The Art of Remembrance and Forgetting

Have a rememorable day

"The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition, American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu..."

—FDR, Dec. 8, 1941

***

Americans never forget to remember. And vice versa.

We "Remember the Alamo!" and "Remember the Maine!"

We never forget Pearl Harbor, or 9/11.

Beyond that, we have a very short and selective memory.

Because, as someone once said many times, "...those who forget the past are doomed to remember the future."

As an example, who among us doesn't recall how General Antonio López de Santa Anna, of Mexico; Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, of Japan; and Osama bin Laden, of Saudi Arabia, were forgiven their treachery by the American people and went on to become President(s) of the United States?

(Sadly, the architects of the sinking of the USS Maine were never identified—none of them went on to become a US president. We are, however, left with a Remember the Maine cocktail to remind us of those exciting times in Havana Harbor. What better than absinth, after all, to sharpen the wits and hone the collective memory?)

US history is replete with formerly infamous figures who went on to be merely famous. And while rehabilitation of reputations took longer in pre-internet days, eventually many of the Great Wrongs of our past were excused and/or transmogrified into Great Examples by those who engineer such things.

These days that same process takes place in the blink of a news cycle. For example, on our National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, do you remember...

• A 2017 tour of the USS Arizona Memorial, during which the sitting US president had to ask his chief of staff what the event was about?
• The day we learned that those who died at Pearl Harbor were "suckers and losers"?
• That the very same US president, in 2021, led an armed attack on the US Capitol?

Those things may have seemed bad at the time, but here we are less than four years later, and all is forgiven! In fact, those documented events may have never occurred at all! Only in America (and a few other quasi-democracies), can you be THAT GUY, and re-become president of anything but a cell block.

It is truly a remarkable thing. A thing our forefathers would not soon forget, had they not died many-score and some number of years ago. 

Happening here, now, upon this continent.