Busy Remembering

This one will be brief. I am just about to start a few hours working on my ghosts. And I was thinking about . . .

Our children are not taught to remember. They are taught to forget. Learn enough to take a test, pass it, move up, forget about it. They are told, You always can look it up. But how can anyone look up an answer if they've forgotten the question? No search engine is that good. And will anyone drive down the information highway if the fuel that drives them -- curiosity -- is in low supply and their tanks are empty?

Why is remembering so important? Does it get you a Job, the house, the girl (or boy)? Well, I knew what question to ask and so I looked the reason up. It is contained in George Santayana's famous quote: "Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it."

Humanity has gone through hell after hell of our own creating. And yet each generation seems more than willing to make the same mistakes, to enter the same bloody ventures, to go for glory not in the library but on the battlefield. Santayana also said, "Only the dead have seen the end of war."

So, lets simplify, shall we? A slogan of sorts, short, not sweet:

THOSE WHO FORGET, REPEAT.

One of the Ghosts

It occurs to me that when I talk about the voices in my head, it may make me sound a little unbalanced. Crazy, no? Well, sanity is highly overrated.

Please understand that I have encountered many stories in my 61 years of curiosity induced reading, and remember them. (Details -- I have a fine research library for them). I am busy remembering people I believe should not be forgotten ----- those are the voices in my head. I worry that when I am gone (and forgotten) that they will be, too, at last. The urgency of getting some of their stories down on paper grows when I think on that.

Like Mata Hari. I just read a bio on her. She was a woman of loose morals (for her day) convicted of spying on flimsy evidence as a scapegoat for French military failure. Then she was shot.

She was also a Dutch national. A cousin of sorts.

I read her story, the last half of which was about her arrest, incarceration and interrogation, and trial, and I think about how we hold people indefinitely on the suspicion that they are terrorists. I understand the paranoia behind that; I also understand that the government claims to have proof that each one is a dangerous person. But their rights are gone. And if only one of them is innocent, a Mata Hari incarcerated for who they are rather than what they did or did not do, then American justice is a joke for all of us.

History shows us many things. The worst lesson is this: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Did They Die For This?

Ten years ago America was brought to her knees by nineteen men and an investment of $500,000. Over three thousand citizens of the world perished, and we declared war on a word. :Terrorism" is a tactic, not a philosophy, and ten years later all that has changed is that America has spent herself into near insolvency and her people have, as well. We mourn the dead, grieve with their families. The wound has not healed -- there remains a gaping hole in our consciousness.

But the question begs to be asked -- was our response over the top? We toppled one dictatorship, certainly, and killed Bin Laden (after ten years of hunting). We have engaged in the longest and most constly war in our history against an enemy whose numbers remain small, whose governments pose no viable threat to our or anyone else's national security, and whom we vastly out-gun and out-man. And yet we haven't closed the deal (moxed metaphor, I know, but this is America the land of the Businessman).

If our enemies are nothing but anarchists, let us define the term. Anarchists actively pursue the disruption or dissolution of the existing order with no clear alternative to present; the lack of order IS the goal, by any means available. This sounds a bit like Congress to me, where a handful held the economy hostage in the hopes of further lowering public opinion toward all members of Congress -- in the bargain they are betting the voters (those that show up) will side with no government at all. Anarchy. Is that what the victims of 9-11 died for?

Thank you, Catherine, for cluing me into Jon Carroll's commentary in the San Francisco Chronicle today. In it he suggests strongly that the Republican Party is not the party of opposition, but now only of obstruction. I hope he is only partially correct. But I always state the one obvious point -- follow the money. Find out who stands to make a profit out of anything our :deciders" decide -- or stonewall.