Our top story tonight: Generallissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
Chevy Chase, Weekend Update, Saturday Night Live, 1975
Chase had a recurring bit in the Weekend Update segment during his short time on SNL, which Jane Curtain continued with a time or two, in which he would mention as newsworthy the fact that Franco, the recently deceased dictator of Spain, was still dead. However, in a sense, Franco actually wasn’t dead then and still isn’t now. Not that he’s alive in the sense that you are or I am today but that he hasn’t slipped into that ethereal, ambiguous place we call the past.
When someone dies, people usually give the comforting advice that deceased isn’t really gone as long as she lives on in your heart. So when everyone who knew that person finally passed on as well, 10 or 50 or whatever years later, death was truly final and that person extinguished. With exceedingly few exceptions, relatively speaking, that extinguishing is true for every single human born prior to the Industrial Revolution. Not counting surviving census (and similar materials), only major historical figures have anything still known and alive about themselves.
Since the Industrial Revolution began, however, modern media has been born and evolved. Newspaper archives and personal journals are probably the oldest such records and since Daguerre’s (or Talbott’s) and Edison’s inventions we’ve been preserving sounds and images. With the invention (and continuing improvement) of digital storage, nearly everything that currently exists in the various analog formats and everything stored digitally is being preserved and,with the right approaches, will never be lost. In a sense, then, none of us will ever truly die again. Are you reading this while I’m still alive or after spelunkering through drafty archives of the web’s birthing far down the road?
BillSaysThis 