Following up a comment from a previous post: Memory and Politics

[womzilla]

In my post on Decency, max_bialystock quotes Woody Allen from Radio Days:

I never forget that New Year's Eve when Aunt Bea awakened me to watch 1944 come in. I've never forgotten any of those people or any of the voices we would hear on the radio. Though the truth is, with the passing of each New Year's Eve, those voices do seem to grow dimmer and dimmer.

and added:

I think the problem lies in the passage of time. For those of us close enough to remember the events of the "McCarthy Era" and the Viet Nam "Police Action" the past grows dimmer and dimmer.

There are a lot of things this brings to mind. Two of them are fighting for foremost.

One is this recent statement from Grover Norquist. Grover is probably the leading intellectual force behind the current "conservative movement"; he delights in repugnant statements like "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub" and "Bipartisanship is another term for date rape". This week, in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, he said that he thought the Democratic Party was coming to an end because: 

their demographic base is shrinking. Each year, 2 million people who fought in the Second World War and lived through the Great Depression die. This generation has been an exeception in American history, because it has defended anti-American policies. They voted for the creation of the welfare state and obligatory military service. They are the base of the Democratic Party. And they are dying.

In case you were wondering, yes, the Republicans really do want you dead. When you're dead, you won't remember.

The other is this, the one brilliant line from Barry Levinson's Avalon:

If I'd known everything was going to be gone, I would have remembered harder.

Don't forget.

Comments

[wizwom.livejournal.com]

Well, actually, from what I've seen, the Democratic base is minorties and the poor.
The democratic leadership, meanwhile, is the cynical politico who calculates that he can have more power in the democratic organization playing to heartstrings rather than the republican organization, playing to pocketbooks.