Newspaper obituaries are carriers of collective memory, and researchers have found them to be a valuable source for discerning a society’s values. But obituaries are also about individuals, whose lives and identities they record—and for many people, they represent a unique instance in which their life story is told by a third party. In this article, I consider how collective memory of major public events is woven into the life stories told in obituaries by comparing recent obituaries of veterans of World War II and the Vietnam War. My findings suggest four interrelated ways that collective memory shapes these narratives: selection of defining life experiences, selection and emphasis of specific events and experiences, use of historical detail, and provision of cultural scripts. By influencing these components of the life stories told in obituaries, collective memory both occupies the narratives of individual veterans and maintains itself over time.
This chapter reveals that the storylines described in the section point toward a relationship with meritocracy that treats the concept not as an attainable ideal but as a flawed and unattainable guideline, with myriad exceptions and caveats. To challenge inequality and raise standards of living, the chapter suggests that stories and discourse about success and failure should focus less on pointing out the flawed execution of meritocracy and more on admitting that it is incoherent. The chapter gives emphasis on a fact that life is too complicated and arbitrary for merit to be reliably rewarded, and that what we accomplish has not much to do with what we deserve. The chapter also elaborates on what “Deserve's got not much to do with it” implies and evaluates the consequences of Americans' flexible, individualized, and narrativized idea of deservedness. Ultimately, it presents the narrative tweaks proposed in the concluding chapter, stating that they are not fixes to get us closer to meritocracy, but fixes to get us away from the delusion that we can be a meritocracy.
This chapter explores the logic that seemed to guide interviewees' responses in the question: “Do Americans think they live in a meritocracy?” It looks at the conclusions we reach about what we have earned or deserve and the standards we use to reach them, arguing that the most common standard for deservedness Americans use is merit more than meritocracy. The chapter also details the interviewees' responses about American ideas of success, and notes that people evaluate success in the context of their parents' jobs and finances, the neighborhoods where they grew up, and the educational opportunities afforded them. The chapter asserts that our ideas about what it means to earn or deserve something are so flexible for two main reasons: the bigness of life and the subjectivity of experience, and the second reason for our flexibility is that in turning our lives into stories and asking whether we have done enough, we find ways to avoid using the standard of societal meritocracy to evaluate ourselves. Ultimately, the chapter notes that the absence of meritocracy does not preclude the possibility of individual deservedness being realized.
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