On our trip is also when I saw an article about the World Cup in Qatar. During an interview with Piers Morgan, the secretary-general of Qatar’s Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy, Hassan al-Thawadi, stated that deaths of workers involved in World Cup construction numbered between 400 and 500 people. “I don’t have the exact number,” al-Thawadi later said.
There are those who say that history does not rhyme, but it does echo. Upon reading that news article, I felt the echo of al-Thawadi’s words through the canyons of Hawks Nest and the beams of the Big Four Bridge. The inability of those in power to account with accuracy how many lives have been lost in their pursuits of projects that are meant to dazzle, advance commerce and enrich corporations or kingdoms felt tremendously callous—as callous in Qatar as it had been in Kentucky or West Virginia.
In Louisville, they were immigrant workers. At Hawks Nest, they were local and migrant laborers. In Qatar, they are foreign nationals from Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and China who have often been trafficked or extorted into forced labor and made to work long hours in extreme heat with little or no breaks in order to complete stadiums as quickly as possible to showcase Qatar to the world. We do not know how many have died or have been injured. Maybe one day, long after the World Cup has passed, a small plaque will be placed next to the stadiums with three or four sentences about what these workers endured. It will almost certainly not include their names.
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If you watch the HISTORY Channel series, “The Engineering That Built the World,” you’ll notice that it adheres to a familiar trope of the great man theory of history. The episodes laud the “ambitious,” “risk-taking” “heroic” male millionaires who “overcame the odds” and “risked everything” to lay the transatlantic cable or secure the government contracts needed to build the transcontinental railroad.
This particular brand of history has been repudiated by most academic and public historians as patriarchal, chauvinist and even jingoistic. But it’s a brand of history still very much en vogue in Hollywood and media—and, indeed, “The Titans Who Built America” series is produced by Leonardo Di Caprio’s production company Appian Way. The reason is simple: it makes for a compelling story. An ambitious, eccentric debonair who risks everything to overcome the odds and conquer both man and nature is a tidy plot device that adheres neatly to Hollywood’s brand of storytelling.
But history is not a movie, and the past is not a neat and tidy story. Even if you disagree with historians’ disputation of great man theory, at best this brand of history is woefully incomplete. It erases the negligence, corporate malfeasance, disregard for human life, incredible dangers, and horrific tragedies that have accompanied so many engineering marvels. Those realities are an equally valid part of the narrative. They deserve more than a few sentences on a plaque.