Memory is an odd thing.  Anyone who explores his or her mind daily will come to realize there’s a strange moving around of furniture that goes on.  Memories shift and get shunted aside.  Some take on a different perspective or different priority.  For example, the memory of being jilted in high school was clear once upon a time, vivid and painful, but after years of happy marriage and having children, takes on an entirely different cast and comes to matter very little in context.  Young people don’t know this and can’t imagine how it is true.  That’s why they’ve got to have faith sufficient to “hold on” until the worst is over, instead of doing something rash that may end their life or cause regret.  The expression “Time heals” is true, and ironically speaks to the double-edged nature of time acting on the human mind.  How wonderful it is that the unbearable anguish and grief of yesterday lifts at last, cleanses or at least becomes more tolerable.  Yet how sad when you struggle to remember the curve of her face, the last words he said to you, the gift your mother gave.  Time makes forgiveness possible and most apologies useless. 

Policemen know how mistakes can be made in a lineup too, how eye witnesses ten years after the fact do not remember the same way they did ten hours or ten days afterward.  It gives meaning to a speedy trial.  I was a battery commander during the Gulf War and remember a lot of things about that time, but some names require harder recall now—and there’s no way I could tell you for sure how many meals or chemical suits I had under my seat in the command bunker.  I used to know that and much more for months, maybe even a year or two after the war.  On the other hand, I’ve got some papers filed, old drawings and records, a journal in my hand, etc.  These jog memories, and even if they don’t I’ve got 100% confidence in the veracity of them.  Various packing lists tell me how many pair of underwear I actually took along, what size the canteens were on my hip.  Tables and manuals list the nomenclature of tents, vehicles, missiles, ammunition and radios.  In this way, a good historian can tell you as much about Washington’s army, as George could himself a few years after.  Of course, the record is never exactly the way it was.  The more you know, the more you realize how little you know for sure.  History requires a tolerance for ambiguity.  At its best, it is only an approximation of the truth.  Truth is no doubt true and real, but perfect Truth resides only in the Mind of God.  For us mere mortals, we do the best we can.   

Then again, it is important that mere mortals do indeed do their best.  As suggested, memories are helpful but ephemeral things, and the written record becomes a surrogate for memory.  Moreover, no generation recalls or can, what another generation saw or experienced.  Records are all we have, and the historian is a narrator of our storybook.  He must not intentionally or unintentionally become a liar.  If something is doubtful, chalk it up to conjecture, best guess, unconfirmed analysis or second hand reports, etc.  Admit whatever biases there are.  Help us to understand what is plausible and likely, give us the texture of the day—but do not turn the past into fiction, history into agenda.  “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” (Isaiah 5:20) 

  Now consider the importance of integrity and having good character.  It is certainly important for the lawmaker and congressman, for the judge and soldier and policeman.  How critical also for the historian and teacher, shapers of memory and understanding!  When a civilization ceases to produce sufficient men and women of character in all these and other fields of pursuit, the record begins to lose its integrity and the knowledge of truth changes for subsequent generations.  Technical advances require parallel knowledge, in terms of historical, philosophical and cultural frameworks.  Values and ethics continue to matter, if only to keep the record straight.  Otherwise, the national psyche descends into myth and obscurity and falsehood.  Presidents and neighbors will claim that everything or nothing depends upon the meaning of is: whether the Great Awakening occurred or had effect; whether Jefferson penned the Declaration, or was just an evil slaveholder; whether Jesus taught us to love; whether the government was ever limited or the Constitution binding in terms of its textual meaning and Original Intent; whether states hold sovereign prerogatives under federalism and a peculiarly American political tradition; even whether Superman’s mission is to be “truth, justice and the American way” or “truth, justice and all that stuff!”  Where once this nation was born and raised in an Age of Reason, it bumps along in an age of stupidity and inanity. 

Men’s minds are mush where the record is so spoiled and the teaching content is controlled.  Then again, the devil and Big Brother’s stratagem is first to confuse the subject, even to the point of doubting your mind or the existence of anything before.  The Party boss who interrogated Winston in George Orwell’s classic 1984, said: “Does the past exist concretely, in space?  Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is still happening?  No.  Then who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”  The remnant of American freemen and freewomen know they must exercise their memory better, and rigorously keep their own records; and strenuously, openly vet every counter claim.  Americans will write their own history, because they will determine their own destiny.  They also fight to establish the truth of what they believe, or at least the right and freedom of approximating it. 

Wes Riddle is a retired military officer with degrees and honors from West Point and Oxford.  Widely published in the academic and opinion press, he ran for U.S. Congress (TX-District 31) in the 2004 Republican Primary.

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