THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

Commenters take it for granted that the Black Sea Valley will be studied more. The Caucasian mummies in China have NOT been studied more. They are in the Memory Hole. As one astronaut said, "I always hoped I might be the FIRST man on the moon. It never occurred to me that I would be the LAST."

Here is where my memory comes in. You don't realize how many things get completely ignored because, well, they are completely ignored. There is nobody to remind you of them, and most people write about the latest news release.

From what I can see, the last exploration there was in 2001, by the same man who did the earlier one. He was disappointed that they found wood from trees instead of houses when they sent hooks away down there. Actually, if you dropped a hook into modern France, which is smaller and far more crowded than the Black Sea Valley was, you would come up almost entirely with trees unless you happened to hit on an urban area.

And there it stopped. "Christians" don't want any exploration there. Liberals do not want to risk finding the Urheimat of the Indo-European race they have persuaded everybody to forget about. They want to talk about how the Nubians built Egypt while Northern Europeans grunted and waited to learn how to use the opposable thumb.

Without my kind of memory, maybe you cannot really see how critical the Manufacture of Information is. Anything that is not in the newspaper in the last month is FORGOTTEN. We have a better Memory Hole than Orwell did.

Whole areas of study, involving tens of billions of dollars, from theology to social science, are invested entirely in the Garbage Dump Theory of History. Who is going to defy all that and finance the huge project it would be to get down under all that fresh and sea water?

The truth will eventually out, but that is because, as I pointed in my forgotten summation to A Plague on Both Your Houses, the whole social science establishment is facing an embryonic NEXT establishment. Carbon dating and frontal lobes and a lot of other things want money, and another study of how blacks suffer or the Holocaust is taking it. I can see signs of this frustration now, but I could not explain it in the time I want to devote to it.

Black Sea History will be an afterthought, and it won't come from history or archeology. Advancing science in fifty years will let us read the Black Sea bed very clearly.

That is why I hesitate to make predictions. I know where things are going but I am weary, weary unto DEATH of guiding people back into rational thought. Most of the people I deal with are like bowling beginners; the ball hits the floor and, at slightly different distances, goes over into the gutter.

But I see the basics spreading. That is the only point that matters. When it hits the headlines, some people will ready to absorb it.

Besides, I would have to repeat it eery two weeks and I don't want to bother.