Her Story/History

     As mentioned over and over, history is one of my weakest subjects, which is ironic because I do enjoy both reading and hearing about it.  But I am little more than a tourist listening to a guide when learning history.  For while it is fascinating to hear about the past, even to take copious notes, if you give me a quiz the following week or month, little of it remains.  And within a year, only a tiny detail or two is there, the entirety of the scope of the person or place or culture somehow as lost as a solo part of a 1000-piece puzzle.  What were the main ruling empires in 200 BCE?  The Assyrians ruled for how long, and where?  Did the Persians, Roman's, or Greeks come first?  Good grief...where's that white board to graph it all out?  And yet, somehow I keep reading history. 

 

Photo: Zhengze Xu of China

     Quick quiz: which Cleopatra married Marc Antony?  Wait, there was more than one Cleopatra?  And wasn't his name Anthony?  Answers: no, to the latter and Cleopatra #7 was the ruler, the one so vividly portrayed in both Hollywood and history books (the couple's daughter would become Cleopatra VIII).  Cleopatra VII (the ruler) was the daughter of Ptolemy XII (their reign wouldn't end until Ptolemy XVI).  And many of these Egyptian rulers were young.  The combined ages of Cleopatra II, and the brothers Ptolemy VI & VIII (number VII didn't survive), all of whom co-ruled at the time, was 30.  Yes, 30 was the combined ages of all three!  But of course you remember those Ptolemys, the rulers who freed Egypt from 150 years of Persian rule and who would themselves go on to rule Egypt for over 300 years.  You know, builders of the Library of Alexandria (which burned down twice), comissioners of creating the Rosetta Stone, and the first to measure the circumference of the Earth.  Hmm, and here all I remembered were pyramids and King Tut (in case you were wondering, Tut was a ruler in the 18th dynasty, before the Ptolemys came to power; although credit the Ptolemys with writing Egyptian history as we know it by dividing its 3000 years of pharaohs into dynasties).  Great tour, you say, sure learned a lot, but likely to forget most of it.  And to think that that was the simplified version...

     Most of that came from a review of three books in the London Review, which tied the fall of Egypt (and Cleopatra) and the rise of Rome in a condensed form.  It came right after I had read the review of Hitler's death and the convoluted search for his body in the New York Review.  Allegedly, Hitler's mistress took cyanide and Hitler shot himself as the Soviet army neared.  But the bodies were quickly taken out of the basement bunker and burned, with little proof that the bodies were actually those of Hitler and Eva Braun (many at the time, including Churchill,  Japan's emperor Hirohito, and Hitler, had look-alike doubles to allow possible escape or avoid assassination).  Wrote the piece: At the moment of victory in 1945, SMERSH [Soviet military counterintelligence] and the NKVD security police (later the KGB, today the FSB) were in vicious rivalry.  A year after SMERSH found the bodies, NKVD agents went to the site and found cranial fragments, one of which had a small hole the size of a bullet exit wound.  But SMERSH refused to give its rival access to Hitler’s corpse, so to this day no one can prove that the skull pieces were Hitler’s.  But the piece added: Hitler’s last command, the final Führerbefehl, had been that his body should be completely destroyed, leaving nothing for a conqueror to gloat over.  His order was bungled, leaving behind an undignified but identifiable scatter of debris.  Sharples [author Caroline Sharples] gives a fascinating account of Nazi state funerals: monumental, neopagan, and ugly. Hitler liked ordering them for Nazi “martyrs” such as Reinhard Heydrich.  But his own peculiar narcissism, veering between a Napoleonic self-image and an affected “little man” simplicity, suggests that he would have chosen an “ordinary German soldier’s burial”—attended by a few million mourners.  The muddy mess in the Chancellery garden, followed by decades of goggling speculation about which tooth fit where, was beyond his nightmares.  It was this disjointed combination of historical articles that unfortunately brought to mind Trump, not that he would perish with "a soldier's death" (as was the wish of Hitler) because Trump has never served in the military.  But rather that Trump would probably imagine those millions mourning him only to perhaps collapse in what's left of the Rose Garden and, like Hitler, imagine such an ending as one "beyond his nightmares."

     If you missed it, the podcast On Point featured attorney Ty Cobb (not to be confused with the legendary baseball player) who served as special councel  during Trump's first term (he departed 10 months later).  As he and host Megna Chakrabarti explained: CHAKRABARTI: Let me provide a little bit of detail on that for people who don't know.  So the president is now selling, as you said, early access to his Truth Social posts for $100,000 a month to anyone, basically anyone who's willing to pay.  Because those posts can be market movers essentially.  And so he's literally, the president of the United States is selling early access to that information.  I think it's completely unprecedented.  And there have been people in recent days who have said, people who are still ostensibly Republicans, not in office, who have said, "If anything has ever been impeachable beyond January 6th, 2021, this is it," and yet Congress is doing nothing.  They barely even notice, I'd say, that this is going on.  COBB: Yes, no, I agree with that.  And there's a long list of impeachable offenses.  And I think we'll see that list roll out with all the supporting documentation.  But I do think it's important to understand that it's not hidden anymore.  This is a crime family that flouts its misconduct.   Selling access to presidential decisions in advance to Wall Street for a fee, the founders would've been astonished that a) Americans would elect such a person, and b) that Congress, on which the founders bestowed greater powers than the presidency in Article 1 tolerate that they do that without removing the president under the impeachment clause, and that they fund his whimsical tirades against immigrants and others without exercising the spending power that they have.  And that they allow the Iranian war to continue, which Trump now uses solely to announce that the strait is open, the strait is closed, we're going to bomb, we're not going to bomb.  Those are all market movers for him.  The amount of trading that goes on, when he makes those decisions, has been assessed, and it is substantial.  That you will see trades immediately before and after he makes those decisions that affect the price of oil internationally.  And anything that, anytime he says he's going to relent or that the strait's about to be opened, the price of oil comes down.  Anytime he says we're about to bomb, it goes up.  These are decisions on which people are making a lot of money, and many of those people are associated with the president.  One has to wonder: if Trump is willing to sell inside information, would he sell our nuclear codes for a few billion $?  As it is said in Latin: Media vita in morte sumus: in the midst of life we are in death (note: I know diddly squat about Latin; that phrase came from an article on grief).

 

     But Trump is far from alone in profiting off of such insider information.  Wrote Barron's: To date, more than 300 legislators have served for more than 30 years in Congress.  Some 70% of the current members were career politicians before they made it to Washington.  No Founder would have even thought to consider laws around term limits because they couldn't have fathomed hanging out well beyond their welcome, all while depending on the government dole for their salary.  The natural question is, why would legislators want to stick around for so long?  It turns out that, since 2004, the top 100 wealth gainers in Congress have averaged a 114% increase in net worth while in office, according to a recent Ballotpedia study.  During the same period, the median U.S. household saw its inflation-adjusted net worth decline by nearly 1%.  That means that for every $1 of wealth the average American lost, Congress's top 100 gained $121.  Wow.  Today, at least 30% of senators are estimated to be worth more than $10 million, despite their taxpayer-funded base salary being just $174,000.  How is this possible?  One obvious explanation is that these politicians are privy to information that average Americans aren't, yet they are still permitted to own and trade international stocks.  The 2012 Stock Act, which requires member of Congress to report stock trades worth more than $1000 within a 45-day window, does nothing to curb legislators' trading.  You would hope that they would want to act in the interest of the country without the appearance of personal gain.  However, an investigation conducted by a consortium of news organizations that analyzed nearly 9,000 financial-disclosure reports identified 78 members of Congress who violated the Stock Act.  In a recent Gallup poll, 56% of those polled said that moral values in the US were poor, while 80% responded that such values were getting worse.  And yet, we continue to vote these people in...of both parties.

     And see if you find this slightly ominous:  Author Ece Temelkuran wrote in her earlier book, How to Lose A Country, what she termed "the machinations of a country's slide into fascism:" I laid out the logic of this new political agenda -- seven global patterns, repeated and recognizable in several cases from India to the US.  It begins with a movement that divides society into two: the 'real people' versus the 'corrupt elite', and with a leader who insists they alone embody the 'real' people.  The next step is the dissolution of truth and the prioritization of loyalty above decency.  Then shame is dismantled.  The leader breaks with the long-standing political and moral consensus with unprecedented relentlessness.  The longer they remain in power, the boundaries of what is acceptable begin to stretch.  What once felt unthinkable or despicable gradually becomes normal.  As the institutions that hold democracy together are quietly hollowed out and the very definition of democracy is rewritten as being simply majority rule, universal values --human dignity and the rule of law-- are replaced with a fierce nationalism, a proud victimhood, and a rewriting of history.  Cruelty and ruthlessness are deemed just, not only in the highest echelons of politics but also trickling down to daily life.  The circle of who counts as -us- grows smaller, while millions of fellow citizens are recast as permanent suspects.  People are forced to behave as the regime's model citizens unless they are brave enough to become the 'enemy of the people'.  Eventually, when power gathers in one person and institutions exist only as decoration, elections as ritual, what remains may look like democracy from a distance, but inside it has already rotted away.  In the end, you lose your country even if you are living in it.  A few years pass and she writes another book, Nation of Strangers, saying: There is a sense of mourning in the air.  It is thin still, but it is real.  It is as if we are mourning not for what we have already lost, but for what we know we eventually will.  For the first time in history, humanity is mourning in the future tense.  All that is beautiful has not vanished yet.  We still have things -- lemon trees, the Mediterranean shores in springtime, tipsy Sunday afternoons, a bit of the rule of law here and there, and many brave women who are still loud enough to become the nightmare of fascist leaders.  The joyous, wondrous and magical are still here.  But for a while now, it is as if a layer has been added to our retinas, an overlay of melancholy.  Our eyes already sense it; everything that is beautiful has its future loss imprinted on them.  Still, we work, we act, and we even resist.  But we know.  Our basic joy and faith in life have been worn out.  It is as if we all imitate our previous selves, which once felt at home in time and space.  A specific ache has taken over our times.

     My wife, who is quite empathetic to the world and animals, tells me often that she feels a dark cloud over our Earth and that people feel it.  They are anxious, they are struggling, they are more short-tempered.  And yet, it is up to each of us to provide those constant specks of kindness and brightness.  We shall overcome is a phrase full of more meaning than ever, for all people.  An article in The New Yorker asked this: We’re taught to believe that hard work insures a good outcome, even as the stepping stones to a secure life grow harder to find.  Where does one look for models if élites and powerful decision-makers seem to have ascended through nepotism or greed rather than through merit?  How can homework and grades possibly matter in the age of A.I.?  One student, reflecting on the relentless demand for productivity and output, wondered if the American Dream was delivery on demand or having the time to cook for yourself.  Earning a college degree or owning a home was once not just a status marker but an investment that promised material returns.  Today, people amass unmanageable debt simply to keep faith with a story that feels increasingly detached from their reality...The American Dream may not be making a comeback, but the argument about how to revive it certainly has.      

     Another piece in the New York Review wrote this about what it titled, the Dreams of Our Nation: “Our age is involved in irony because so many dreams of our nation have been so cruelly refuted by history,” wrote the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in 1952.  At that time, just seven years after the end of World War II, he and others were asking about the character of the nation that had risen to worldwide leadership.  Niebuhr believed that nations were made of their histories, contrived or factual, and that “every nation has its own form of spiritual pride...Our version is that our nation turned its back upon the vices of Europe and made a new beginning.”  Yet, he noted, “we are mystified by the endless complexities of human motives and the varied compounds of ethnic loyalties, cultural traditions, social hopes, envies and fears…which lie at the foundation of their political cohesion.”  A total war among nations had made the idea of a nation more pertinent than ever.  Many scholars no longer concentrate on such sweeping issues about nations or national identity.  Recent research has tended instead to approach the nation from this or that particular angle: gender and sexuality, colonialism, indigeneity, capitalism, incarceration, the environment, and, with renewed vigor, the long struggles over race and ethnicity.  These subjects—many of them now under attack by Trumpist censors—have greatly enriched our understanding of the United States.  But is there not still reason to study how Americans, from within their infinite chorus of difference and pluralism, have understood their nation as a whole?  If historians don’t, advocates of “patriotic” history will do that work for us.  So let's see, we shed "the vices if Europe" to make a new beginning.  But is what is happening here in the US the "new beginning" you wanted, or what you expected?  When traveling to other places or countries, it used to be that we Americans were welcome, or at least as welcome as any other tourists.  Not so much anymore.  It seems that now we are at best, tolerated, at least as long as we continue to spend money.  Telling a foreigner that you are from the US now means that you support Trump and all that he is doing, whether you do or don't.  Why would you vote for him, they ask?  I didn't, you say.  Why doesn't your Congress do something, they ask?  Or your courts?  And you can only give them back a look as puzzled as the one they are giving you.  Perhaps our shining star of both welcoming arms and high morals really are shrinking as quickly as our weapons supply and our dollar.  Empires fall, and our role as a looked-up-to superpower sure seems to be on shaky ground these days.  

       So I jumped back nearly 40 years to a "letter to the next generation" from the late Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek.  It was a series of advertisements sponsored  by Volkswagen as they featured "prominent figures in American culture [who] pass on their ideas and views to those who'll inherit the earth...100 years from now."  Said Roddenberry: For many living now, today is a time of fear and even despair.  Some believe that life has become too complex for us.  Or too artificial.  Or that this era's nuclear missiles, its waves of hysterical nationalism and quarreling superstitions, perhaps mean a violent end for the human creature, as soon as the close of our present century...If the future is not for the fainthearted, it is even more certainly not for the cowardly.  One of the saddest spectacles of our time is to watch the leaders of Earth's nations meeting together clumsily and embarrassedly exchanging slogans containing grains of friendship and understanding, yet fearful that this might constitute some awful blasphemy.  Those who insist theirs is the only correct government or economic system desere the same contempt as those who insist that they have the only true God.  As I began by saying, I am a television dramatist who lived many years before your time, and I realize that the human future will be infinitely more complex than anything I am able to imagine.  I hope, however, that by your time some small truths will be found in the rough sketch of tomorrow that I offer here.  If not, at least you may find this a pleasant and entertaining tale.

    That was nearly 40 years ago.  60 to go.  Looking ahead, where would you picture this nation in 60 years?  A shell of its former self, the second British empire to fall?  Or would our nation be nearly complete in its remake, another post-world war adjustment for the better: better laws, better safeguards, better internal defenses, better morals in politics?  Again, many of us realize that in the grand scheme of things, there is little that we can do individually other than to be kind and to continue to create sparks of light.  And many of you are doing just that, keeping your outlook and hopes on the brighter side, as difficult as it has become.  But I didn't want to have you finish in a downbeat mood; so in keeping with going back to happier times, a repeat of an old compilation that has managed to be seen by over 25 million people, a pre-1953 collection of movie stars and how they danced, and how we as viewers, enjoyed watching them dance.  Times may have been equally rough, or corrupt, or depressing, but movies (black & white for the most part) got us through and had us forgetting the problems "out there."  As Judy Garland told us: Forget your troubles, c'mon get happy...