The author of Flashes on History proposes a reevaluation of forgetting as a weapon of memory detoxification.

U.S. President George W. Bush argued, to about the Vietnam War, that "a great nation cannot afford memories that foment discord." His successor Obama, in a conversation that appeared in the_ New York Review of Books_, praised "American amnesia" as opposed to the "long memory" of civilizations where ancient events still provoke fierce disagreements. For that matter, Lete, the river of oblivion, is spoken of positively in Plato's Book X of the Republic, in Virgil's Book VI of theAeneid , in Dante'sPurgatorio, which also mentions the Eunoè, the river of remembrance of good things past, in Goethe's Faust, in Baudelaire's poems.