Absence makes the heart grow fonder of things that really were bad
Polansky the Younger has a nice one up on the front page today. Here’s a taste:
Of course, suggesting that the neocons will somehow manage to pervert our descendants’ understanding of the present is pointless, insofar as the consensus of our children’s children is unlikely to be right in the first place. Most people are poorly enough informed of contemporary events, and they show an even weaker grasp of the past. Can the average American today explain the origins or ultimate effects of World War I? And in many ways it is easier for jingoism and arrogance to seep into our perceptions of our ancestors’ activities than it is our own. Our attitude is more or less “nothing to be done about it now, might as well mythologize it.” Better to think the Doughboys died for something grander than Wilsonian self-deception and the Treaty of Versailles.
Really, this entire mode of argument is little more than self-aggrandizement at the expense of our forebears — “poor Grandpa, he didn’t understand how good a leader Truman was.” (And as far as this George W. Bush is Harry S. Truman thing goes, James Buchanan also left office loathed by the populace he purported to serve, and history remembers him an abject failure.) Maybe the Greatest Generation was a little more on the ball than we realize. Truman wasn’t loathed because he dropped a pair of atomic bombs on civilian population centers, but because he entangled us in a foreign war without clearly defining attainable objectives or appropriate strategies. (Actually there might be something to that Truman analogy after all.)
We fixate on Truman’s decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki while glossing over the Korean conflict because we’d prefer to memorialize our history as one of just and terrible avengers rather than semi-competent invaders of Asian countries of questionable strategic significance. Our grandchildren may wish to remember our generation in a similar light, but the apologue they create won’t qualify as objective assessment of history any more than ours does. Human judgment is fallible, and there’s no reason to think another 50 or 100 years will change that.
Yep, Comedy = Tragedy + Time, except in this case. Read the whole thing.