August 16, 2009 - Just finished "The Culture of Lies" by Dubravka Ugresic'. Loaned to me by my friend Emily, it is a sobering series of essays written at the time of the beginning of the Yugoslav wars, with some postscripts from five years later. I was most struck by her grasp of how we rewrite what we know - how we redefine our past. How memory becomes a fictional narrative or, in its truth, selectively interpretive. We believe what we remember because we keep telling ourselves it was so. Nation statelets breathe like living human beings. They use the tools we've devised for overcoming our personal trauma, they slip into a belief in a past and the construction of a reality that never was. She stubbornly refuses to give up her past and, in her glossary, defines that stubbornness. At her most pessimistic she believes this will never change - but perhaps it may be in some instances now some ten years further on... But the lessons are all too real and applicable to us all: do we rewrite our own histories to conform to a more comfortable, livable present? And further, outside of us, how does our own dialogue as a nation - the shouting of truths that are less than true at each other - falsify our national past and damage our present? Questions worth thinking about perhaps. Let me know your thoughts. cwrecord@alaska.net