Friday Mind Games With BoBo

Part of me wants to ignore completely the latest musings from David Brooks that appear in the New York Times today, but it probably behooves me to communicate some of them anyway. He sets it up with a description of interaction with friends and acquaintances at social gatherings, giving us a peek into the “smart set” of guiltless extravagance where, apparently, the primary points of discussion are the dates and times of upcoming jaunts to fashionable resorts and the appreciation of each other’s investment portfolios (think pre-Anschluss Vienna about 70 years ago in terms of obliviousness to wartime reality).

And I say that because, though Brooks feigns memory loss in an attempt to be humorous, he does manage to work in the following…

They say the 21st century is going to be the Asian Century, but, of course, it’s going to be the Bad Memory Century. Already, you go to dinner parties and the middle-aged high achievers talk more about how bad their memories are than about real estate. Already, the information acceleration syndrome means that more data is coursing through everybody’s brains, but less of it actually sticks. It’s become like a badge of a frenetic, stressful life — to have forgotten what you did last Saturday night, and through all of junior high.

In the era of an aging population, memory is the new sex.

Wow, dude, I’m really sorry to hear that. And as if that weren’t enough…

The dawning of the Bad Memory Century will have vast consequences for the social fabric and the international balance of power. International relations experts will notice that great powers can be defined by their national forgetting styles. Americans forget their sins. Russians forget their weaknesses. The French forget that they’ve forgotten God. And, in the Middle East, they forget everything but their resentments.

Well, for a nation that has supposedly “forgotten God,” I believe the story noted here shows some truly honorable compassion in His name…

ABLAIN ST. NAZAIRE, France After 148 Muslim war graves were desecrated on the weekend, Muslims, Christians and Jews prayed yesterday in the Muslim section of the Notre Dame de Lorette cemetery in northern France to protest what a local Islamic leader called an "odious and irresponsible act." Abdelkader Aoussedj, deputy head of the French Council for the Muslim Religion, said his community was very touched by the "mobilization of national and regional" authorities and by the "marks of sympathy" from other religions. Roman Catholic and Jewish leaders, along with Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, have expressed anger at this latest vandalism of Muslim war graves…in France's biggest war cemetery.

And BoBo sums up as follows…

As in most great historical transformations, the members of the highly educated upper-middle class will express their suffering most loudly. It is especially painful when narcissists suffer memory loss because they are losing parts of the person they love most. First they lose the subjects they’ve only been pretending to understand — chaos theory, monetary policy, Don Delillo — and pretty soon their conversation is reduced to the core stories of self-heroism.

Their affection for themselves will endure through this Bad Memory Century, but their failure to retrieve will produce one of the epoch’s most notable features: shorter memoirs.

Memo to Clark Hoyt and Andrew Rosenthal of the Times editorial board: is this supposed to be funny? If that’s the intention, then I can tell you that it isn’t.

The next time Brooks finds himself without something legitimate to propagandize about as a deadline approaches, he should just either recycle some tired narrative from past columns or just call up his boss and say, “Hey, I got nuthin’ – maybe you could let O’Hanlon and Pollack write another column in favor of the Iraq war or something.”

Because, unlike the trendy sort of memory loss that Brooks describes while one is tossing aside witty bon mots after sipping the Chardonnay and passing the sweet and sour shrimp, I can tell you that I have seen actual degenerative memory loss suffered by a family member, and there is nothing whatsoever about it that is clever or desirable in any way.

Grudgingly, though, I will admit that Brooks has a bit of a point about his so-called “great forgetting.” Though it is a flimsy excuse, I can think of nothing else to explain the two-term candidacy of Bushco and the continuation of the Iraq war.