Memento meets the New York Times

Steven Den Beste finds it hard to relate an op-ed from the Times with the past that he remembers:

“And that’s how I found this article. John Coumarianos dismisses it as revisionist fantasy, and damned straight, too. Its author, one John Patrick Diggins, tries to portray Reagan so as to present a sharp contrast to President Bush, and in the end he puts Reagan inside a bunny-rabbit costume and presents him as an accommodating cooperative multilateralist who was only interested in getting along with everyone and who didn’t have a confrontational bone in his body.”

Den Beste continues:

“I found myself increasingly awed as I read the Diggins piece, as his version of the 1980’s diverged further and further from the way I remember it.”

I was reminded of the movie Memento in which, due to a head injury, the protagonist is unable to retain new short-term memories. He can’t remember what happened yesterday.

Perhaps that’s the kindest explanation for Diggins’s odd article. I wonder if an alternative explanation is more to the point. The Cold War was concluded with the total destruction of the enemy—the USSR completely ceased to exist. And it was done without all-out war. If we can be brought to believe that the Cold War ended without confrontation of any kind, this provides more ammunition for the anti-war Left in its opposition to the current Administration.

It’s not a new strategy—it forms the heart of Orwell’s 1984 where it’s the future that’s known and the past that changes. That’s the Stalinist world that Professor Diggins and his friends at the New York Times apparently yearn for:

“To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone—to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: from the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of double think—greetings!”