But you said...

Richard Cohen offers a perspective that makes sense to this blog writer, one of a group who are sometimes told that their anonymous posting is less than positive for society:

I am forever coming across columns I've totally forgotten writing and I now, routinely, have to check to see if I have already staked out a position on some matter of importance -- and what, exactly, it may be.

---snip---

Obviously, this is a good thing. Less obviously, maybe, this is a bad thing. A man is entitled to his own view of himself. He is entitled to be who he says he is. He is the sum product of a gazillion memories, some of them shaved a bit, some of them totally renovated, some of them discarded and forgotten and replaced by dint of imagination and the urgent need to deny. Anyone who has led a full life needs denial. It is the Novocaine of life.

But now I am denied denial. I have been at this column business since 1976, writing most of the time three times a week, more recently just two. That comes to about 3,500 columns, my opinions on just about everything -- a huge memory dump straight from me to the printed page and thence, alas, to the dour computer that lacks remorse or romance and is nothing but rebuke: But you said in 1980. But you wrote in 1990. But . . . aw, shut up.