Permanent Records, Mel Gibson, and Freedom

“As you know, Bart, one day your permanent record will disqualify you from all but the hottest and noisiest jobs.” – The Simpsons

I have to remember that every time I talk to my wife, my conversation is being recorded for “training and quality” purposes.

In my younger days at school I actually heard teachers say, with great regularity, “That’s going to go on your permanent record.”

The teachers didn’t say that to me, of course.  I spent spare time in the classroom quietly reading the Bible.  Okay, that’s not true.  I was actually that kid in class that got away with everything.  But even though I wasn’t getting in trouble for things like taking blood samples in fifth grade for use in making slides for the class microscope (I got samples from about a dozen kids that all used the same needle).  And in kindergarten I think I spent more time in the principal’s office than in the classroom.

I actually deserved every minute I spent in the principal’s office.  Today?  I think they’d have tried to pump me so full of medications that my street value would have been about $6 million.

Nowadays they’d say I had ADD, but in reality I had a serious case of JAAD.  As in John’s An A____e Disorder.  Feel free to fill in the blank.  No points if you’re my ex-wife since she would claim she discovered this syndrome.

Even when I was fifth grade I knew that the “permanent records” threat was nonsense.  One thing that America used to be great at was losing records.  When I asked Pa Wilder how he did in high school, he just smiled and chuckled and said, “the school burned down, so those records are gone.”  He didn’t smell like gasoline, so I’m hoping he wasn’t the one who helped that fire along.

“Nice school you’ve got there.  Be a shame if my Permanent Record didn’t show all A’s.”

But even the courthouse in the county burned down while I was in elementary school.  I’m sure that they had some of the records stored elsewhere, because they were still able to charge property taxes.  But I assure you that some records were lost – this was a poor county, and if they were lucky they had microfilm stored offsite for property tax purposes.

The really, really nice thing about records was this:  they weren’t permanent.  Sure, we have cuneiform tablets from the time of the Sumerian emperor Sargon the Great dealing with taxes from Umalahook selling a goat to Brandon for a fraternity prank.  However, the great part about history is that most of it is forgotten.

Really, do you think that gouging the eyes out of a chocolate Easter bunny is grounds for a restraining order?  I’ll admit doing it with an ice pick was a little excessive.

There are gaps in history, where we don’t know the motivation of people, not popes, not kings, not Elon Musk.  The records for some years are so sparse that there’s actually one theory that 297 years were entirely made up and we’re actually living in the year 1722 (LINK).  And, no, I wouldn’t trade in your t-shirts and cargo pants for hose and a tricornered hat, yo.  The theory is that history was such a mess that, at some point, people just made up a bunch of years (between 614 A.D. and 911 A.D.).  I can see that all of Europe could have decided that it’s a much better idea to skip 300 some-odd years and go straight from lice and wooden mugs of grog to iPods™ and Pringles®.

“Early to bed, early to rise, is no way to get a blog post out on time, Wilder.” – Ben Franklin

Oh, sure, there are examples of records that are nearly permanent.  The Secret Vatican Archives (yes, they really call them that but it’s in Italian so it sounds fancier) have documents that date back to the 8^th century, although the 8^th century document is actually just a Post-It® note that Pope John VII (no relation) doodled pictures of cats on during a really long meeting when he was bored and ready for lunch and stupid Cardinal Vincenzo would not shut up about the lack of clean towels in the sauna.

Oh, my, what a difference one typo can make.

Forgetting is even, thankfully, enshrined in law.  The first time (that I can find) that the idea of statutes of limitations showed up was during, drumroll, the Roman era.  Statutes of limitations started out as simply the idea that, after a prescribed period of time, people can’t sue you for damages in civil court.  Added in English law in the 17^th century was the idea that even criminal cases couldn’t be brought after a certain time.

Why?  The logic was that after a certain time, evidence of the civil case or crimes couldn’t be reliably produced. This is a good thing.  The crime that you committed when you were 18 can’t hang over your head when you’re 48.  It’s done.  For most crimes, the statute of limitations has a lot of different durations based on the type of crime.  Most Federal felonies (in the United States) expire after five years, unless the crime is murder, terrorism resulting in murder, or anything Jeff Epstein ever did in which case there is no statute of limitations.  Which is also a good thing.  As an aside, I’m really shocked to hear that the jailers watching Epstein both committed suicide tomorrow.

But digital media has changed all of that – the courthouse or school burning down won’t destroy the D you got in high school algebra or the record of the DUI Mel Gibson was arrested for.  They’re backed up on multiple servers in California and Ohio.  Unless there’s an EMP, those records will last a long time in the United States.

“They can feel us up at the airport, but they will never take our freedom!  Oh, wait, I guess that’s totally taking away our freedom.”

Europe has put in place a law in 1995 establishing a “right to be forgotten.”  This law, more or less, says that if the information is no longer relevant, it should be removed from search engines.  Of course, publishing the truth is a zillion percent protected by the First Amendment, which is why people publishing books like the Anarchist Cookbook are legal.  They’re facts.  If you don’t commit a crime using those facts, you’ve done nothing wrong.

Likewise, if people in the United States get Google® results that show someone in Britain did something naughty in 1977, well, that person can’t complain since we seem to have written that pesky First Amendment as a direct result of people telling us what we can and cannot say.  Like a kindergarten-age John Wilder attempting to see how sharp a knife was on a classmate’s forearm, we Americans just don’t take direction very well.

I guess we’ll just have to live with that on our Permanent Record.

I guess I’ll just leave this here.