You Can't Learn From History If You Can't Remember It

Patrick Nielsen Hayden over at Electrolite discovered that not even political scientists can remember recent history.

One reason our political culture is verkakte. Here’s David C. Rapoport, professor[of political science] emeritus at UCLA, founder and editor of the Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence, writing about the history of American electoral violence, in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times.

Our most recent violent presidential year was 1968. Two presidential aspirants were victims of assassination: Robert F. Kennedy was killed, and George C. Wallace seriously wounded. Anti-Vietnam War demonstrators tried to disrupt the Democratic National Convention. And after Richard M. Nixon was elected, the Weather Underground, a terrorist organization, was formed because the election did not provide the group’s solution for the Vietnam War.

What’s wrong with this paragraph is that George C. Wallace wasn’t shot and wounded while running for President in 1968; he was shot and wounded during the next Presidential campaign, in Laurel, Maryland on May 15, 1972.
If we can’t even remember when something this big happened, and can’t rely on as eminent a paper as the LA Times to get it right to within four whole years, it’s hardly surprising that we never learn any lessons whatsoever from our own damn history. (Meanwhile, of course, the LA Times building is no doubt full of people tut-tutting about those unedited, unaccountable bloggers.)

We have enough trouble because people re-write history, now it appears we can't remember it correctly anyway.