10 September 1998, 963 words
I have always been cursed with a good memory. There are many painful memories I would like to forget, though none of those involving leather. But most men do not appreciate what a blessing a poor memory can be. True, you may forget appointments but, with just a little practice, you can also forget your wife. This would actually help conjugal fidelity (a term that unfortunately only sounds obscene.)
Contrary to popular belief, when a married man makes a pass at another woman, it is not because he has forgotten he has a wife. It is because he remembers the fact all too well. If a man could completely forget his wife, sex would never lose its thrill. Not, of course, that sex ever does lose its thrill: only sex with the same person. This is because men take sex far more seriously than women do. The point is easily proven, for you never hear about a man laughing at a woman in bed. Women, however, think sex has to do with love and romance and children. For men, those things are the price of getting sex (which is why many men prefer to pay cash.) But, for men, sex is more than just lust: it is also conquest. Thus, while sex for women is personal, for men it is political. But marriage was designed to remove that feeling of conquest. When you have bought the cow, the milk no longer tastes as good, unless the cow likes turning the milk into whipped cream and slowly licking it off.
This is why, if marriage had never been invented, history would probably have recorded fewer wars. The Church encouraged holy matrimony for many reason, but mainly so it could have the Crusades. Marriage not only meant that men had to fight other men in order to feel like conquerors, but going to war gave them an excuse to get out of the house. Invading other countries was also a good way to meet other women. I have little doubt that the real reason Saddam Hussein tried to invade Saudi Arabia was because he had gotten bored with his wife. And I am absolutely certain that, if the United States didn't have a sociopolitical system with effective checks and balances, Bill Clinton would have already have tried conquering the Sudan instead of just bombing it.
Now having a lousy memory would at least mitigate this problem. If men had really bad memories, they would never leave home to go to war. Not only would sex with their wives always be like sex with a complete stranger, but they wouldn't be able to find the house keys. You might be wondering what the attraction is in having sex with a strange woman, but that is only because you are a normal one. In fact, for many men, the stranger the woman the better the sex.
The hard fact of life, though, is that married men usually have better memories than unmarried ones. This is because their wives always remind them of what fools they are. And women have amazing memories: they can remember what outfit they wore the first time you both went on a date, whereas we can't even recall what clothes we took off the first time we had sex with them. Our memory is only good enough to remember to walk with a condom, and even then we forget to put it on unless the woman reminds us.
The inferior memory of men is, I think, the main reason there are more male politicians than female ones. It is quite clear, for example, that neither Basdeo Panday or Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj remember anything they said while in Opposition. At that time, Panday was against any attempt to remove the Privy Council, Maharaj opposed capital punishment, and both were all for freedom of speech and the rights of the people. Now, however, their main method of good governance is to try and hang convicted killers. They want to replace the Privy Council with a Caribbean Court of Appeal, even before the latter is set up. They have now taken over the State- (not Government-) owned media and have increased the penalties of holding public demonstrations without official permission. An article on memory in a recent issue of The Economist puts it this way: "The infuriating fallibility of memory may be a necessary consequence of retaining the ability to overwrite what you know when you discover that it is no longer correct." Since for politicians, "correct" and "convenient" are synonyms, this explains why their memories are so poor.
Maharaj, though, must be blessed with an especially bad memory, since even more than Panday he now takes positions which are completely opposite to those he held for the whole of his previous public life. The same Economist article goes on to say, "When dealing with the truly trivial, the brain does not, it appears, even bother to learn anything in the first place". This probably reveals Maharaj's true attitude towards all those human rights statements he was once so fond of making.
It must be bad memory, for the alternative explanation is that Maharaj is a lying, two-faced, duplicitous, unprincipled hypocrite. Not that this has to be a bad thing. If we are to judge by our many exemplars, including some of the so-called Independent Senators and most of the Hindu newspaper columnists, bad memories and/or hypocritical characters are de rigueur for social respectability. That is why I say I am cursed with an excellent memory. Maybe, though, if I hit myself hard on the head every day, I will get amnesia and so become a prominent and influential member of society. And, if I damage my brain severely enough, I'll get married too.
Copyright ©1998, Kevin Baldeosingh