"The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
I hate to take issue with Abe Lincoln in his first inaugural address, but I think that the ‘mystic chords of memory’ are more like genuine out-in-the-open public memory. While such memory is not visible in the flow of pop cultural or daily news media, the body politic is a genuine entity that remembers and digests historic events.
The body politic is evident in the mental structure that we find in our language; it is evident as the reason we get smarter when we talk with smart people and most importantly it is visible when the body politic erupts to change the political direction of the nation/state/or local government. We see such out-in-the-open memory in the reaction to building a Ground Zero mosque nine years after the New York Twin Towers attack.
'Mystic chords' no. Memory in the greater body politic, yes.