Everybody Back On Your Head

There is an old joke that involves a guy who goes to Hell and is asked by Satan to choose his preferred poison. The first room is freezing cold with snow and ice all around and everybody in that room is shivering cold. The second room is your classic hellscape with fire and brimstone and everyone in that room is in agony as their flesh burns. In the last room, everyone is standing around in sewage up to their waist while they drink nice cups of coffee. The guy obviously decides that despite the smell of the third room, it seems to be not so bad and he chooses it. When he walks in he is handed a cup of nice hot coffee and after his first sip, suddenly a whistle blows somewhere in the distance and over the loudspeaker a voice says, “Coffee breaks over! Everyone back on your head!” Sometimes our choices in life that seem like they are for the best prove not to be and we end up in the shit no matter our careful choices.

` Now that the holidays are past, we are starting to settle into the reality of what life in these United States and the world in general is likely to be like. It has proven to be the perfect time to listen to the historians to gain perspective. I read Heather Cox Richardson and her Letters from an American every day, without fail, as I have for the past five years. Heather Cox Richardson started writing Letters from an American on November 7, 2019. She began this daily newsletter on Facebook as a way to help readers understand the historical context behind current political events in the United States. The project started shortly after the first public hearings in President Trump’s first impeachment inquiry began. Richardson, a professor of American history at Boston College, initially intended it as a small project to explain complex political developments to a general audience. Her particular area of historical expertise is the Reconstruction following the Civil War, which seems overtly relevant to our circumstances at this time. The HCR letters quickly gained popularity and expanded to other platforms like Substack, where they became one of the platform’s most widely-read newsletters. I had been referred to the HCR daily missive by our friend Candice, who is a retired school teacher who shares a similar political orientation to Kim and I.

The other historical information source that I am feeding on is the Ken Burns documentaries. I have mentioned several in recent stories, but feel compelled to once again reference his 2014 documentary on The Roosevelts, An Intimate History. What I continue to see in this series, produced well before the unfolding of the current crises we face in our country and world, is the extent to which many of the current themes are almost a complete replaying of themes that have played out in our country time and time again. These include concerns about immigration, efforts to maintain isolationist global standing, the subordination of racial equality to whatever issues seemed more pressing in the moment, the prioritization of business interests over social and ecological justice, and diversity of power to women and oppressed minorities. The major structural and long-term challenges are so very similar. At the top of the list is the sustainability of democratic institutions and election integrity including an ongoing debate about election administration and voting rights, the concerns about political polarization and institutional stability and overall questions about the role of media in democratic discourse (now more social media than traditional media then). Immigration and border policy, the management of migration flows and asylum systems as well as the integration of immigrants into communities and related humanitarian concerns, have literally always been on the table for Americans. Naturally, there are the ever-present economic challenges like income and wealth inequality, housing affordability and availability, the pernicious inflation and cost of living concerns, and job market changes due to automation (and now AI).

The list of issues that seem to crop up over and over in history that still persist today go on and on. Recently, most of these are taking on an even higher level of concern like Climate Change and environmental policy, including the transition to renewable energy. And healthcare affordability and access just keep getting more and more urgent as the country ages. Education policy is all over the place with student debt and college affordability and access at the top of the list, followed closely by K-12 education quality and funding, leading to concerning skills gap and workforce development (As Vivek Ramaswamy likes to point out and, of course, assuming the Elon Musk projection of full replacement by AI is an overstatement of likely reality). This is largely driven by technology policy with AI regulation and impact at the top of that list, followed closely by data privacy and cybersecurity not to mention Tech industry concentration and regulation (including such things as the banning of Tic Tok). This is all set against a backdrop of geopolitical tensions and global security concerns with aggression in both military and international trade relationship battlefields in the offing.

Every American president is tasked with overseeing a global empire and goes about preserving it or expanding it in different ways. As President-elect Donald Trump prepares for his second term, he’s bringing his signature scammy touch to the enterprise. Trump, apropos of nothing, has recently said, “We’ll be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, which has a beautiful ring…And it’s appropriate.” Can the United States rename the Gulf of Mexico? It seems like he could, considering U.S. presidents can change the names of landmarks. That doesn’t mean map makers and other countries will go along with it given that the name dates back more than four centuries. “The Gulf of America” is a tacky nationalist typical Trumpian gimmick. What he’s really doing is claiming he wants to rename the gulf as he threatens Mexico with tariffs in a culture war that gives Trump an easy way to beat his chest and yet not actually doing anything meaningful. This nationalist marketing gimmick is not a policy solution to any problem the United States has. It goes hand-in-hand with his far-fetched proposals to buy Greenland and reclaim control of the Panama Canal. Trump has said that he refuses to rule out military or economic coercion to obtain Greenland or the Panama Canal and said, “We need them for economic security.” Is this isolationist? Sounds more national socialist (aka Nazi).

I take a certain amount of comfort from the awareness that other bully presidents like Teddy Roosevelt and Andrew Jackson had similar senses of manifest destiny. The caveat with that observation is that those gentlemen had certain other redeeming qualities in their leadership package that Trump is devoid of. I understand that there’s nothing new under the sun, and that nature is designed to make man, aggressive and belligerent both towards other species and to lesser men, but that doesn’t make it right, and that certainly doesn’t make it palatable. So as we start the new year in the beginning of the second Trump administration all I can say to my fellow Americans is that it’s time for everybody to get back on their head.