January 6th was a disgrace. American citizens attacked their own government. They use terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of domestic business they did not like. Fellow Americans beat and bloodied our own police. They stormed the center floor. They tried to hunt down the Speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chatted about murdering the vice president. They did this because they’d been fed wild, falsehoods by the most powerful man on earth because he was angry. He lost an election. Former President Trump’s actions preceded the riot or a disgraceful dereliction of duty…
There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. No question about it.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, R- Kentucky (as Minority Leader), February 13, 2021
Kids today have it so much better than when I was in school. Back then, we had to read about historical events like “gunboat diplomacy” in dusty old textbooks.
2026 Is going to be a year of history, if not an historic year in its own right, if this morning’s news about our military action in Venezuela is any kind of harbinger of things to come. This past year was a whirlwind of, well, shit, as the “Flood The Zone With Shit” playbook1 was opened to every chapter.
What has concerned me all along me is the zone flooding was only the beginning, as norms were tested to the breaking point again and again and again. As we head into this year, I call it a year of history not because of today’s headlines, but because 2026 marks the Semiquincentennial of the event we mark as the birth of our nation. In July, we will celebrate 250 years since fifty six men from 13 colonies declared the independence of those colonies from their sovereign across the pond.2
It would be a dozen years before we arrived at the form of governance we are still – theoretically – working under. The actual date of our nation’s birth can arguably be pegged to a few major events, but the events of early July in 1776 are a good place to find consensus on our origin story.
Folks in the commonwealth of Massachusetts would like you to think that they started it all about fifteen months earlier, with the famous shots fired on the Lexington Common and the bridge in Concord in April of 1775, celebrated annually as Patriot’s Day, a state holiday in Massachusetts and Maine (the latter being part of the former when the events occurred…).
We all heard about Paul Revere’s famous ride…but growing up, the version we heard in seacoast NH was the ride that happened five months before the ride memorialized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem (recitals of which, curiously, were also part of growing up back in the day). On December 14, 1774, Revere rode north to Portsmouth, NH, to warn the militia there that the British were sending troops to reinforce Fort William and Mary, which commanded the Piscataqua River entrance to the Portsmouth Harbor. Men from Rye, Dover, Durham, and Madbury raided the fort and stole its stores.3 Shots were fired – the first time colonial militia fired on British regulars – but it was a small group of troops in the fort, quickly overcome by the mob. Admittedly it was a far cry from what went down the following April – but it was still first.
Of course, the notion of violence in the face of the British rules for the colonies was expressed a year prior, on December 16, 1773, when the famous Boston Tea Party began a long tradition of polluting Boston’s Harbor (it was followed a few days later by the Philadelphia Tea Party, which few outside of Philly or history buffs are even aware was a thing). This wasn’t the taking up of arms agains British Troops, but it acted like a canon shot across the bow.
The point in all of this is to say that we the people are going to have myriad opportunities to re-learn (or in some cases learn) the story of our nation with a big-number birthday as a backdrop. Ken Burns is helping out with his take on the American Revolutionary War; over the course of the year we can expect to see a number of television programs, magazine spreads, analysis, commentary, and assorted coverage in the many media out there.
The problem with this is the background against which we have to celebrate this anniversary: a government led by a man and cabal more interested in rewriting history, calling truth “fake news,” and self-serving for their own tainted glory and legacy. I shan’t recount the unilateral actions taken by this administration that fly in the face of the law, the norms, or the history of our governance, but I will point out one of the more visible affronts, wherein the president gutted the board at the Kennedy Center, which last month, in turn, voted to rename the center with the president’s name.
[The presdident] said on Thursday that he was “surprised” and “honored” that the center’s board, of which he is the chairman, had thought to do this for him, almost as if it were coming out of the blue. And yet he has been referring to the center as “[president’s name]-Kennedy” in social media posts for months — and the new lettering for the building’s face was all ready to go the next morning.
It is only a distraction, of course. It takes an act of Congress (even a supine one) to make that change, as it took an act of congress to create the center in the first place, as the nation’s memorial to the slain Kennedy. The president could just as easily fake a name change to the Lincoln or Jefferson Memorials or the Washington Monument – and, honestly, I would not put it past him to do so – but that would not change the reason those memorials were erected.
We have seen, in his first administration and now the second one, an inclination to rewrite history with the levers available in the Oval Office.4 Narratives are being changed in museums, for example, to make the Civil War seem less about slavery and more about “state’s rights.”
By the time we get to July, what will the story as portrayed on our federal stages of our nation’s origin look like?
This is not an original thought or concern. Nor is it new – nine years ago I wrote a piece arguing that we cannot allow ourselves to normalize what we see as if it is somehow normal.
This year will be a year of history. Merriam-Webster defines history as, “a chronological record of significant events (such as those affecting a nation or institution) often including an explanation of their causes.” We have a record of events that won’t change. Names, dates, times, places of things that happened to make ours an independent nation are all well -documented and won’t change.
What will change, and has been for some time now, is the power with which those who wish to change the explanation of things can amplify their skewed version of who we are as a nation, and twist that perception to their vile ends.
You know – flooding the zone with their shit.
Then again, this is a year of history, being written down today for the story of how we met this challenge as it will be told years from now. What will they be saying at the Semiquincentennial of our Constitution a dozen years from now?
Eight score and a pair of years ago today, in the midst of a bloody civil war, our nation dedicated a national cemetery on the grounds where the Battle of Gettysburg took place a few months earlier. It was a cool autumn day, and in attendance was the President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln.
But Lincoln was not the main orator for the event; that honor was accorded to Edward Everett, who prepared a 13,607 word address that lasted two hours. When he was done, Lincoln rose to make some concluding remarks.
He spoke for about two minutes; he used only 271 words. Everett afterward said, “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”
As much as he was honoring the dead of Gettysburg, Lincoln was speaking to the future of our nation. Once again, we find ourselves engaged in a great civil war of sorts, testing whether this nation, conceived and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, can long endure. Lincoln said:
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
We find ourselves at a strange juncture; our Union is at arguably the greatest risk it’s seen since Lincoln’s time. We’re not fighting in open fields with canon, cavalry, muskets and bayonets, which makes these far more insidious circumstances. Without the physical carnage of bloody bodies, it is not as easy to see the attacks made upon our rule of law by the folks in control, who, in terrible irony, refer to their caucus as the party of Lincoln.
It is for us to honor all who gave the last full measure of devotion that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom.
My father’s parents were born in what was considered part of Russia; in their youth they saw the independent nation of Latvia come into being on this date in 1918.
Sadly, the revolution that led to independent status of a number of territories, including the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, gave way to a more evil empire, with whom we were allies in the second world war, during which time the independence of these states was stripped away. My father’s family fled from the oppression as refugees, with a harrowing flight into Germany to get to the other allied lines before the Soviet tanks claimed territory, and prisoners, en route to Berlin. (Spoiler alert: they made it…)
Occupied Latvia was given its own Soviet Socialist Republic in 1944 (You’re one of us now. You’re welcome. Good luck finding food.) but in 1987, as perestroika took hold under Gorbachev, the thaw began. After the fall of the Berlin wall, things accelerated, and by August, 1991, after a few years of de facto semi-independence, Latvia again achieved full, autonomous independence as a nation, which has lasted now longer than the first time.
In response to the question at the end of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Ben Franklin was said to have replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Little Latvia, along with its Baltic sister states, and especially Ukraine, stand in testament to that sentiment. Despite the depredations of authoritarians, beginning with Stalin, who lied and broke their promises, the spirit and light of independence in a people is difficult to extinguish.
All the same, it’s better to keep it lit all along, rather than let it grow dim or expire.
After another 584,058,562 miles, it occurs to me the numbers would look less impressive if I go metric. So, now, with another 939,951,143.17 kilometers under the belt, it’s only a cumulative 54,517,407,850 km. Compared to last year at this time, the number is smaller, even if the distance is the same.
This is the time of year when we hear folks going through their lists to recap the past year, and to make new lists of predictions. With this past a year of hyperbole, we are heading into a new year full of dire warnings. The planet is on fire, our politics are on fire, our culture is on fire…
And yet.
It is a new year, and while the politics of the day will be front page for many months to come (You thought the 2024 contest was already taking up too much airtime and pixels? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.) it is also worth remembering that we are not living in history…yet.
The signs, all bright neon colors, flashing at hypnotizing rates every way we turn, tell us we are in a scary time for our nation. And, well, yes we are. But the signal-to-noise ratio in our public discourse is lower1 than I can recall in my lifetime, and the alarm bells are rinnging for all the wrong reasons. Deflection is the name of the game, and we – all of us – need to keep our collective eye on the ball, if we are worried about what history informs us of a possible future.
This past week in the small town of Berlin, NH, a candidate for the office of President of the United States was asked a simple question: “What was the cause of the United States Civil War?” The candidate’s2 answer was anything but simple, or even to the point, let alone “presidential.” The word “slavery” was omitted; the topic not even reflected.
The next day, the spin rooms were working at high RPMs. The candidate when asked about her answer said, “Of course the Civil War was about slavery. We know that.”
Except – and this is the thing – she didn’t say it when asked. A subject like the U.S. Civil War should be the low-hanging fruit for any candidate for national office – we are in a time when so many pundits have been predicting that we are sitting on the threshold of a modern civil war.
This is the type of question for which one does not get a “do-over” or make-up exam.
This is the exemplar of the kind of question a Republican candidate should absolutely OWN, given that party’s birth in the same cause that led to the Civil War. The folks who are forgiving the candidate her verbal trespass tell us that the Republican Party has forgotten the concept their party’s name embodies.
But history tells us this is nothing new. A previous republican president of the past century, the guy who resigned rather than face the music, was impressed with the trappings of court when visiting heads of state in Europe, and in preparation for a visit by the British Prime Minister, gussied up the guards with ceremonial uniforms complete with fancy hats and tasseled tunics.
It was the President’s design, and it was panned by critics as being, among other things, “too monarchical” and compared to those you would find surrounding a head of state in a banana republic.
It’s worth remembering that story now, because a few parallels have been made between that guy who resigned and inmate P011358093, the the proclaimed front-runner for the party that has lost its way. Today, we have a candidate who has said he would be a dictator on day 1 if elected. He has said many things, many horrible things, on his way to leading the pack, and they need to be heard for what they are: words that describe what he intends to do if he gets his hands back on the levers of power.
The next closest candidate in the race, if polls are to be believed,4 can’t come to admit why the Civil War was fought – even though the Declaration of Secession of the very state she governed stated slavery was the reason for that state, among others, to secede.
Meanwhile, inflation is down. Jobs are up. Most metrics by which we measure the success of an economy indicate that the past three years have been very, very good to our nation, in no small part because out current President acted in a somewhat revolutionary way: he turned public policy toward raising up its average citizens instead of rewarding its wealthiest, the latter a trend begun under an actor5 in the biggest role of his lifetime.
We are at the beginning of a new year, the first ten months of which will be full of noise, more noise, and then some noise on top of all that. Bread and circuses will appear everywhere a crowd can gather, and much time, pixels, and airwaves will be spent confusing the people so they don’t vote in their interest. Or in the interest of the nation and the world.
We live in a democratic republic, but less and less so in recent years, as the ironically-named Republican party works feverishly to transform our nation into an autocracy, or oligarchy, or some other form of big-ass banana republic.
A republic is, as was explained years ago to sell the notion of one of our own by folks like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, a government whose fundamental principle is “…that the sense of the majority shall prevail.”6 One needs only look at this past year to see ample evidence tat the GOP is working toward the opposite principle. Perhaps the most obvious and egregious example of this is a former football coach turned U.S. Senator who singlehandedly degraded military readiness and our defense posture around the world by refusing to allow military promotions to continue for most of 2023, leaving whole branches with interim leadership – all for a cause for which that the vast majority of the general public disagrees with him.
The sense of the majority no longer resides in the leadership of the GOP. The Republican Party is not what its name suggests.
All this is nothing new to you, dear reader. If you are here, you are likely already of a similar mind. So what to do?
I don’t know. Getting a signal in past all that noise is a Sisyphean task, but we cannot let up. We cannot give up. Because if we do, they win. And that’s a future, for 2024 and beyond, that I don’t want to be a part of.
And so…welcome to the new year. Take a deep breath, and find some time to make some time to make a difference, however small, on your side of the playing field.
Things are not what they seem. But they don’t have to become what they appear to be coming to.
Good luck – for all of us – in this new year.
If you would prefer, our noise-to-signal ration is terribly high.↩︎
I would prefer not to use names of folks I don’t support on my blurg. You can look ’em up if you don’t know of whom I am talking. ↩︎
I would prefer not to use names of folks I don’t support on my blurg, but if they earn an inmate number, I’ll allow that descriptor into my prose. ↩︎
Polls at this time are not to be believed. But the give us an insight into what folks are thinking about when it comes to the horserace, so they are not without value – only without as much merit and value that is too often accorded them in the absence of easier reportage this early in the game. ↩︎
Life has kept me busy. Of course, who hasn’t been kept hopping these days? Most folk I know are, well, busy, be it keeping up with work, managing health issues, dealing with their families. When I set myself down in the home office to do some kind of activity on this computing thingy, I find myself doing work – that is to say, working on material brought from the job, spending extra time in an edit doing tweaking, mixing, and such other things as I might fuss over before I send a project out for review.
Lately, too, when I set myself own in this chair to write, I find myself writing for work. My job hasn’t changed, per se, but the focus of some of what I do has shifted somewhat. These days I am writing to document what I do – the great Brain Dump as we call it in my quarterly reviews. With more staff in our department, and, lets face it, the imminent reality of my aging out toward retirement in the actually foreseeable future, it is incumbent upon me to delegate more of what I do to others. I can’t keep doing it all, myself, especially now that I am not alone. Which is nice – but there needs to be a conduit between my grey matter and the tasks our new folks are picking up.
I also get to work more on communications-oriented writing, especially to promote the strategic alignment of our larger department within the division, and the university writ large.
All this is nice, but I need to start carving out time in the new year to write more for myself. To work on projects that have been piling up, one way or another, on the desk here in the home office.
It can be done. Life has been busy, but, let’s be real – not any busier for me as for many others. One person in particular continues to astound and amaze me with her daily output. She writes, each day, for us; for all of US. Her output demonstrates a discipline and ethic that humbles. I type of Heather Cox Richardson, whose substack column, Letters from an American, should be required reading across the board.
Richardson has a new book out; as she’s been hustling around doing the author boogie, she keeps cranking out the daily submissions. Each day I see her name in my inbox, I am awed.
Yesterday’s filing, for Thanksgiving Day, was, as usual, inspirational, and I leave you with her final words from yesterday:
In 1861, Americans went to war to keep a cabal from taking control of the government and turning it into an oligarchy. The fight against that rebellion seemed at first to be too much for the nation to survive. But Americans rallied and threw their hearts into the cause on the battlefields even as they continued to work on the home front for a government that defended democracy and equality before the law.
After 33,307,137,180 miles, it’s that time again to schedule a visit into the shop to kick the tires, check the fluids, and adjust levels. No major breakdowns (knock wood), but I have been hearing some strange noises from the joints and transmission lately.
Each year a local radio station switches to an all-Christmas music format. Used to be it make the switch over the Thanksgiving weekend; this year it was first weekend of November, when a lot of folks were still sorting their Halloween haul…
Upon hearing the seasonal songs had arrived ever earlier this year, my daughter observed that, “It’s a shame there are no Thanksgiving songs, too…” I corrected her, and said yes, there are. She assumed I meant the 18-minute classic Alice’s Restaurant (with full orchestration and five -part harmony) by Arlo Guthrie – which, she admitted, is a Thanksgiving Song.
“No,” I said, “there are Thanksgiving songs out there besides Alice’s Restaurant.”
And so I reminded her of the song she’s heard many, many times growing up, tucked as it is in the classic history lesson brought to us by Stan Freberg one-fifth score years before Arlo drove trash around in a red VW microbus with shovels and rakes an implements of destruction.
Freberg’s take on this nation’s history, from it’s “discovery” by Christopher Columbus up through the Battle of Yorktown, is a masterful twist on reality, offering an arguably woke perspective on the United States hidden behind brilliant satirical sketches. It took him 35 years to create Volume 2, which essentially covers the 19th century, and, sadly, there is no Volume 3 to skewer the Depression through more modern times.
It was Volume 1 – the early years – that I listened to time and time again until I wore out the grooves. Sparkling wit, great puns, clever songs – to this day it ranks in my personal top three comedy albums of all time. Of course, that’s just my opinion – but it’s shared by plenty of folks out there.
And it’s got the best Thanksgiving song – at least in the “short length” category…
