When Will They Ever Learn?

“Civilization, in fact, grows more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. The are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury.”

An abridged version of that quote appears in the header of It’s My Country, Too, Riggsveda’s current home on the web.

It is from H.L. Mencken’s book, In Defense of Women, that was written in 1918. That it is as true today, as when Mencken wrote it, is another proof of one of the best known quotes: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” That was written by George Santayana in Volume I, Reason in Common Sense from the larger work, The Life of Reason, published beginning in 1905.

When we started on the road to the war in Iraq, a number of younger people complained that some of us were trying to fight the Vietnam War again, missing the point that we did not want to fight the “Vietnam War” again, because it was not a fun time. We remembered the past, and did not want to repeat it.

Barack Obama is someone who “cannot remember the past”, especially as it relates to FDR and Ronald Reagan. He has obviously made no effort to educate himself on what actually happened and is reacting based on lies about history. When you don’t know why one of the benchmarks for a Presidency is the first 100 days because of what FDR accomplished in his first 100 days, you really are not very well informed about the office of President of the United States.

It is unfortunate for President Obama that historians have little interest in the opinions of his fan club, and will assign credit for success and responsibility for failure based on actual performance.