Bill Nye recently asked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez how she planned to deal with those who were afraid of change.
This, in essence, is the question of the current era: Mr. Trump won, if he won on anything, on the idea that we have to go back to a better time: Make America Great Again, was a call to return to the times when father went off to the factory with his lunch pail, while mother stayed home with the kids and they had a car and two weeks summer vacation and everything was just swell in America.
While we cling to the past we should remember that the Czar, before World War I, called for a convention of nations in order to get everyone to agree to not seek new knowledge, new technology to make guns shoot farther or to develop more powerful weapons, because he realized his government could not spend the money an arms race would require.
He knew, on some level, that any army or navy of the modern age could defeat any army or navy of preceding ages simply because their technology is better. So the mighty wooden British Navy of the 1700 and early 1800's would be utterly destroyed by any Navy, say, the Italian Navy of 1940, without the loss of a a single ship or life by the Italians, simply because of technology.
There is a wonderful scene in "Master and Commander" in which Jack Aubrey, the captain of a British man of war examines a wood model of the ship he has battled and been nearly wrecked by, the double hulled French ship, and he remarks, "What a marvelous modern age we live in!" He could not even imagine iron ships under steam power. He was so masterful handling his wooden ship, which he had joined as a 13 year old, and had bled into its wood enough that he felt it was a relative, he could not make the mental leap into an age where none of what he knew, the wind, the sails, the management of sailors aloft, using the wind gauge, firing mussel loaded cannon, would be rendered totally irrelevant to winning a battle at sea.
And yet, less than 60 years later the iron clad ships of the American civil war would render wooden ships impotent.
Small changes, like the rifling of gun barrels, changed the equation on the battle field, and another small change, the machine gun did even more, but physics would ultimately make these incremental advances seem almost quaint.
It was only 76 years between Custer's last stand and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. All that in the lifetime of a single man.
Those who could not embrace the notion of change were, literally, incinerated.
Now we are asked to hold fast, to in fact, turn around, about face, toward a sweeter, happier nation, an Ozzie and Harriet, a Leave It to Beaver past.
But consider that past, a past when "White Supremacy" was the official motto of the Alabama Democratic Party (1966) and before the state of Mississippi had not ratified the 13th amendment abolishing slavery (1995!) and 1923 when the Mississippi supreme court found it legal for that state to expel from all-white schools two children whose great-aunts were rumored to be married to coloreds on the grounds that the law was intended to "prevent race amalgamation" and, the court approvingly noted the law meant to insure "the broad dominant purpose of preserving the purity and integrity of the white race." Oh, this too, was America, as Louis Menard has noted in his New Yorker article "In the Eye of the Law."
In Plessy v Fergusson, a case decided in 1896, the Court argued "We consider the underlying fallacy of the plantiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race choose to put that construction on it."
As if there could be any other construction put to it.
Not until Antonin Scalia did mental contortions to explain why "A well regulated militia" did not mean the authors of the Second Amendment were saying guns did not not belong to individuals but to organizations intended to defend the state, was there such transparent idiocy from the Court.
But this was all an effort to keep change at bay.
In 1896, there were 130,334 colored voters registered in Louisiana; by 1904 there were only 1,342. This was not because colored voters had left the state; colored voters were stripped of their right to vote in that America of former greatness.
That was "Jim Crow." That was the counter revolution to the 2nd American Revolution which freed the slaves and gave all men the right to vote regardless of race.
In 1930, Birmingham, Alabama passed a law making it illegal for a White and a Black person to play dominoes or checkers together. In 1932, Oklahoma outlawed baseball clubs, one Black one White, playing baseball within 2 blocks of one another.
For a period of 50 years there were something like 10 lynchings of Blacks in the South every week.
So this is the America we seek when we want to Make America Great Again.
We want to go back to wooden ships, and muskets and a time when hate rule supreme in the 14 states of the former Confederacy and in Western states like Oklahoma, and in the mountain states and the high plains states which now comprise the Red States.
Read Howard Zinn, Oliver Stone. Read real American history. Watch "Platoon," and "Full Metal Jacket." There you will find the real MAGA.
Humankind cannot stand too much reality, T.S. Eliot warned, and we can see that in full bloom in Mr. Trump and his core.
These are the fearful, the cowering, who are terrified of what the future may bring, who cleave to a past where you got points for being white, where simply being white guaranteed you always had someone below you in America.
Make America Hate Again. That's the real message. And it's a message of weakness. "Home of the free. Land of the Brave." Not for Trump who sees MS-13 in every immigrant family presenting itself to the Southern border.
MAGA.
This, in essence, is the question of the current era: Mr. Trump won, if he won on anything, on the idea that we have to go back to a better time: Make America Great Again, was a call to return to the times when father went off to the factory with his lunch pail, while mother stayed home with the kids and they had a car and two weeks summer vacation and everything was just swell in America.
While we cling to the past we should remember that the Czar, before World War I, called for a convention of nations in order to get everyone to agree to not seek new knowledge, new technology to make guns shoot farther or to develop more powerful weapons, because he realized his government could not spend the money an arms race would require.
He knew, on some level, that any army or navy of the modern age could defeat any army or navy of preceding ages simply because their technology is better. So the mighty wooden British Navy of the 1700 and early 1800's would be utterly destroyed by any Navy, say, the Italian Navy of 1940, without the loss of a a single ship or life by the Italians, simply because of technology.
There is a wonderful scene in "Master and Commander" in which Jack Aubrey, the captain of a British man of war examines a wood model of the ship he has battled and been nearly wrecked by, the double hulled French ship, and he remarks, "What a marvelous modern age we live in!" He could not even imagine iron ships under steam power. He was so masterful handling his wooden ship, which he had joined as a 13 year old, and had bled into its wood enough that he felt it was a relative, he could not make the mental leap into an age where none of what he knew, the wind, the sails, the management of sailors aloft, using the wind gauge, firing mussel loaded cannon, would be rendered totally irrelevant to winning a battle at sea.
And yet, less than 60 years later the iron clad ships of the American civil war would render wooden ships impotent.
Small changes, like the rifling of gun barrels, changed the equation on the battle field, and another small change, the machine gun did even more, but physics would ultimately make these incremental advances seem almost quaint.
It was only 76 years between Custer's last stand and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. All that in the lifetime of a single man.
Those who could not embrace the notion of change were, literally, incinerated.
Now we are asked to hold fast, to in fact, turn around, about face, toward a sweeter, happier nation, an Ozzie and Harriet, a Leave It to Beaver past.
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| Pre vaccination polio, iron lung ward |
But consider that past, a past when "White Supremacy" was the official motto of the Alabama Democratic Party (1966) and before the state of Mississippi had not ratified the 13th amendment abolishing slavery (1995!) and 1923 when the Mississippi supreme court found it legal for that state to expel from all-white schools two children whose great-aunts were rumored to be married to coloreds on the grounds that the law was intended to "prevent race amalgamation" and, the court approvingly noted the law meant to insure "the broad dominant purpose of preserving the purity and integrity of the white race." Oh, this too, was America, as Louis Menard has noted in his New Yorker article "In the Eye of the Law."
In Plessy v Fergusson, a case decided in 1896, the Court argued "We consider the underlying fallacy of the plantiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race choose to put that construction on it."
As if there could be any other construction put to it.
Not until Antonin Scalia did mental contortions to explain why "A well regulated militia" did not mean the authors of the Second Amendment were saying guns did not not belong to individuals but to organizations intended to defend the state, was there such transparent idiocy from the Court.
But this was all an effort to keep change at bay.
In 1896, there were 130,334 colored voters registered in Louisiana; by 1904 there were only 1,342. This was not because colored voters had left the state; colored voters were stripped of their right to vote in that America of former greatness.
That was "Jim Crow." That was the counter revolution to the 2nd American Revolution which freed the slaves and gave all men the right to vote regardless of race.
In 1930, Birmingham, Alabama passed a law making it illegal for a White and a Black person to play dominoes or checkers together. In 1932, Oklahoma outlawed baseball clubs, one Black one White, playing baseball within 2 blocks of one another.
For a period of 50 years there were something like 10 lynchings of Blacks in the South every week.
So this is the America we seek when we want to Make America Great Again.
We want to go back to wooden ships, and muskets and a time when hate rule supreme in the 14 states of the former Confederacy and in Western states like Oklahoma, and in the mountain states and the high plains states which now comprise the Red States.
Read Howard Zinn, Oliver Stone. Read real American history. Watch "Platoon," and "Full Metal Jacket." There you will find the real MAGA.
Humankind cannot stand too much reality, T.S. Eliot warned, and we can see that in full bloom in Mr. Trump and his core.
These are the fearful, the cowering, who are terrified of what the future may bring, who cleave to a past where you got points for being white, where simply being white guaranteed you always had someone below you in America.
Make America Hate Again. That's the real message. And it's a message of weakness. "Home of the free. Land of the Brave." Not for Trump who sees MS-13 in every immigrant family presenting itself to the Southern border.
MAGA.
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