March (and the other months) Madness

As Japan commemorates one year on after a massive earthquake triggered a tsunami that killed tens of thousands of people and provoked a partial meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant, a series of programmes has been commissioned by the BBC and others.  Worthy and insightful, on one occasion in a programme the day was referred to as ‘3/11’.

This is one of my greatest bugbears – that an immense tragedy (indeed, one that is still ongoing) can be boiled down to a few numbers, as it was just another date in history.  It is also confusing for a British audience because it uses the back-to-front American dating system.

It started with one day in September eleven years ago.  The enormity of the attacks and their scope meant that it was hard to encapsulate into a bite-size portion for the 24/7 (see what I did there) media.  There is a mania for abbreviation these days, enhanced by text messaging and Twitter, e.g. the permanent five members of the UN Security Council are known as the P-5 and so on.  My take on the events of 11^th September 2001 would have been to call it the East Coast Massacres or Eastern Seaboard Air Attacks or some such formulation.  As the Bush Junior administration was in charge of the White House, its war-mongering cadre coined September 11 or ‘9/11’.  It is a militaristic term, stripped of all humanity and date-ordered so as to give a reference point before pressing on to the next battle.  You would find it in a sergeant-major’s logbook – you would not find it in Herodotus, Thucydides, the Venerable Bede, Edward Gibbon, Arnold Toynbee, Lord Macaulay, no less the whole panoply of histories. 

Until now, when it has passed so pervasively into the vernacular.  There is good reason for this, for in one hundred years it will signify nothing and tells us less.  People don’t chronicle the outbreak of World War One in Europe as 28/7 (or 7/28 for Americans); the Visigothic sack of Rome is not 8/24; and Napoleon Bonaparte’s defeat was not 6/18 thereby ending the 100 Days War – it was the Battle of Waterloo.  Even Remembrance Day adds the details with ‘at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, we shall remember them’, not ‘something 11/11 something something’.  Stephen King’s fantasia on JFK’s assassination at least appends a year to give the merest sliver of context, though he is also succumbing to (or riding, however you see it) modern mores with his use of it.  With interplanetary exploits, the terrain becomes trickier.  Depending where you were in the world, Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon on either 20^th or 21^st July.  The date cannot be localised to the event because we do not work on a lunar calendar.

I’ll concede grudgingly that the phrase ‘9/11’ became an emotionally-charged touchstone given the sacrifices of the New York emergency services and the 911 is the American dial to reach them.  But before a hundred years is out, nay, fifty, will people even remember in what year it occurred?  It marched in lockstep onwards, the Bali bombings in 2002 became 10/12 and those of 2005 10/1.  The London transport suicide bombings in 2005 are 7/7 (and the failed follow-up 21/7).  But a tremendous flaw in this naming is that the Atocha train bombings in Spain in 2004 happened on – that’s right – 11^th March or 3/11.  Who gets to claim that moniker – Spain or Japan?  How about we ditch it altogether, express the full human experience of what happened and give a slap to any journalist, commentator or politician who uses this system - their lazy cataloguing an affront to what it means to be human.