CSotD: Horses, clam strips and our memories of memories
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Here's one page of a longer Lauren Weinstein cartoon about children and memories, and how nice it would be if we could ensure that our kids remembered the good things.
Go read the rest; it's not all that long and it's worth the time.
A hat tip to Sarah Laing for that, and hardly surprising, since it mirrors her own understated, elegiac style of marking small events. I think that's a style peculiar to women, perhaps related to the way in which their memories can, for reasons impenetrable to most men, be anchored to articles of clothing, which in turn adds a dimension of depth to quilting, because the scraps recall these moments.
What is particularly striking about Weinstein's piece is that the small moment of swimming with horses is contrasted with a pair of larger moments, almost in a Goldilocks continuum: Swimming being the smallest, a marital quarrel in the middle and a burglary as the large, unforgettable moment.
Her wish that the small moment might be her daughter's takeaway from the week is sweet, sad and, as she acknowledges, largely futile.
We've all got memories that are not memories of the event but, rather, memories of our elders recalling the event around the table at holidays. It's not quite a false memory; the thing really happened.
But we're remembering someone else's memory.
It is sweet that she wants to direct that memory away from the quarrel and away from the burglary. A child who was three-and-five-eighths (and I love that age) won't likely remember that you came home early, unless the vacation is forever branded as "The time we went to Maine and our house was broken into."
Nor is she likely to remember it as "the time we went to Maine and quarrelled the whole time" unless that's what you turn it into.
Though beyond that, it's out of your hands: She's apt to remember the clam strips and not the horses.
Even people who are older than three-and-five-eighths can have their memories and perceptions skewed, as Adam Zyglis notes in a cartoon that updates, but does not change, the subject.
He's quite correct that the egregious, outrageous statements coming out of the Trump campaign distract from the things about Clinton that we might otherwise expect to be discussing, though there's no guarantee that, if we were focused on them, we'd be discussing the horses and not the clam strips.
But even beyond that, many of our "memories" of her flaws are, when examined, memories rather of the discussions of those flaws, not our own memories.
Those who were three-and-five-eighths when the stories of Whitewater began to be told around the table are, today, twenty-seven-and-five-eighths, and the memories of that scandal are deeply implanted.
In listening to the old folks talk over all those years, they have picked up on who their elders don't like, even if they never quite understand why, and even if that particular cousin has always been kind and pleasant to them.
The result is that, even if they consciously know that there is no way Hillary Clinton orchestrated the murder of Vince Foster, the taint of deceit lingers.
They aren't likely to realize that nothing happened in Whitewater that wasn't par for the course in any commercial real estate deal, but they will remember the conversations about the scandal.
Just as knowing that Al Gore genuinely did support the development of the Internet doesn't remove the perception of Al Gore as a liar.
Just as recognizing the nature of Trump's attack on the Khan family does not change the impression that John Kerry lied about his experience in Vietnam, even though those doubts were the result of an equally deceitful, if more organized, campaign of sleaze.
As for flip-flops, it's plain that the accusation no longer has any meaning.
Campaigns once failed on perceived inconsistencies: Kerry explained that he had supported a measure initially, but, once it had been amended, no longer did so, and the heavens fell upon his head.
Now positions and opinions can change several times a day without apparent effect.
Brandan Reynolds at least tries, using a delightfully clever graphic, to keep the collective memory in some sense anchored to the historical record.
Likely a futile gesture on his part.
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