Elephants can remember, can we?

A dvd on John McCain was lying on the shelf. A piece of paper taped to the shelf said "Free to take"...

I had gone with Bing to check out the Ann Arbor District Library book sale. Generally a good place to be. Anything from cheap novellas to the classics available for a dollar or less! Second hand (or worse) of course but who cares! Among the hundreds of, well, mostly unreadable books and cds/dvds is a shelf for free stuff. These are for things that attract so little attention that it is inconceivable people would be willing to spend even a dollar on them. This is where I saw the dvd on John McCain's life lying around. I felt sorry for him. No not politically but because here was the story of a man who fought for, arguably, the most powerful position in the world and came up second best. As a consequence, today, no one is willing to spend even a buck on him! Would a dvd on Obama's life be 'sold' for free (or even a dollar) anywhere? No way! and that's cos he won, bottomline! Are we humans, as a species, so unforgiving to those who are second best? Are people who come up second best not worthy of being remembered? Are we that critical of failure? I felt a tinge of sadness thinking how unfair this was to the 'runners-up'...but , then, on deeper thought realized that it is not necessarily true that we forget...

The first example that struck my mind were Puskas' Magical Magyars. They lost the 1954 world cup soccer final to a ruthless Germany. How many remember the 1954 dour German team? Not many. How many, however, still talk fondly of Puskas and his team of magical Hungarians?

Then I remembered another instance when the runners-up became way more famous than the winners. The Titans (of 'Remember the Titans' fame) won the State Football championship but were runners-up in the National Championship. How many even know the name of the team that won the national championship that year? Not many I guess. But how many remember, remember always the Titans to this day?

So, I think, its not that history only remembers the winners. I think history only remembers those who manage to capture our imagination. Perhaps Obama managed to do this and McCain didn't. That would at least rudimentarily explain the difference in price and popularity of their lives on dvd.