antikoan.net

The "Christmas In Cambodia" meme is really picking up steam. It's a really problematic meme for the Kerry camp for two reasons:

1. It's arrant nonsense, but:
2. It's hard to fight it without seeming to be making excuses.

Now, lots of people do really seem to think this is a big deal. These people need to look in the mirror. Or rather, look to their own past. And they need to do it honestly. Because I can just about guarantee you that they all have things they're sure about back there that just plain never happened.

I was born in Las Vegas, and left there at the age of 3. I have a very vivid memory of standing at the curb with my father, and watching the moving van -- a big, yellow and green Mayflower van -- come around the corner at the end of the block. My father was wearing shorts and a three-colored knit shirt that he was fond of in those days (very '60s-Vegas). I'd had no idea before then that we were moving.

The memory is especially vivid for me because I did this with my father, who I seldom saw. He worked at a nuclear research test site 150 miles out in the desert. He left the house well before I woke in the morning, and was back only long after I'd gone to bed. On weekends, he kept busy with the endless home improvement projects that young homeowners think they have to undertake to improve their resale value. (Though truth be told, he probably did it just to stay sane. He's always loved working with his hands.) This is not an indictment; he was just trying to take care of his family. And after all, he did quit that life after a few years for a saner one.

There's just one problem with this memory: It can't possibly be real.

See, I'm blind as a bat. I wear glasses with a very strong prescription. There's no way I could have seen that Mayflower van. Without my glasses, I could just about safely walk home through a neighborhood I knew well, but it would be a really good idea to get someone to tell me whether there were cars coming. At night, I'd be up the excrement race without a propulsion device. I've been this way all my life, but no one spotted it until I was 5, getting ready to go into kindergarten.

I have other memories from a similar age that I regard as more authentic, because they include my frustration at not being able to see what people were telling me to look at: Landscapes, fish, trees in a field, Yosemite falls. Where this particular one comes from is a complete mystery to me, because, as I've noted, before we left Las Vegas I barely knew my father. There are no pictures of moving day or the moving van in our otherwise extensive slide collection. No one else in the family remembers this happening. I remember having this memory as far back as I can think, but never mentioned it to anyone until I was in my teens, when I was informed in no uncertain terms that I must have made it up. And yet, though I know all these things as probable facts, that memory is still as vivid to me as it ever was.

The point of this story being that I was able to manufacture a vivid, powerful memory of something that most likely never occurred -- or, at least, never occurred the way I remember it. People do this all the time. It's perfectly normal. You can even make other people confess to things they haven't done. I have other vivid memories that I can carefully situate, that don't stand up to the evidence. And what's more, if we're honest, we all do.

If I could do it, so could John Kerry.

The United States is full of men in their 50s who have lots of vivid memories of a very nasty place and time that are probably not very accurate, but seem very, very real and present. John Kerry remembers 'searingly' being on a boat in Cambodia on Christmas; records indicate that he wasn't there on Christmas, but he was (probably) there a couple of weeks later. It's not at all implausible that he conflated the two nights in his mind. (Hell, Ronald Reagan "remembered" photographing the liberation of Auschwitz.)

I talked with my father about memory a couple of weeks ago. He showed me a list that he'd been making, to help him write a personal memoir. Nothing scandalous; just something to help him sort his life out, maybe provide some insight to grand- and great-grand-children. He told me that he'd found so many places where he realized he'd gotten the order of things wrong that he decided he needed to put them on a timeline, and in so doing found a lot of other things, too.

Well, why not? We have this illusion, this fantasy, that our minds are sure and true and that our vivid, present memories are always what really was. And sometimes they are. But what do we expect? Billions of neurons we may well have -- but we store many decades of sights and sounds and scents integrated into rich, cinematic wholes. Shouldn't we expect that we're filling in at least some of the details through interpolation?