Esquire_USA_-_May_2016.pdf

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“I DID IT ALL…I HAD ALL
THE FUN YOU SHOULD HAVE.”
…A N D
H E Y,
!
LOOK
MAY 2016
PAG E 1 5
“I MIGHT
HAVE SAID
TO THE
LADY, ‘THE
SAUSAGE
IS, YOU
KNOW…
SPECIAL
TODAY.’”
PAG E 9 0
INTERVIEW
THIS GUY
IS REAL,
AND HIS
NAME IS
KODY
VAN
HALEN.
MORE WRITERS
THAN USUAL .
STORIES BY:
A . J . JAC O B S,
SC OT T R A A B
J O H N H . R I C H A R DSO N
TO M J U N O D,
TO M C H I A R E L L A
C . J . C H I V E RS,
C U RT I S S I T T E N F E L D
M I K E SAG E R,
C H R I S J O N ES
K E N KU RSO N ,
C H A R L ES P. P I E RC E
A N N A P E E L E ,
ST E P H E N M A RC H E
CA L F U S S M A N ,
DAV I D WO N D R I C H
B E N JA M I N P E RCY,
C O L BY BUZ Z E L L
GOD BLESS
MAGAZINES
REMEMBERING,
AND FORGETTING
B Y C H A R L E S P. P I E R C E
IN
LENIN’S TOMB,
HIS LUCID ACCOUNT of the end
of Soviet Russia, David Remnick uses as an epigraph a
famous quote from Czech author Milan Kundera. “The strug-
gle of man against power,” Kundera wrote, “is the struggle
of memory against forgetting.” The philosophy was
central to Remnick’s contention throughout the book that
one of the critical weaknesses of the Soviet state, and of all
of its satellite governments in Eastern Europe, including
Kundera’s Czechoslovakia, was that it required its citizens
to fight against their own memory, to unknow what they
clearly knew. Sooner or later, the effort to forget and to
unknow becomes too much of a burden for too many people
and they force the collapse of the system. Humans are driv-
en to remember. Humans can crack from the effort it takes
to deny and to forget. The consequences can be therapeutic
or they can be catastrophic, for people and for the political
societies into which they organize themselves.
This is as true of liberal democracies as it is true of author-
itarian states. In fact, the effects of forgetting can be worse
in the former, because citizens of authoritarian states see
the effects of forgetting and unknowing in every transaction
in their daily lives. In liberal democracies, and especially in
this one, there are so many distractions and so many options
and so much media that the corrosive effects of the loss of
the power of memory can elude anyone’s notice until some-
thing important comes apart all at once.
The 2016 presidential campaign—and the success of
Donald Trump on the Republican side—has been a tri-
umph of how easily memory can lose the struggle against
forgetting and, therefore, how easily society can lose the
struggle against power. There is so much that we have for-
gotten in this country. We’ve forgotten, over and over again,
how easily we can be stampeded into action that is con-
trary to the national interest and to our own individual
self-interest. We have forgotten McCarthy and Nixon. We
have forgotten how easily we can be lied to. We have for-
gotten the U-2 incident and the Bay of Pigs and the sale of
missiles to the mullahs. And along comes someone like
Trump, and he tells us that forgetting is our actual power
and that memory is the enemy.
The first decade of the twenty-first century gave us a
great deal to forget. It began with an extended mess of
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