Living through history

History is upon us.

Well, duh, obviously. History is the past, and every moment is history by the time the next moment arrives. But right now, this year, this time, this is history happening in the sense of "university courses will be taught about this time in history" the way courses are taught about The Great Depression or the Vietnam war or Japan's Taisho era.

I first took a university level American history course in 1987. It was a survey course, covering everything from colonial times through basically Watergate. The history I was living through in that present, the waning days of Reagan's term in office, was, unbeknownst to us all at the time as it almost always is unbeknownst in the moment, a pivotal era. The Reagan administration had begun a movement in U.S. politics and government that in many ways brought us to our current nightmare scenario. Reagan showed the conservative political machine that you can inflict gigantic levels of pain on the American public, but as long as you do it while telling them how wonderful life is, a large percentage of them will not only take the abuse but thank you for it and ask for more.

But the damage done in the 1980s was (comparatively) subtle. Slow-moving. Certain segments of the populace were hugely impacted in the short term, but in the aggregate things deteriorated over years. Even when that decline was temporarily arrested with Democratic governance, influence of the Reagan years persisted and prevented any real reversals (though Joe Biden did a valiant job in trying).

The damage occurring now is not subtle. It's careening along at breakneck speeds. This time, 2025, is such an obvious inflection point that we do know in the moment that we're witnessing, and participating in, critical history.

The current President of the United States has been in office just 43 days, and in that time he has:

• Abdicated the United States' status as leader of the free world;
• Effectively abandoned 80-year-old international alliances;
• Eliminated countless humanitarian and soft-power functions of the U.S. government;
• Engaged in an almost wholly lawless decimation of the federal workforce, crippling important agencies at all levels including the IRS, NOAA, Air Traffic Control, NIH, CDC, FDA, and is threatening to cripple USPS;
• Given an unelected, unvetted, corrupt billionaire access to every American's personal information;
• Assembled a Cabinet of fools, traitors, neo-Nazis, rapists, and idiotic cosplayers that appear to have been put in place to sabotage their departments and ensure no attempt to invoke the 25th Amendment would succeed;
• Begun tanking the domestic economy;
• Begun selling off/opening for destruction our national forests and public lands

And that's just off the top of my head.

Then last night he went on national television to tell the American public that he was some sort of messiah while spewing a breathtaking number of lies and droning on incoherently for 99 minutes.

After that debacle of a speech last night, Congress would have convened an emergency session this morning and removed this man from office today by overwhelming votes to impeach and convict if we lived in a sane and healthy America. Instead, we live in this time of utter corruption and stochastic terrorism and blackmail and stupidity, and when we come out on the other side—for those of us who do, because not everyone will—it's anyone's guess what the world will look like.

Some people, it seems, are beginning to see the light. Some of the dupes who voted Republican last November are regretting it. Pushback from constituents to Congresspeople has been largely on the side of righteous outrage. But the people who could stop this madness right now are not listening. Party leadership has told Republicans in Congress to stop holding town halls and meeting with constituents. That's their solution—just don't listen to them.

A not-insignificant portion of the Republican caucus is batshit crazy and/or cruel misanthropes and therefore unreachable—your MTGs and Boeberts and Jordans and Holy Mike Johnsons and that-other-John-Kennedys—but others are reachable. Some via appeals to their self-interest; the corrupt always look out for themselves. Others know they're on the wrong side but stay there out of fear. Fear of the mob, fear of the unofficial militia of pardoned insurrectionists, fear of the weaponized Justice department, fear of Presidentially sanctioned thuggery.

I have no doubt that among the boxes of documents POTUS45 stole when he left office and that as POTUS47 he has again taken to his home in Florida are records and FBI files and such on Senators and members of Congress. I have no doubt that he is using mob tactics to pressure Senators to confirm his nominees, to threaten Congressmen, to do whatever he can to put the metaphorical boot on the neck of anyone he thinks he has leverage over. It's these people that are going to have to wake up to the big-picture reality that their cowardice is enabling the Fall of America. That their willingness to be terrorized means they are traitors to the nation.

Because they are. Right now the President of the United States is a Russian operative, whether he is fully cognizant of it or not (that's a 50/50 bet, I think). He is also so staggeringly corrupt that he has no problem bankrupting the country for his personal gain and the gain of his donors and "friends." He is also, without question, the dumbest person to ever run for that office (and I include Jill Stein and Joe Exotic in the list) and contemptuous of the Constitution itself. Yet instead of doing their duty as elected officials and just representatives of humanity, those Republicans in Congress are instead huddled in a corner begging "please don't hurt me." Putting whatever personal scandals or threats to their bodily safety above the lives of countless people all over the world who are already dying due to this president's actions and will continue to as war in Europe rolls on and poverty rises at home and thuggery of all sorts gets a free pass.

This is a pivotal year.

If we can, while political forces still matter, convince the cowards and malleable part of the Republican caucus to do their jobs; if we can, while law-enforcement remains at least tacitly an instrument of public protection, bring the atrocities being committed by this administration to the notice of the apolitical checked-out masses; if we can, while courts remain faithful to the Constitution and the rule of law, arrest the runaway train of treason out of the Oval Office ... then we mark 2025 as a turning point that begins reforms to strengthen democracy and civil rights and free society and protect against the future elevation of tyrants. If we don't ... then we have years of steady descent into catastrophe and possibly that war Captain Pike told us about.

We're living through history.

The Trump Voter's Lament, from the band Talking Heads

And you may ask yourself / What is that beautiful house?
And you may ask yourself / Where does that highway go to?
And you may ask yourself / Am I right?...Am I wrong?
And you may say to yourself / My God!...What have I done?!