Condemned to Repeat It: When Our National Memory Fails

from OurFuture.org:



Condemned to Repeat It: When Our National Memory Fails
By Sara Robinson

September 25th, 2008 - 2:34pm ET




Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Santayana's warning is now such a persistent cliche only because it's so painfully true.

Where have we seen this kind of meltdown before? Oh, yeah, right—we've got those family snapshots of our grandparents waving at the camera from the edge of this very same vertiginous wealth-eating abyss in 1929, as their family fortunes whirled out of sight through the yawning hole at their feet. And, as Kevin Phillips has told us more than once, the path to that chasm was well-worn even then. The Spaniards forged the trail to this dark place in the 16th century. The Dutch sacrificed their last shot at being a world power here in the 17th. And the Brits dropped by and flung their empire into this same pit in the early 20th.

In fact, it turns out that this is where the road has ended up every single time a major empire has turned the keys to its common wealth over to private financiers for the past 500 years. It turns out that the Great Depression was not a one-off —it was part of a long-understood pattern. It turns out that, contrary to conservative cant, the rules of economics do not change and history does not end.

It does, however, rhyme. And a lot of that has to do with the fragility of human memory.

Given the clear lessons of history, just what possessed us to believe the Masters of the Universe back there in the 1980s when they swore they were taking us out to some new and exciting frontier, the place where history ended and the normal laws of economic gravity no longer applied? (And why didn't it occur to us at some point along the way that that's pretty much the precise definition of an abyss?) Why is this terrain suddenly so familiar, and the trajectory of our coming fall only now so bitterly predictable? .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2008093925/condemned-repeat-it-when-our-national-memory-fails