David Brooks, a New York Times columnist I'm not particularly fond of, made a good point in his recent colum about our "Bad Memory Century." He wrote that "International relations experts will notice that great powers can be defined by their national forgetting styles. Americans forget their sins. Russians forget their weaknesses. The French forget that they’ve forgotten God."
While I have the feeling that the French survive very well even if they forgot that they’ve forgotten God, I wonder if a "Chosen People," (or ANY people, for that matter) can really thrive when they forget their sins. "Sins" means errors against humanity, compassion, and care for the common good: unfortunately, they have the bad habit of catching you sooner or later, often when you think that "forgetting" them was the functional equivalent of "erasing" them.
Americans, for example, did commit a number of sins in Vietnam, and sprayed vast areas with toxic products like Agent Orange, indifferent to the consequences. This caused the birth of thousand of handicapped children, born without arms, or severely brain-damaged. But it also provoked a number of deaths among American troops, many because of cancers that stroke years later, as it was the case with Admiral Elmo Zumwalt's son (as Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Zumwalt was responsible for the order of spraying Agent Orange over the Vietnamese jungle).
In the 1920s, American bankers and businessmen did commit a number of sins against common sense, and brought financial havoc to Wall Street, a disaster that was only repaired by Franklin Roosevelt's administration in the 1930s. As Eric Hobsbawm wrote, the XX Century ended early, in 1989; a few years later we entered the Bad Memory Century, with the Clinton administration promoting a financial deregulation that was later triumphantly completed by George W. Bush.
This, and nothing else, was the source of the "subprime mortgages" catastrophe: Bad Memory about bad financial practices.
Unfortunately, all Presidential candidates this year seem have the same trouble of their fellow citizens in overcoming Bad Memory and proposing to Americans the effort to recover the memory of past errors and sins.
