Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Knock knock.
-- Who's there?
Nineleven.
-- Nineleven who?
Sob! You said you'd never forget!

Ordinarily I am a great friend to memory, perhaps because my own memory is so poor. But there are things that need to be forgotten before they can be usefully remembered; for which re-discovery is the only discovery, and the resistance to oblivion is a resistance to understanding. Nineleven is one of these things.

I would very much like to forget Nineleven, and I wish everybody else would too. 'Memory', as actually practiced about this topic, is really nothing of the kind; it is a robotic repetition of grievances, a hysterical itch-scratching that only makes the itch worse.

Of course it serves its purposes. There's nothing like a carefully-cultivated sense of victimhood to make people cruel -- if only vicariously cruel; but hey, the world-bestriding thug state will take whatever buy-in it can get.

Every pushback against the finance parasites brings a horde of mini-CEOs out to comment on blogs. By a strange coincidence, they all work 80 hours a week, uphill through the snow, on their way to distributing equity to their workers—who they personally trained because the school system has failed American businesses. They also took great personal risk to create jobs, in their 20 to 30 person firms, and they still have time to coach their children's sports teams.

Was there ever a country so blessed?