Every year the Charlotte Mecklenburg Public Library hosts a festival of reading called "Novello." Usually the festival runs through October (although this year it goes well into November) and includes a variety of authors and other famous figures who give lectures, answer questions, and sign books. It's a wonderful festival and my mom and I try to go to at least on Novello event each year. So on Thursday we went to hear Doug Marlette, controversial political cartoonist and author, talk about his new book Magic Time and his first novel The Bridge, which I wrote a little about earlier in the week.

First of all, we both really enjoyed listening to Marlette; although he was obviously uncomfortable talking in front of an audience, he is very funny and quite an armchair philosopher. Some of his ideas were extremely interesting to me and I'm going to try to do them justice tonight. However, he covered a lot of information in about an hour, so if I mangle it hopelessly, please forgive me.

Two of the things Marlette talked about at length were: how do good people allow injustices to happen around them without doing anything and why are those injustices so frequently forgotten by the very people who were witnesses to them? He wrote both of his books, in part, to explore how this "collective amnesia" (as he called it) works because several members of his family were witnesses to two major events in the South. Like the character "Mama Lucy" in The Bridge, Marlette's grandmother was bayoneted by a National Guardsman during the General Textile Strike of 1934, an event he describes in his book as "[The] Closest we've ever come in this country to a revolution." (I'm assuming he's not counting the Revolutionary War or the Civil War). His father was part of the troops called up to search for missing Freedom Riders in Mississippi during the 1960s (as pictured in the movie "Mississippi Burning") and that was the inspiration for his new book, Magic Time.

Those are both pretty big historical events, right? But Marlette thought it was strange that he didn't learn about either story until he was well into his 40s. And when he asked his relatives who had witnessed these events for more information he found that they knew very little about the events themselves, despite having "Forrest Gump-like" (again, his words) front row seats.

So Marlette set out to find his own answers and in finding them he came to some conclusions about why some people who witness injustices can forget them so quickly. He called it the "Good German" principle: basically good, moral, generous regular folks witness an injustice (like the concentration camps in World War II Germany) and make excuses for those evils saying that they aren't really that bad ("they're just factories," for example). But when the truth comes to light and the nature of the horror right next door is exposed (as in the Holocaust), these same good people are left with a predicament: if they allowed these awful things to happen without doing anything to stop them, that may mean that they aren't quite as good as they thought they were. That realization is to much of a threat to their sense of themselves and their reality, so they either say the injustices never happened or bury the story through a kind of collective amnesia (in essence, forgetting is easier than dealing with the questions).

The idea has a lot of implications for the South...but for the purposes of Marlette's books, his theory explains how good, God-loving, Bible-quoting Southerners could justify and fight for segregation in the 1960s in the face of awful events like dogs and water cannons being used to attack protesters in the streets, firebombings of black churches, and the assassinations of so many Civil Rights leaders. It certainly explains how the General Textile Strike of 1934 could become one of the bloodier and most forgotten events in United States history.

I don't know, maybe the ideas that Marlette spoke about on Thursday are nothing new - maybe they're well known concepts that other folks talk about all the time. But they were lightning bolts for me, not only in relation to my own family and their tendency to "spin" or forget history that doesn't suit their needs, but also because of recent stories in the news. Because just when I think we're making progress, a story like this comes along that reminds me that we're only a hair's breath from those bad old days. And the only way to keep history from repeating itself is to speak out and to ask questions - even if the answers might lead us to truths about ourselves about which we aren't proud.