The Boston Massacre - 3 January 1997

Images of 1996. It must be the same the wide world over, wherever there's a television station and an ambitious film editor. On the last day of the old year more millions than we can guess must have seen retrospective news programmes that put together, in short takes and sound bites, images of 1996.

I was able to catch at least half a dozen of these efforts on six different television networks and, if I'd had the time, I could have seen 20 or 30 more. The more I saw the more interesting they became because each network director or head of news or whoever had a different idea of what were the most important and the most memorable events, people, incidents, of the year.

I'm not sure I'm making myself clear. I already hear one listener saying about such programmes what Ronald Reagan, defending the logging industry in an environmental row, is reported to have said about trees, "When you've seen one you've seen them all". Not so, that's the whole point and the rising interest of watching several versions.

A vivid example occurs to me nearer home, a granddaughter of mine was given over Christmas a holiday assignment to write up a report on the so-called "Boston Massacre", which is popularly regarded as the match that lit the American Revolution and fired up the War of Independence. Quite simply, all we positively know that happened was this.

The year 1770, the place Boston – more precisely the Customs House, which had become to the colonists a detested symbol of London's authority to impose taxes on the people 3,000 miles away who had no say in the government that taxed them. On a snowy day in March, the little Customs House was guarded by a single British sentry. That's about all we can be certain of, what happened next? Nobody then or now can tell us.

There are slightly, or wildly, different versions. There was a planned attack on the sentry by some thugs, somebody threw a slither of ice, or the sentry slipped and his musket went off, certainly he fell and pretty soon there was a scuffle, soldiers came running. There was some sort of panic; there were shots and a small riot. In the end, three civilians were killed and two wounded.

The next day, scores of citizens some of whom had been present, some not, lined up to dictate their own depositions to a rally of lawyers. It all led to a town indignation meeting to gaudy pamphlets, both sides giving bloody, imagined accounts of the event and then it led to throwing into Boston Harbour a shipment of 300 chests of tea from the East India Company, then to London's closing the port of Boston to all commerce and the despatch to Boston of four British regiments, the ultimate humiliation and pretty soon the war was on.

There being no television at the time, the bestseller among the many lurid pamphlets about the happening at the Customs House was an engraving, a silversmith's engraving, of a line of British soldiers, rifles shoulder-high, firing on command at a rabble of citizens most of whom are collapsing pitifully from fire received from about six foot away. Any day after this brilliant picture appeared it was too late to call the Customs House event anything but the Boston Massacre. The moral is, history follows not necessarily what happened, but what people think happened.

It occurs to me that we are now at the end of a year very much in the same plight as the citizens who bought Paul Revere's engraving. Of all the pamphlets published throughout the colonies, that would no question be the favourite image of the year 1770, whether true or false it stimulated a revolution.

Now of course, we all have our own personal visual memories of last year, but those editors are going to win because by sheer repetition they can convince us that their choices were really the most memorable. First, though, there were certain events that by their very number defeated the editors. Naturally on a continent there are so many disasters which the television camera loves, so many fires, explosions, floods, mud slides, men arrested for murder, that they stay in our memories as a jumbled collective image of fire and smoke and men in handcuffs and men paddling in rowboats past their flooded homes.

There were however, four or five images that were everybody's choice. First, the floating wing of a sunken airplane. A baseball player spitting at an umpire. Senator Dole falling off a platform, a deer or two wandering into the backyard of a suburban house or many suburban houses in many states. I'm talking here, of course, about remembered American images. As for the foreign record you can guess at the same horrors that you've seen, the monotonous misery night after night of the pictures from Bosnia and/or Palestine.

So for our domestic pictures, two must have struck you as remarkably trivial, but everybody recalls them. Senator Dole's alarming stumble may come to be the most memorable moment, almost a symbol of his campaign. And while you know that a standard sight at all baseball games is a player and an umpire, or a manager and an umpire, almost but not quite bouncing off each other's chests, their arms carefully flexed behind them (they mustn't touch), but the sight of a player actually spitting at an umpire was one that, in a nation otherwise unshocked by such routine motion picture obscenities as theft, murder, rape, arson, this was a sight that shocked the nation.

A picture of a deer, two or even three deer munching the flowers of a suburbanite's garden that may sound odd or a little cute. Let me say it was a picture that could have been taken out on the high plains country of Montana or, more often, in the back garden or along the main roads and down some of the main streets of well-populated states like Michigan in the midwest and in the east, Connecticut and New Jersey.

Quite bluntly, the deer population, especially in the north-eastern states, is multiplying at a predacious rate. In the midwest, in Michigan in four years from half a million they've gone to two millions. In the east, less has gone to much more and the common menace is the increasing boldness of deer not finding enough to eat in the vanishing woods and moving into the replacing suburbs.

In Arkansas in the south and Vermont in the north, they have at considerable cost started erecting electrified fences to keep the deer out. Well now, 100 years ago, with Colonel William Cody on hand, it would have been a simple matter after he'd wiped out the immense herds of buffalo all across the west, he would have disposed of intruding deer in no time, but today the mere suggestion of killing them off is one that no governor, mayor, city councillor dare utter out loud.

I've left to the last the one picture that, shown in a flash, is something everybody remembers with a shudder or a sigh, it is the picture of the drifting floating wing of an air plane, a part only of the doomed flight of TWA 800, which just on its way to Paris exploded only a mile or two off the south shore of Long Island in July.

That first picture, I'm sure, would have been long forgotten except by the families of the dead if the case had been solved, but since July that picture could be used as the jacket photo of a huge anthology of thousands of pictures. In the intervening six months, the FBI and the National Transportation Safety Board have done a Herculean job of recovering, identifying and subjecting to autopsy 215 bodies of the 230 aboard.

The divers and the navy rescue ships have picked up, across two miles of the ocean floor, scattered segments, fragments, parts, crumpled bits and pieces to the extent of 90% of the airplane and have assembled them, in a flattened sort of order, on the immense floor of a hanger.

Since the day after the accident happened, as you can imagine, the conspiracy boys have been active with all sorts of shocking theories, chief of which got on to the Internet and was picked up around the world that the plane was the victim of friendly fire from a US Navy exercise off Long Island.

This was investigated at once, months before it was parroted by old, retired but well-known American reporter unacquainted with the Internet. The Pentagon and military and naval experts looked into it, not for long. The number of agencies and services and people that would have had to be involved in keeping this exercise accident quiet would have been is beyond belief. The two plausible theories the FBI and the Safety Board confronted were that the explosion was due to a bomb or a missile fired by remote control, or it was caused by some mechanical failure.

Well Mr Calstrum of the FBI has then and ever since been in daily consultation with a National Safety Board expert who has investigated over 5,000 air accidents. Obviously, they both must have gone to bed every night since July praying for enlightenment. As I speak, they have just about ruled out the bomb/missile theory and are leaning to the possibility of a dangerous build up of gasses in a fuel tank, but they cannot identify the spark that could have triggered the explosion.

To their frustration, but also to their commitment to scientific method, they won't say what they still don't know. Mr Calstrum, determined to solve it, says it may take a year, it may take 10 years.

Meanwhile, nothing official has been said about, or done for, the very small team of divers who at great risk to their safety and their health spent over 60 hours down below and brought up everything but a solution. If ever unsung heroes deserved the Medal of Freedom they're the ones.