Oh, Rob Lowe, what were you thinking of?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/28/rob-lowe-what-were-you-thinking-of-hermes-war

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What a curious individual Rob Lowe is. I met him once, five years ago, when I flew to Toronto for an interview. I was all geared up to like him. He was in St Elmo’s Fire! He was Sam Seaborn in The West Wing! He seemed so nice and crinkly eyed on screen!

I say “met”, although that’s stretching the credibility of the term because Rob Lowe walked out 14 minutes into our designated hour-long chat after I had the temerity to mention the fact that he was suing his nanny for attempted blackmail. He was 45 at the time, old enough, you’d think, to say he didn’t want to answer the question.

Anyway, I wasn’t particularly surprised when Lowe said something monumentally stupid a few days ago. Wading into the diplomatic fallout following Sony Pictures’ decision to cancel the cinematic release of The Interview because of a threat from North Korean cyberhackers, Lowe took to Twitter to announce portentously: “Hollywood has done Neville Chamberlain proud today.”

You can imagine him being entirely thrilled as he came up with this comparison, sitting on the veranda of his Malibu beach house, sipping a kale-juice-infused glass of coconut water while wearing a wet suit tantalisingly left undone to display his rippling pectorals.

“People think I iz just a pretty face,” he might have thought, jabbing out 140 characters on his smartphone like the human equivalent of Lolcats. “But I knowz History and stuff.”

Of course, North Korea’s hacking of Sony emails was a grave act of cybervandalism. But as President Obama himself stated, it was not “an act of war”. Yes, Sony’s decision to drop the film was a serious blow for free speech (although a handful of independent cinemas chose to screen it on Christmas Day). Yes, it is a worrying development in an online world where terrorism can take many forms. But comparing the whole sorry episode to a policy of appeasement by a misguided British prime minister that contributed to the outbreak of the Second World War and the unparalleled horrors of the Holocaust? No, Rob Lowe. Just… no.

As it happened, it wasn’t the first time Lowe had been guilty of employing a borderline offensive Second World War analogy. Earlier in the month, he had posted a picture of himself on Instagram, posing next to a Hermès handbag, accompanied by the caption: “This would literally be a Sophie’s Choice for the women in my life.”

In the novel by William Styron and the subsequent film version starring Meryl Streep, Sophie’s Choice tells the story of a Polish immigrant who was interned in Auschwitz and who was forced to choose which one of her two children would be gassed and which would proceed to the concentration camp. When Sophie sends her daughter to her death, it is a moment of devastating poignancy and almost unimaginable trauma. Choosing whether to buy a handbag doesn’t come close, Rob. Literally.

But why should I care if a superannuated Hollywood himbo says some silly things on social networks? Because, in this context, comparisons count. Using a global conflict during which millions of innocent people died as an unthinking way of getting your point across is, at best, tacky and, at worst, dangerous. It cheapens history. It trivialises legacy. Suddenly, the Second World War and the systematic genocide of the Jewish people become a casual conversational meme, a symbol of something denuded of its original ugliness. We forget to think about what any of it actually means because we’re too busy snickering at the idea of a woman getting befuddled over whether to buy a designer handbag.

It’s not just Rob Lowe. Over the festive period, we were subjected to the Sainsbury’s advert, which used the 1914 Christmas Day truce as a backdrop to a heartwarming story involving a chocolate bar. I’ve mulled over this advert a lot. I’ve tried really, really hard not to think it is a horrible act of commercial appropriation. It was supported by the Royal British Legion, I told myself, so it can’t be all bad. And surely anything that raises awareness of an important historical event is a good thing, right?

But I’m afraid I don’t buy it. And I don’t buy it because I’d argue that packaging trench warfare into a neat little narrative parcel in order to sell more mince pies is not a pathway to greater understanding of what these real men went through every day.

Real men. It’s worthy of the repetition. Because the more we treat war and death as cutesy visual shorthand, the more in danger we are of forgetting the brutality and the bloodiness at its core, the shattering violence and the existential terror experienced by those who battle through it. The further away war seems, the less impact it has. It runs the risk of becoming a cliche.

This year has been one of commemoration. Looking back over the past 12 months during which we have marked 100 years since the outbreak of the First World War, it strikes me that the most effective memorials are those that require a degree of thinking on our part. They do not do all the work for us. They do not involve Sainsbury’s chocolate bars given to chisel-jawed soldiers called Otto. They are, instead, the quieter moments that prompt individual reflection: the sea of ceramic poppies engulfing the Tower of London; the flickering candles on windowsills as the lamps went out all over Europe; the dog-eared, faded letters of servicemen passed down through the generations.

When it comes to the two world wars, we need to keep on thinking about what they meant. It should require effort. The legacy of these appalling conflicts cannot be reduced to a glossy advertisement or an unthinking comment by a 1980s Bratpacker. If we allow that to happen, we forget the reality without realising we’re forgetting. We start to lose touch with our past. We all become a bit more Hollywood himbo.

Literally.