The book of Laughter and Forgetting- Milan Kundera
I first read this book years ago, but the Bush flight performance made me pull it out to read again. The "hat" image has always haunted me ... " It is 1971, and Merick says that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting"
Excerpt page one - "In Febuary 1948, communist Leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to address the hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens packed into Old Town Square" It was was a curcial moment in Czech history- a fateful moment of the kind that occurs once or twice a millennium."
Gottwald was flanked by his comrades, with Clementis standing next to him. There were snow fluries, it was cold, and Gottwald was bareheaded. The solicitious Clementis took off his own fur cap and set it on Gottwald's head."
"The party propaganda section put out hundreds of thousands of copies of a photgraph of that balcony with Gottwald , a fur cap on his head and comrades at his side, speaking to the nation. On that balcony the history of Communist Chechoslovakia was born. Every child knew the photograph from posters, schoolbooks, and museums."
"Four years later Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immeadiatly airbruashed him out of history, and obviously out of all the photgraphs as well. Ever since, Gottwald has stood on that balcony alone. Where Clementis stood, there is only bare palace wall. All that remains of Clementis is the cap on Gottwald's head."
Excerpt page two- "He had finally come around to the position of his more cautious friends. True, the consitution guaranteed freedom of speach; but the law punished any act that could be construed as undermining the state. Who could know when the state would start screaming that this of that word was undermining it? "
Excerpt page 7 - " The bloddy massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Chechoslovakia, the assination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until unltimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.
In times when history moved slowly, events were few and far between and easily committed to memory. They formed a commonly accepted backdrop for thrilling scences of adventure in private life. Nowadays, history moves at brisk clip. A historical event, though soon forgotten, sparkels the morning after with the dew of novelty. No longer a backdrop, it is now the adventure itself, an adventure enacted before the backdrop of the commonly accepted banality of private life"
11:40:18 AM 
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