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“Only thank god men have done learned how to forget quick what they aint brave enough to try to cure.” Faulkner, The Hamlet
A humble (and unfortunately gloomy) thread on this point, which I hope will help to explain why the “Mueller’s got this” stuff makes me so queasy.
We live in a society that has proven itself adept at forgetting the uncomfortable problems it hasn’t summoned the political will to solve. We remember the climactic last act of Watergate, but we forget how Iran-Contra ended.
There’s a grim list of the forgotten stretching back into history: Thousands of citizens died in Hurricane Maria, with no investigation (yet); a global archipelago of black sites, with the Senate report on the torture practiced within them locked up forever; etc; etc
Of course, it’s not that everyone forgets these things. But they do sorta get kicked up into the national attic—about as remote as can be from the possibility of enacting systemic reform—something for hobbyists to file FOIA requests about and demagogues to occasionally invoke.
We can get up an argument about what causes this kind of forgetting or marginalization, but it’s clear that maintaining public attention is a bit of an antidote. You don’t get Nixon’s Watergate resignation through some secretive executive branch official It’s televised hearings.
And it’s playing the tapes. The public needs to know what happened to decide whether things need to change. And at present it’s still a contested matter how much the public will get to learn.
It’s a time when the public ought to be seeing hard evidence, not reposing blind trust in prosecutors—who already have a nigh on impossible task enforcing the criminal law against someone they’re not allowed indict, and who may not be willing to help out on the political side.
In important ways Mueller doesn’t have the resolution of the Russia issue (and all the intrigue and influence peddling uncovered along the way) entirely on his shoulders. He couldn’t bear the load. Congress and the people need to stay engaged somehow, lest it be forgotten.
