Public forgetting: The rhetoric and politics of beginning again

Memory is unavoidably, and sometimes maddeningly, inconstant. It sustains a sense of the past in bewilderingly protean ways. Shelley's "Ozymandias" commemorates the ruins of a once-grandiose edifice of memory-a colossus intended to so impressively amplify the fame of Ramses the Great that his renown would stand undiminished against the erosions of time. The massive idol promised to immortalize its subject in such grandeur that even those in future epochs who laughably considered themselves mighty would revere the monarch as "king of kings" and "despair" at the insignificance of their own trifling feats compared to his everlasting prestige.