"Pacto del olvido"
What if history doesn't care whether we remember it or not?
Welcome to The Experiment, where we’re trying to remember what we’re supposed to be forgetting, and greetings to a whole new round of new subscribers! Welcome, welcome. Make yourself at home. Soon, I promise, we’ll get back to talking about the bigger issues of how we’re getting through The Uncertain Now (such as my friend’s post-traumatic stress, Maggie Smith’s gap year, and Jason Statham’s dives in The Meg), but right now we’re in the middle of a meaty discussion about what history means.
As always, we offer recommendations on what to do (not applying for this job), read (this longread about a bizarre incident in Forks, Washington), watch (Halston on Netflix), and listen to (Nice White Parents, a shocking podcast by The New York Times).
But first, did you ever hear about the “Pacto del olvido”?
I’ve written before about the logical hole in the Spanish philosopher George Santayana’s aphorism, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I never forgot we elected one guy named George Bush president, and yet that happened again. Also, that aphorism keeps repeating, misattributed to Irish statesman Edmund Burke and gently rephrased by Winton Churchill, who wrote, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” There’s a lovely nuance shading the contrast between proving unable to remember history and failing to learn its lessons, but the point holds. History is the Honey Badger of this timeline. It does not care about us. “The future bears down upon each one of us,” wrote Ryan Holiday, “with all the hazards of the unknown. The only way out is through.” Santayana, it’s important to note, was not a historian but a writer looking to sell books, a subject I know something about, especially of late.
Until recently, my preferred solution to stopping history’s cycle has been Germany’s Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, which literally means “working off the past” but is more fully understood as what Terry Snyder called in his marvelous Times essay an example of what’s called a memory law. A memory law goes further than discrete events such as the Nuremberg trials or South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which my Forget the Alamo co-author Chris Tomlinson prescribed for what ails America in his previous NYT-best seller, Tomlinson Hill: The Remarkable Story of Two Families Who Share the Tomlinson Name - One White, One Black, which is a helluva book that you should read. The difference is…
What’s that? Previous best seller, you ask? Oh, right. Might have mentioned this earlier. Sorry. Forget the Alamo is a Top 10 New York Times best seller. Completely slipped my mind. Anyway.
The difference between what South Africa did to get past Apartheid and Germany’s response to Nazism is that the former was a one and done event while the latter is ongoing. Not only are Nazi symbols banned but everyone is taught that Nazism was evil. Some ongoing program against confederate symbols and systemic racism might be what’s needed here, I recently argued.
Now I’m not so sure, for a couple reasons. Not only has Russia perverted Germany’s Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung to criminalize history that is literally politically incorrect. Recently, some dude indicted in Russia for blogging that the Soviets and Nazis originally invaded Poland as allies, which is true, but illegal to point out. And like a bad kopek, anti-American sentiment that starts in Russia ends up in Texas, where lawmakers recently created The 1836 Project to promote a “patriotic” version of Texas history. Picture South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but the complete opposite.
Like a bad kopek, anti-American sentiment that starts in Russia ends up in Texas.
The other cause to question myself came from my friend S.B., who while researching her next perfect novel, ran across the Pacto del olvido, or the Pact of Forgetting. Santayana wrote the aphorism about history decades before the Spanish civil war. He did not anticipate a Spain that came to the end of Franco’s rule and wondered, What now? They didn’t just have to deal with the future but the past. Should there be a German-style re-education? A little justice after all the injustice? Or perhaps a historical inquisition?
Instead, in the ‘70s Spain adopted the Pacto del olvido, which committed the country to a policy called “la desmemoria,” or disremembering. This is like “if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything at all” were federal law. It’s also like if Faulty Towers were enshrined in the constitution, with politicians scurrying around telling people not to mention the civil war, or Jim Crow, or the civil rights movement, or the militarization of the police and mass incarceration of Black men in the ‘80s and ‘90s, or the resegregation of American schools and churches, or the wave of voter suppression laws and dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, or the January 6 insurrection. Come to think of it, we’re disremembering things all the time. It wasn’t an insurrection, after all. It was just a “normal tourist visit,” according to an actual member of congress.
The reason Spain chose the route of disremembering, wrote a Bard College professor in a separate essay in the Times, is that there “was also considerable resistance on the part of the politicians and the general public to delve into the past for fear of repeating it, including those aggrieved by the past.”
“In Spain there is only one way to reach democracy, which is to forget the past,” said a Communist Party leader at the time.
I wonder what it must have been like for Santayana’s acolytes (a committed bachelor, he left no heirs) to see his home country commit whole hog to disproving his most famous aphorism. Those who forgot history, Spain decided, liberated themselves from repeating it. Remarkably, it seemed to work.
“Contrary to what the conventional wisdom would suggest, neglecting to confront the past during the transition did not prevent the rise of successful democracy in Spain,” wrote the Bard professor. “Indeed, a common factor cited for Spain’s successful democratization is the decision not to delve into the past as a representative government was finding its footing.”
America has never been particularly good at remembering its history clearly. We put a considerable amount of effort into inserting a hero lens when we look at ourselves and tend moreover to constantly want to chop up history’s arcs into bite-sized chunks. World War II? That was when we dealt with fascism in Europe. Black people? First we liberated them in the Civil War and then enfranchised them in the ‘60s. All this Black Lives Matters business… Why do they keep bringing up old stories, making us the villains in history?
Americans are even worse with beginnings. American history begins in 1776, not in 1619 when you-know-what happened or in 1598 when the Spanish colonized what’s now New Mexico. And if you want to go that far back, I guess you could peg the beginning at 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue and not Leif Eriksson and his boatload of vikings who beat Columbus by 500 years and still couldn’t win a playoff game. Or, if we’re going for this whole obsessive writing down what actually happened thing, we could start American history with the Chinese and Africans who beat the vikings here, albeit separately, or, for that matter, the people who were here to begin with or trudged over from Russia shortly thereafter. There's also a very amusing incident with a kebab, which is one of several amusing anecdotes.
I guess you could peg the beginning at 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue and not Leif Eriksson and his boatload of vikings who beat Columbus by 500 years and still couldn’t win a playoff game.
Or we could look to a historical site in downtown San Antonio, which was settled three centuries ago by the Spanish, who forced Indigenous people to convert and build their missions. Traces of those people are buried under the street in front of a church and barracks that are famous for what happened over 13 days in 1836. The descendants of those Indigenous conscripts are still fighting to protect their remains, just one example of how long the arc of history is if you don’t chop it up into bottle episodes. As Santayana also wrote, “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
As much as I’m charmed by the idea of state-mandated mass amnesia, I don’t know how to forget just some of it. If we forget January 6, we have to forget the Trump presidency. And as good as that sounds, we also have to forget both Clintons, and then Nixon, and the Cold War and our reactionary ‘30s when we played footsie with fascists and anti-semites before evil went mainstream in Germany. We can’t forget “America First” without forgetting how both Woodrow Wilson, William Randolph Hearst, and Warren Harding used it as a non-interventionist cudgel. Before World War II, the America First Committee had 800,000 dues-paying American members, which we’d definitely have to forget if we ever bothered to remember it in the first place. And as long as we’re forgetting things, can we please include the 1979 World Series and Super Bowl XLIX?
Yesterday the Texas Senate passed its own version of a Pact of Forgetting. The bill, SB 3, would remove the requirement that students be taught about white supremacy and “the ways in which it is morally wrong.” The bill bans the 1619 Project and removes the requirement that students be taught about the writings of Susan B. Anthony, Cesar Chavez, and Martin Luther King Jr., among other figures from women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement. Perhaps worst of all, every school would be required to send a teacher to a civics training program.
Even Spain couldn’t remember to keep forgetting. Parliament cured their amnesia in 2007 with the Law of Historical Memory that classified all of Franco’s military inquisitions as illegitimate and made reparations to the victims. “Amnesty is one thing, but amnesia is another,” said poet Marcos Ana, who was imprisoned for 23 years for being a dissident leader.
“Amnesty is one thing, but amnesia is another.”
I’ve been asked often lately about the meaning of our book’s title, Forget the Alamo. We are not advocating for our own Pacto del olvido because events from the past insist upon their own reality. “There is no good or bad without us, there is only perception,” wrote Holiday. “There is the event itself and the story we tell ourselves about what it means.” I will always insist upon a better story, preferably one that is entertaining. There are a few reasons why the average visitor to the Alamo only spends about ten minutes at one of the most famous historical sites in the world. One of which is that the story it presents is cartoonishly flat. People walk in Texans and come out sorted into good guys and Mexicans, less a hero’s journey and more a fork in the road.
History is our relationship to the event and the story we tell about it. Or as Robert Earl Keen wrote in his classic song, “This Old Porch,” history is sitting on a porch:
And this old porch is just a long time
Of waiting and forgetting
And remembering the coming back
And not crying about the leaving
And remembering the falling down
And the laughter of the curse of luck
From all of those passerby
Who said we'd never get back up
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How I’m getting through this
Noting Toyota’s backtrack
Hiking the Williams Lake Trail
Hiking the Devisadero Loop Trail
Restraining myself from applying for this job
Making shrimp scampi with tomatoes and corn
Knowing the Texas Institute of Letters has our back
Being the subject of Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter
What I’m reading
Dan Balz: “Independents, suburban voters among the keys to Biden’s victory over Trump” - The age splits on Black and Hispanic voters are startling.
Pew found that nonvoters preferred Biden by 15 points — 50 percent to 35 percent. That marks a big shift from 2016, when those nonvoters preferred Clinton over Trump by half that margin. Had all these nonvoters turned out in November, Biden would have won by an even bigger margin.
Sonny Bunch: “From ‘Zola,’ to ‘Cat Person’ to ‘Once Upon a Time ... In Hollywood,’ what do artists owe the people who inspire them?” - Still hated Zola
In America, it’s famously difficult to libel a celebrity; those who are not in the public spotlight have an easier, but still difficult, time pursuing a libel suit. For the purposes of fiction, I wonder if there’s a similar principle to be invoked: Artists should, perhaps, take greater care when mining the lives of those who do not live in the spotlight to avoid having a spotlight thrown on them.
Simone Carter: “The Battle Over 'Forget the Alamo' Deepens Texas' Raging Culture War” - That the Alamo myth is a Christ allegory never occurred to me before.
Stanford believes the state’s conservatives are so enamored by the Alamo self-sacrifice myth that they've placed it at the center of their Texan identity. Many of the book’s harshest critics may not even be fully cognizant of why they’re angry, he said. They've perhaps romanticized Hollywood icon John Wayne’s portrayal of Davy Crockett. And Christ-like stories resonate in Bible-thumping Texas. Much like the sacrificial lamb trope, many young Texans were taught that heroic Alamo defenders gave themselves so that others could live.
Heather Cox Richardson: “July 7, 2021” - The Professor widens the aperture
An inaccurate picture of what creates change means that people cannot make good decisions about the future. They are at the mercy of those who are creating the stories. Knowledge is indeed power.
Lauren Smiley: “The True Story of the Antifa Invasion of Forks, Washington” - I grew up around here. This story is bonkers, and completely believable.
In a calmer spring—when facts weren't so slippery, social media so noxious, the country so ready to combust—what happened in Forks, Washington, on June 3 might have been a perfect plot for a farce. A giant white school bus known as Big Bertha puttered into a two-stoplight town far north on the Olympic Peninsula, in desperate need of a new battery, on the very day the town was on alert for a different bus, one full of violent antifa activists ready to riot.
Ann Hornaday: “Comic books have taken over the movies. Must they take our indie auteurs, too?” - America’s best cinematic essayists asks what cost opportunity?
…if they want their work to be seen on the big screen, they might go straight into superheroes. And it’s hard to knock them for making that leap so readily, when the result is virtually guaranteed to be a film built for fans.
Precisely which fans, of course, is the billion-dollar question.
Fidel Martinez: “Latinx Files: ‘Forget the Alamo’ and the difficulties in talking about this country’s complicated history” - This right here…
We spoke to dozens of San Antonians of Mexican American descent who talked about how hurtful the legends of the Alamo are, how they were made to feel un-American in seventh grade because their ancestors killed Davy Crockett. It’s the equivalent of accusing Jews of being Christ killers. It is a harmful, hurtful message. And that’s one of the main reasons we wrote this book.
Ross Ramsey: “A ‘special’ session of culture wars, politics and unfinished business” - In which Forget the Alamo officially becomes part of the #txlege narrative
Censorship of the public kind is a hot ticket at the moment. At Patrick’s urging, the Bullock Texas State History Museum canceled a virtual event with two of the authors of “Forget the Alamo,” a recounting of the role of slavery in the state’s fight for independence from Mexico.
Like a lot of controversies, that cancellation seems to have benefited both the striker and the stricken. Patrick got a lot of attention, and sales of the book skyrocketed. The only real victim appears to be the state history museum that pulled itself out of a discussion about state history at the behest of elected chickens in high perches.
Renuka Rayasam: “The culture wars invade the Alamo” - QOTW, Sorry Iowans
This book is incredibly hard for Texans to accept, because they grew up being taught this just like they were taught the Bible or the Constitution or anything else. It was fact, not open to question. On an emotional level, this speaks to what many Texans want to believe desperately about the state, that it arose from heroic circumstances, that there’s a reason that the state is special and therefore you and I are special. The first time I told my girlfriend the name of this book, she literally slithered out of the booth onto the floor. This is sacrilege down here.
Don’t hate me Iowans, but without the Alamo, Texas is just Iowa.
What I’m watching
Thanks to C.R. for tipping me off to Bob Newhart’s “Stop It” routine.
There’s a danger is your name becoming a brand. Halston on Netflix isn’t great, but when it gets into commercializing your name it gets good.
What I’m listening to
The addition to The Experiment’s Spotify playlist this week is John Vanderslice’s odd tribute to the late David Berman, John, I can’t believe civilization is still going here in 2021! Congratulations to all of us, Love DCB.
The boys and I noticed a lot of parallels with the story in Nice White Parents and what they experienced in Austin public schools.
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Buy the book Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick banned from the Bullock Texas History Museum: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself is out from Penguin Random House.