Paul Horton: The New American Amnesia: Trouble in Gatopia II
Guest post by Paul Horton.
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their own history.
Orwell
A lot of people I've been running into lately can't seem to remember important details about anything. I get stuck on spelling "the" sometimes and I reverse digits on my phone number a bunch. We all wonder why, even those of us under fifty and who haven't delivered kids, we seem to be loosing our memories.
A recent study (was it released today?) revealed that 9% of Americans take sleeping pills to get to sleep. Somebody a few years ago (10? 20?) said that we had become a Prozac nation, though I have heard (when?) that aluminum, not reading, and lack of exercise can also contribute to memory loss. And, of course, those sports that use the head as another appendage, football and soccer, do lots of damage, too.
But the sort of memory loss I want to talk about involves memory in the singular use. This kind of memory loss is the favorite subject of our nation's memory therapists otherwise known as historians. You know, those talking head guys on all of those PBS documentaries that are all