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Constant Information - and Nothing Remembered
Americans are often praised for their resilience in the face of calamity, but there is another quality that seems to be in greater supply these days: willful amnesia. An August Gallup Poll showed that 65 percent of Americans oppose another economic stimulus even though the first one, which was inadequate by most economists' calculations, saved or created roughly 650,000 jobs. A more recent Gallup survey had 45 percent of Americans believing that current government regulation of business and industry was too great - a 10-year high. Never mind that it was the lack of regulation that got us into our current economic predicament. Regulation is so last year. In the ingenious film "Memento,'' the protagonist had lost his capacity to remember anything. It now seems as if we live in a memento nation - a place where we too instantly forget what's happened to us.
It wasn't always this way. When Herbert Hoover and his fellow Republicans dithered while Americans sunk into an economic slough in the early 1930s, they were rewarded with a generation of Democratic hegemony, and Hoover's name was eternally blackened. Similarly, when Lyndon Johnson presided over both domestic racial chaos and a military cataclysm in Vietnam, he was rewarded with the Nixon presidency. Only Watergate spared the Democrats further electoral indignities.
These punishments were not only right; they were essential to the functioning of a democracy because they reinforced accountability. If you screw up, you lose, which is exactly how it should be.
Accountability, however, is predicated on remembering who did the screwing up and what the screwing up was. That's why there's a problem when a society suddenly forgets what failed in the past - say Hoover's unwillingness to stimulate the economy or Bush's unwillingness to police Wall Street. The philosopher George Santayana famously said that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. We have been living Santayana's dictum.
But if memory loss is the problem, the deeper issue is why we seem to have suddenly lost our memory. In looking for an answer to why we have national amnesia, one might look first to the concept of memory itself. A common memory is the consequence of shared experiences and information. Americans suffered the Great Depression together. They maintained a vivid memory of that pain, a collective memory, from personal experience but also from reading the same newspapers, listening to the same radio programs, watching the same movies. In short, memory was created not only personally but culturally.
Likewise, Americans certainly disagreed about the war in Vietnam, but they watched the same images of the war on television and read the same AP dispatches. We were a nation united by information and memory.
Things have certainly changed, so much so that the United States is something of a misnomer. The institutions that helped forge collective memories have long been in decline. Movies, newspapers, and mass circulation magazines are all gasping. Broadcast television has been usurped by cable television and the Internet, which provide a plethora of images and ideas but which are far more likely to divide us than to unite us, giving us each the images and spin we prefer. Put simply, Americans probably share less now than at any time since the rise of the mass media early in the last century, including shared memories.
What is more, the loss of collective memory has been accelerated by the speed with which we receive information. Both cable news and the Internet place a high premium on "churn'' - on providing a new story or new scoop every few minutes.
Whether this is a function of our own growing impatience or a cause of that impatience is difficult to say, but cable television and the Internet contribute to a national Attention Deficit Disorder. They disrupt continuity, break the chain of cause and effect, detach memory from action, and heighten the moment at the expense of history and the bigger picture that history provides.
In "Memento,'' the hero, unable to remember anything, is compelled to live moment by moment, without the past ever informing the present. The here and now obliterates the there and then.
We operate similarly. We not only live in a society increasingly without memory; we live in a society in which the present is unmoored, making anything that happens right now far more important than anything that has happened before. Hence, if the economy hasn't recovered, it must be President Obama's fault since he is currently president. Or if Congress hasn't enacted health reform yet, it must be the fault of the Democrats since they are the ones in majority, the history of health reform notwithstanding. Or if deficits are growing, it must mean we should stop stimulating the economy since deficits are the issue of the moment. The present moment is everything.
However much this obsession with the here and now destroys accountability, there is an additional danger to a society that lives in the moment. When our actions and opinions are no longer grounded in a larger context, we are also much more susceptible to slogans and clichés that take the place of experience and memory. Government is bad, deficits are bad, military deliberations are bad. If you repeat these mantras endlessly, the memories of government efficacy, productive deficit spending, and the catastrophes of not deliberating over military strategy all disappear. Slogans replace sense.
Santayana probably wouldn't be surprised by a society that hasn't learned from its past. That was, after all, the point of his quotation. But one wonders what he would make of a society that can't even remember its past - a society that thinks every problem suddenly springs up anew and has no memory to tell it how it used to cope. That society is déjà vu all over again. And that society is ours.
34 Comments so far
Show AllGabler swipes Gore Vidal's amnesia idea and doesn't even give him a mention. Seems he forgot.
Good one!
"65 percent of Americans oppose another economic stimulus even though the first one, which was inadequate by most economists' calculations, saved or created roughly 650,000 jobs"
First I would really like to see some solid documentation on those 650,000 jobs. Second we are loosing 400,000 to over 600,000 jobs every month so if that number IS true it represents one months worth of job loses in this long recession. I would also like see the cost per job created/saved, but good luck with that one. I'm guessing any estimated would be too politicized by either side to be accurate.
I also think why people don't want to see another "stimulus" is that the money that was given to the financial sector seems to have only enriched a few at the top. The banks are still not lending very much, and still foreclosing on people with a vengeance. I think it seems to a lot of people that that money was just squandered.
He also talks about holding one party accountable by throwing it out of power and putting the other one in it's place. There MAY have been something to that argument in the PAST, but to me anyway I'm just not seeing major differences between the parties on major issues like the economy or war.
But other than that I do agree with the overall premise of the article that Americans have a short memory for things political. But ask many of them who won the 1960 world series and they'll know that!
Two hours till turkey time...
Good reply.
There is indeed amnesia in the USA, but the first example Gabler gives is the one case in thousands where their memory IS working a bit! Anyone not familiar with the corporate media propaganda model would be stuped as to why he gave this particular example. But, Gabler knew he could have never gotten this critical piece past the op-ed editor without the required deep-bow to the elite consensus. So he put it right at the top of the first paragraph! No doubt, he also waited until the deadline so the editor would be busy and only skim the article for grammar. Good thinking!
How I love to deconstruct this MSM stuff.
The stimulus was spent or is being spent to pad the bank accounts of people and Institutions that don't friggin need it! . I doubt it created 10 jobs and saving jobs? Nobody saved mine.
Americans are often praised for their resilience in the face of calamity . . .
Hah! LOL! ROTFL! We're doing real well now, aren't we? We finally have a government "of the people, by the people and for the people", don't we. I am dazzled by our resilience. I must go get my sunglasses.
My Empire tisn't of thee
sweet land of conspiracy,
in all i see
Land of the homicide,
and of the genocide
and to the herbicide
cancer's our meme
I think the 65% nay makes sense because most don't feel the stimulus money has reached them. A good example is the cash for clunkers program which rewarded gas guzzler owners and gave not a penny to those who've been endlessly responsible in this way. And then there's the 8,000 bucks to first time owners--how cute, but leaves out the vast majority. How about setting these programs up so that everyone or almost everyone gets a piece of the pie, even if a little less than the prime recipients.
Also, no sooner does federal money flow into communities under the stimulus package, then we hear that state-run programs are cut way back (multiple layoffs).
And obviously the main reason for the nays are the fact that the financial establishment has been bailed out ad nauseam... while the majority has received nothing but losses upon losses. And it doesn't require much a memory to know this--so we all know it very well.
Church goers - they believe what they are told and never think for themselves.
Oh my. Such a bold general statement. Did you come to that conclusion on your own?
Dont kid yourself, we remember.
We will remember, we will NEVER forget.
Payback is a bitch.
Hear! Hear! I second that! I third that! NEVER forget! Let Obama find out in 2012 that Payback is indeed a bitch!
I think fxduffy is pretty on target here.
When Bush Treasury Sec. Paulson demanded the $800 BILLION TARP bank bailout, the calls by constituents to the Congress ran around 100 to one against it. People were VERY upset. During the first round, the demand was turned down, but then the back room dealing started and the second round passed it. Then-Senator Obama voted for it.
Once burned..., actually badly scalded...
-30-
One congressman reported that his calls were evenly divided: No, and Hell,no.
He uses the weasel words right from the mouths of the bureaucrats, "created or saved jobs." Huh??? Which is it? Created or saved?
It might have just a little meaning if it were, "The stimulus, in addition to saving 650 thousand jobs, created 650 thousand jobs." But no, it is not that, which is not much anyway.
On first glance this looks like another medium-weight somewhat useful CD (-provided) article, but as I worked my way through it, little alarms were ringing.
"economic stimulus .... saved or created roughly 650,000 jobs"
=Where's the linkage, the backup for this assertion? We aren't against economic stimuli, we just want programs that, you know, help people.
"a collective memory, from personal experience but also from reading the same newspapers, listening to the same radio programs, watching the same movies"
="[S]hared memories" may have been meaningful then, but now we have myths and disinformation, circulated similarly, and the author would have it be even more so. Hello?
"the Internet, which provide[s] a plethora of images and ideas but which [is] far more likely to divide us than to unite us, giving us each the images and spin we prefer."
=Nearly the last source of reliable information and open discussion, the internet has also provided venues for cooperation and organization both nationally and internationally that were never before available.
Sharing is not a valid goal without context. Sharing food, values, a local environment are good sharings. This is a diverse nation with many cultures whose histories and memories are not going to be 'shared'.
Arguably, the present is going to be the most important time for obvious reasons - it's when we live, when we exist, when we function. Poor education and understanding of history and of current events is the problem. With underfunded schools and unreliable mass media, we aren't forgetting - we're not understanding in the first place. The author is blaming the victims. And I find his piece, looking beneath the surface, rather ill-conceived and ill-written.
But the loss of social memory is a problem and it does relate to the media. Take 2 cases:
--When there is a political consensus for some policy by the corporate elite, the MSM report it as the undisputed truth. E.g. that when an attack is being planned on Iraq, Iran, Venezuela or wherever the MSM just states that it has weapons of mass destruction and must be attacked.
--When the elite is divided on some issue each side's claims are reported in the "balanced opinion" format; no attempt is made to check the facts. E.g.- "...some say that public health will cost more and others say it will cost less."
But memory distinguishes strongly between what what really happened and what what was believed but didn't happen -- we remember our mistakes and learn from them.
What happens in a society where this distinction breaks down? Take a simple analogy: for persons who can't remember beyond yesterday and the elite is divided over where the sun will rise tomorrow. MSM would "balance" their report by giving both "opinions" so the people would take it as an even bet whether it rises from the east or from the west. So remembering what was reported has no point -- anything can happen.
And since the elite truths are so often later seen to be false (the ongoing British commission study of the Iraq war). People are getting used to treating all the MSM truths as even bets. The institutional corporate order is what is destroying the social memory and the ability to make rational decisions.
I wanted to make a comment, but I forgot what it was.
Vietnam War or Great Depression, it isn't always the case that people forget. Some people are aware of past events but go out on a limb to delude themselves into thinking "Well, we learned from that and everything got fixed so it'll never happen again." There are people who survived the Vietnam war era, the Reaganomics Era, and even the Great Depression but their own kids refuse to listen to their parents and elderly relatives offering their experience and lessons learned that these kids would benefit from. You would be surprised as to the percentage of young Americans who will go out of their way to sign up in the military or put their Social Security savings in the stock market thinking they'll fly high. My prediction is that those who do will either learn their lessons the hard way or stay in denial mode and think "oh it was just bad luck, this time it'll be ok". At least most animals learn not to repeat the same mistakes. Maybe the way we humans educate each other causes some of us to be smart and others to be in dumb brain denial mode. I can only be grateful that my wife and family went through years of hell to pull me out of my stupidity and turn me from a shriveling nobody to a good somebody.
The article makes a huge mistake. Far from saving America, the corporate media in the USA led Americans into the current debacle.
Yet he has a point. There is complaint, anger and frustration, desperation on these pages, but there is no sign of constructive consensus amongst Americans. The media does not belong to them, is not theirs. They have lost contact with the word. They do not know what is real.
The problem that Americans are facing is that their country the USA is too big. Monstrous, self interested legal entities control the country, control the word. This Godzilla is a daily reality, destroying Americans' lives and hopes. It demands absolute loyalty yet does as it wills, without care for the Americans it devours. The world is disgusted with.
The USA is a relationship that is no longer applicable between states or people. It needs to be destroyed and a new relationship that can enable Americans to relate not only to and through American States but also directly to the world can be established .
In my opinion, Godzilla's nest is the Pentagon. Burn it.
The American President is its puppet and all powers must be taken from him. The White House is already a museum.
It seems to me, from the comments here, that the issue might not be forgetfulness but confusion.
The money given to banks was a BAILOUT. This programme preceeded a separate programme of $700 billion earmarked for economic STIMULUS. At least that's how I remember it.
This is true. Earlier posters: feel shame for your ignorance.
Nevertheless, this article is shit. The author seems to yearn for even further consolidation of control of media, which causes mass delusion, not community. Community like a cult community maybe.
If anything is causing amnesia, it's the mainstream media outlets. The talking heads would have you believe that Obama caused the recession somehow. Their analysis of the news is on a 5th grade level. Causes and precedent are never fully accounted for. What you get there is superficial and highly subjective reporting of the events deemed newsworthy by the corporate masters mixed with product placement. Totally fucking useless.
But oh, that bad internet. So many conflicting messages and viewpoints. What will happen to our collective memory? Where will the people look for reliable news and information?
Let me clue you in, Mr. Gabler: Television is and always was nothing but a big advertisement for things we don't need. Newspapers have self-censored themselves into irrelevancy. The consolidation of ownership of media, for Christ's sake. How can you write an article about Americans' collective "amnesia" and not mention the consolidation of media during the last few decades? You totally missed the point.
That is all.
This article repeats a favorite topic of the corporate press: the Internet is destroying consensus by splintering opinions. On top of that, it suggests that people don't remember things because quick Internet stories are replacing thoughtful print journalism.
On the first point - unifying opinions - that's the job of propagandists, not journalists. This essay strangely omits the first task of print journalism - to report the facts. Of course, facts themselves have less effect without context and history - and the dailies almost never supply those last two items. Maybe that's because print space is limited. It isn't limited on the Web, however.
On the second point, it's certainly true that people don't recall things. However, these quick Internet stories are typically equivalent to corporate print journalism these days. Print journalists haven't been doing a very good job on the whole. We've also seen the major dailies largely dispense with investigative journalism, with a few exceptions.
The author scores some points on recanting the familiar tune that U.S. citizens suffer from factual amnesia. However, he loses points on the value of the corporate-funded dailies and the quality of that journalism. Actually, the Internet is one of the best defenses to general amnesia. You can freely search for further details. Most dailies lock their databases of stories, except for those who pay.
This author should read "Manufacturing Consent" by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in case he is unfamiliar with the propaganda model of U.S. media. The dailies have unified opinions all right - helping get public opinion behind unnecessary wars, for instance. Let's have less of that.
From an economic standpoint, the corporate press is dissolving because Internet advertising costs are lower than those of print media. The Internet has become more useful since people can filter out the car chases, celebrity gossip, etc. that have become staple reporting themes of the corporate press.
It's clear enough. Print journalism needs another funding mechanism. It might regain its audience if it actually produced copy that reflected the interests of citizens, rather than push the opinions of elites.
-TIA
Gabler is obviously a corporate stooge, I wonder if he even knows it?
Who cares if "people" (whoever that is) forget stuff? The internet freezez every stupid bit of hypocracy and salesmanship and MANUFACTURED CONSENT that the corporate military mafia shoves down our throat , then tells us we love it, It's all there if you look a teeny weeny little bit.
We remember, names, places, situations.
PAYBACK IS A B,B,B, BEEYOTCH!
How can anyone write anything anymore and include that endlessly repeated, trite, and irrelevant line from George Santayana?
Lazy and mindless writing it is.
The real deal is brought to us by George Bernard Shaw:
"What we learn from history is that we don't learn from history."
The Santayana line isn't trite or irrelevant, but it's been quoted so many times in so many places that it's lost all significant meaning. It's as if Santayana never said anything else, and he was a very good philosopher, especially his "The Sense of Beauty," one of the best philosophical explorations of aesthetics in the Western world. But I agree with you that I'd prefer to never see the line about repeating history ever again. It's like when posters here refer to the "sheeple", one of the most grating references of all. Or, "Wake up America!" I cringe when I see those words here.
this article presumes voting determines governing...it doesn't...
also, collective memory is not an actual thing...we have a number of questionable psychological frames we are handed, en masse, by our current societal 'leaders' in the guise of 'tradition', supported by violence and incarceration...frames regarding everything from religion to education to citizenship to treatment of the living world...I share no actual memory with any other creature...
learning from history? history is largely the cleansed reporting of what is actually large-scale murder, slavery and theft, among other crimes...is this what we need to learn? historical knowledge in no way equates to action in the present...who hasn't heard the Goebbels quotes? having heard them, how does that help in the face of a corrupt congress? who doesn't understand that defeating the horrors of our world will require action...personal, physical action, as opposed to 'voting' action? do you need to read about people throughout history who acted, first?
what bit of historical knowledge will help you when you are being evicted, or when your own government tramples your individual rights? our world, all of the living things upon it, is dying...this is not historical, it is current,and much more important than history...
current knowledge and action are what is needed now...future knowledge, if one can imagine such a thing...history divided up this planet and sold it...the future must undivide it and share it...the current action must move in that direction...
let's get those gardens growing...
this article serves no purpose...
"If you screw up, you lose, which is exactly how it should be."
No, that's not EXACTLY as is SHOULD be - unless we want a society of WINNERS and LOSERS...
We're humans, we screw the f**k up every 17 seconds. But there's a difference between honest screwing up and the top 1% stealing every f**king thing they can get their hands on without any consequence whatsoever.
Tony Romo screws up every week, yet the Cowboys still manage to have a winning record...
The "amnesia" is simply a result of the MSM. What the author describes is really just evidence of how many Americans still get their "news" from corporate media - despite the fact that access to alternative media sources has never been easier. Pretty sad. But it goes a long way to explain why more people think global warming is a hoax, and that the "market" (a la Milton Friedman) will solve all our problems.
What a cold, cynical bunch you people are! No compassion for weak thinking...
I'm from the guvment and I'm here to help you!
-30-
Memory without continuity creates vulnerability. Take Vietnam as an example. There are few old people there after 40 years of disrupted continuity, cultural and economic memory are shaped by events.
Tom Larsen's comment--that the "amnesia" is simply a result of the MSM--is well taken, though I would add a couple of qualifiers.
First is that the mainstream media simply does not report anything that might make the Democrats look good. So the issue of remembering the past never even comes up.
Quick example: the Clinton Administration, which accomplished a huge number of things that would please any progressive. The MSM handled this problem by covering right-wing smears against Clinton and his family, as opposed to what he might have been doing.
The result is that most Americans--including progressives--would flunk a simple quiz on the Clinton Administration's accomplishments. Who needs amnesia when you have boundless ignorance?
Secondly, partisan politics is full of amnesia, in the sense that inconvenient facts tend to drop out of the partisan mind. One might even say that selective amnesia is a sign of bad politics.
Republicans who say George W. Bush "kept us safe" have forgotten how we took our biggest hit in history under his watch.
They also forget we weren't supposed to criticize the President during wartime. It's as if the Pubs have undergone a complete personalitry change, and now it's patriotic to smear the President.
Partisanship dictates the past. Friedmanites are already telling us the way out of the economic woods is tax breaks for the rich and deregulation. Maybe we should get them a tattoo that says "ALWAYS REMEMEBER: YOU SCREWED UP." But we know it wouldn't help.
Progressives can be just as bad. I cite the O-holes (Obama Democrats), who have forgotten Obama's dirty primary campaign and theft of the nomination. Most progs lie through their teeth when they talk about moderate Democrats.
0 sez to look ahead!
forget the past.
ignore the present.
just look ahead!
It's hard to remember things that one does not understand coherently to begin with, but there's another factor here.
FDR rode a generation of Democratic hegemony because he acted "like a Democrat" or at least like people came to believe Democrats would act.
That is, he did things for his constituency. He instituted income tax and social programs, and he put people to work.
For 30 years or so, people have pretended that the Depression did not respond to the New Deal, but it did, distinctly and sharply. Unemployment spiralled until the New Deal measures kicked in, and it began to spiral again when Roosevelt tried to wean people from them.
0bama is not doing any of that, at all, but something very opposed: he stole from the kitty for his rich sponsors, so he's pretending to oversee a "recovery" while the population slips further into poverty and towards unemployment and homelessness, and fresh possibilities of runaway inflation fueled by debt and quicker recovery in other economies loom.
Now, theft under the name of "bailout" is not usually what Americans think of as "regulation," but it most certainly is a way of regulating the economy, and it has been advertised to all of us as regulation for the public good.
Most likely a substantial number of respondents to the cited poll take "regulation" to include "bailout."
We have not forgotten. We just worry that the current crop of wolves is not fit to keep the coyotes out of the henhouse.
Americans voted for least-worst in 06 and '08, but they have received only worse and worse.