Excellent piece and the final paragraphs are the behavioral diagnosis the strategic post-mortem requires: wars of whimsy are a symptom of tyranny, not an aberration within it.
The Iran catastrophe wasn’t a miscalculation by otherwise competent actors. It was what happens when power concentrates enough that one person’s pleasure can become a nation’s foreign policy, and one person’s convenience (gas prices, poll numbers, personal comfort) can end it.
The ruthlessness was the point, and the losing was the consequence.
The structural fix is right. But it requires first admitting that the structure, not the personality, is the disease.
I always appreciate how, at every moment, you remind readers that this current horror show is structural, systematic and embedded in the dna of the usa —a nation “exceptional,” decidedly NOT because of its citizenry, but only because of its power and the grotesque corruption of it (throughout its history).
I think the violence is in the DNA. Westward Ho (never mind American Indians). Enslavement. We've just traded that for today's ICE. Immigrants are the slaves of today. That's who we want to vent our cruelty on, in the name of righteousness. Just look at the rhetoric of the ugliest Americans on "open borders." And so ironic, given that the most dangerous period of open borders was under Reagan and Bush. At the fall of the Soviet Union they allow, practically invited, the Russian mafia into our borders, and their control of Trump (and God knows who else!) is the danger they've been projecting on animals invading us. Everybody's against gangs, homegrown or snuck across Texas. That's not a license for the cruelty of ICE. And the language that they're "straining our resources" is only more genteel, not ethical. The amount of wealth being trickled up belies that argument.
The Trump regime regime virtually guaranteed a strategic loss when Trump (the world's worst stategist) surrounded himself with yesmen and sycophants; fired the knowledgeable stategists; fired the experienced State Department negotiators; came to believe his own propaganda about the US military and expected Iran to collapse like a house of cards. This is a "senseless" strategic defeat of epic proportions!
as usual, Tim Snyder is right and eloquent. There used to be a maxim about having to choose between knaves and fools. With Trump and his enablers, most egregiously in Congress and the courts, we have a devastating package-deal. Maybe the only good thing to come out of the Iran debacle is that the deal will begin to unravel
Disagreeing with Joe Hill's recommendation-dont mourn, organize--i have been arguing that a period of mourning for the country many of us thought we had is exactly what to do. Grief doesn't sap resistance, it grounds and fuels it. In a more compassionate, clear-eyed way. We need that.
Yes! I've been thinking this exact thing since COVID “ended.” When we “don’t mourn,” we allow it to fester and grow toxic. The collective trauma of disability, death, and loss of income went completely unaddressed, and then just segued into the current debacle. Everyone is carrying a big load of grief and unresolved trauma. Some religious entities are holding gatherings focused on “lament and looking ahead.”
Thanks for articulating my vague thoughts about this, Hank!
Appreciate this, Susan. Agree re COVID. As a psychologist, I distinguish between grief and trauma, related as they often are. But the big point is the same. A part of us has "grown accustomed" to mass death, some version of "sucking it up" (and in), and "moving on." In the midst of atrocity--I've been a Holocaust and genocide scholar most of my life--grief is impossible for most people. What we call "resilience" depends on a degree of emotional numbness. But when the after comes, it matters. I've been "hanging out" with survivors since the 1970s.
Interested in what you write about the groups you mention. I assume not appropriate to include contact stuff here, but my email is easy to find online. Would be glad to learn more particulars. Thanks, H
Thanks, Hank. We have had our period of mourning . If people aren’t grounded and fueled for the November voting, that will be like no other, we’d better get that way and SOON!
Well written and well stated. America needs a reconstruction of our Republic. Simple restoration is no longer feasible. First, we need to find a way to reunite our divided people. To respect our differences. And to recognize that we all are Americans and we all have a common interest in preserving democracy and the rule of just law.
Agree - reconstruction not restoration. The reconstruction requires fixing the weak and corrupt legal system by (1) enforcing the law against criminal insurrectionists who are Trump, members of his administration, Republicans in Congress and six justices on the Supreme Court and (2) solving the affordability of housing, food, energy, healthcare with totally new federal government programs with funding created by a wealth tax and much higher income taxes on the wealthy and corporations and (3) totally new legislature ending Citizens United, limitations on protecting voting rights and civil rights and ending qualified immunity for officials in state and local governments.
"...solving the affordability of housing, food, energy, healthcare with totally new federal government programs..."- yes! Things that all Americans want/need can bring us together.
Like your "need to find a way to reunite our divided people," Wayne.
Dems need to campaign in red state areas. Need to speak to the tens of millions of working-class Americans whose communities got devastated by our financial elite's offshoring of jobs.
Thanks to schools which dehumanized (by dark money and far-right design), I know Dems have no resources to draw on to see either the etiology of these damages or their human extent. So here's a short list of resources Dems could draw on (yes, I know there're many more, especially in the fields of film and song):
Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America”; Arlie Russell Hochschild’s “Stolen Pride,” Jane Mayer’s “Dark Money,” George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison's "The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism," George Packer’s “The Unwinding,” Diane Ravitch’s “The Language Police,” Sarah Smarsh’s “Bone of the Bone,” Matt Stoller’s “Goliath: The Hundred-year War between Monopoly Power and Democracy,” and Sheldon Whitehouse’s “The Scheme.”
Re reconstruction, I learn that not quite half of regimes that follow autocratic regimes are themselves not autocratic, and this is when change is by nonviolent means. For violent change, only about 5% are less autocratic. Clear enough what suggests....
You can lay a good part of this situation at the feet of the Federalist Society who manage to protect all things MAGA, at the feet of Citizens United ( but I repeat myself) that has enabled the purchase of politicians motivated solely by money and power, and by the GOP who, drunk on money and power, only want more.
Bush, Goldwater, Eisenhower are rolling in their graves.
I often wonder how the various members of the Federalist Society truly think about what they have wrought in the Trump Administration and its Court. It is one thing to feel aggrieved by liberality and by a society that changes and adjusts as it grows; it is quite another to embrace manifest ignorance, revenge, and the undermining of the promise and the contract--the very lynchpins of our way of life. I suppose this is what happens when resentment breeds policy.
You hit the nail on the head. To FEEL aggrieved, rather than to actually BE oppressed! Chinese philosophy WARNS about this state! It leads to misfortune, if you put any stock in Confucius, I Ching, long term political thinking that's foreign to us. Quarterly profits is the perfect metaphor for our GRASSHOPPER mentality. Trump is our GRASSHOPPER in Chief, with an ugly spectacle of a cage match on the White House lawn and a sophomoric insult, Michelle is a MAN, and steroid juiced Joe Rogan chuckling?
An aside: I've been reading and listening to various books and treatises hoping to come to understand the nature and meaning and power of Us vs.Them conflict that the far-right has so skillfully wielded to their political purpose. I recommend neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky's 2017 tome "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst." An eye opening experience. (btw, I suggest the audiobook as a starter.).
Well...I think they see this as a catharsis moment. You have to break things and move too rapidly for the rest of the country and then you can reassemble your Gilead at your leisure.
How they "truly think," Wolfsdread, depends on imaginative capacity to see human pain.
America still has the arts for all to see what our moneyed classes did to the country, but the first campaigns undertaken by the far-right foundations following the 1971 Powell memo rid the schools of humanities, precisely so Americans would be blind, anesthetized to the schemes thence unrolling to grow the rich their wealth gap.
I keep thinking of Shelley’s Ozymandias. To be sure, Ramses II was far more competent leader than Trump could ever have been, but one cannot avoid the similarities of all the names buildings, and statuary, nor the image of the lone and level sands stretching far away.
But I also recall Thomas Heggens’ little gem of a novel, Mister Roberts, a minor masterpiece about a US naval auxiliary supply ship plying the South Pacific during the latter days of WWII. (The movie, starring Henry Fonda was, of necessity, only a pale imitation of the real thing) At one point Heggen defines a true leader as one who never looks behind him to see who is following. He is a leader simply because he is going in the right direction and others see and understand that and try to follow as best they can. It is a concept of which Trump is wholly ignorant.
Trump is a terribly damaged and morally impoverished old man, elevated to the Presidency by the tens of millions of Americans who bought into his con, that he actually gave a damn about the country he continually claims to love and to understand or indeed about any of them. He is. like any demagogue, only a projection of their manifold gripes and grievances, their dissatisfaction with their lot in life.
So it is no surprise that as a war leader, he is utterly incompletely incompetent. The real problem is that in a war, incompetent leadership gets people needlessly injured or killed. It gets material structure destroyed. It invariably alters the trajectory of those involved without a compensatory upside. So here we are.
Except for near the end where you summarize the relationship between America's tens of millions of working-class souls and criminal Donald s "only a projection of their manifold gripes and grievances."
May well include here also the complicating factor of how Dems got so totally blind and anesthetized as to their need for him. When U.S. schools dehumanized (1970's, following the Powell memo), Dems lost touch with all the humanities that nevertheless did keep in touch with the vast human pain abroad the land.
Thank you for this. I hope that this catastrophe marks the beginning of the end of the reprobates who brought us to this most dismal point in the history of our nation.
This is a fabulous essay. It’s on par with “The American Abyss” which now seems written so long ago. It is a measure of how far the US has fallen through bad leadership and our own decisions. And it also offers a way out, if we choose it. And it will take time and be hard.
This piece really makes it clear to me. Thanks for the always-outstanding analyses of the latest evil and hapless blundering by the gang of useless thugs bumbling along in their own little billionaire world of greed and corruption and utter ignorance.
BTW Is the word meant to be "flouting" the laws?)
It seems to me that our entire world is Enabling this toxic incompetent man. WHY? In situations where only a few people are involved, the person doing harm is stopped. Why are we acting together to pretend this horror show is normal. Is there no way to act together to stop this dangerously unbalanced, vindictive, incompetent person, to restrain him to a place where he cannot continue to do immeasurable harm, at home and all over the world?
We seem to accept it is OK to drop deadly bombs on apartment buildings full of families who have done nothing wrong, and to shoot fishermen in their boats earning their living, and accidentally blow up hundreds of little kids in their schools. But our scruples appear to be much too exalted for us to STOP this menace of a lawless man who is flailing around destroying everything he touches. What is the ( !! ) matter with us?
Thanks for all these good ideas. Phil Balla.. I also think schools need to be re-thought. And public ("free") schools need to be greatly strengthened, and charter schools stopped or minimized greatly, and not be allowed to siphon off money from the education every kid can have equally. I think testing can distort learning a lot. Do you?
Acquire the humane habits Michelle, Barack, and Zohran yesterday called on.
In comments here, Kate, in discussion anywhere, cite others more widely, both actual people (such as other commenters here) and those characters apt as they appear in novels, memoirs, histories, biographies, essay collections, films, and songs.
Thank you, Dr. Snyder. For what’s worth, I really enjoy reading your thinking. This is a strong piece…the framing is sharp; the rhythm works and your tight prose carries real emotional weight. You bring to light the abject incompetency of our current administration; it’s clean and hits hard. You nailed the losing atmosphere of the Iran war.
"Incompetent" is The Bloated Yam's middle name. At the ripe old age of 85, I have discovered that I'm a huge fan of algae and the panels of blue paint that have become unmoored in the Reflecting Pool. Iran and the Reflecting Pool drama = a calamitous 250th anniversary.
I remember back to the lead up to the Bicentennial in DC-how enthusiastic and happy everyone seemed to be about it. Quite a difference 50 years makes. The far Right has really piddled in the pool.
The biggest disaster in our history (Vietnam comes second) but perfectly predictable. I have been saying for years as a lawyer that he has no idea how to negotiate. It’s a myth. He gives away points needlessly, without getting in return. I blame that stupid book for creating this myth. In addition, to have those two fools negotiate with Iran (who are pros at this) is mind boggling. They may be good at real estate but this ain’t real estate. They’re deal makers, not negotiators. The saying by PT Barnum comes to mind with these fools.
Vietnam was a great and bloody mess. It was a great disaster.
This current mess is simply the humiliating culmination of our nation's collective folly in allowing laws and norms to be so corrupted by lust for power that we elected a criminal and gave him free rein to destroy every institutional limit erected as safeguard against tyranny.
Fuck Trump and the herds of sycophantic Republican politicians, Supreme Court Justices and the rest of the awful crowd of moralizing morons who put him in power.
Wow, really great and incisive stuff as usual! In the part of about the concentration of different types of power leading up to the war perhaps we might add the concentration of power in the control of energy. Renewables, as well as the often overlooked energy sources- conservation- tend by their nature to much more decentralized and democratic than the fossil fuel based energy forms that are making our planet increasingly less livable. These posts are truly a great resource.
New growth will follow this devastation and it will reflect the dominant value system. Apologies for mixing metaphors but, if we don’t start feeding the other wolf, I fear that life in our nation will become the matrix’s blue pill.
Excellent piece and the final paragraphs are the behavioral diagnosis the strategic post-mortem requires: wars of whimsy are a symptom of tyranny, not an aberration within it.
The Iran catastrophe wasn’t a miscalculation by otherwise competent actors. It was what happens when power concentrates enough that one person’s pleasure can become a nation’s foreign policy, and one person’s convenience (gas prices, poll numbers, personal comfort) can end it.
The ruthlessness was the point, and the losing was the consequence.
The structural fix is right. But it requires first admitting that the structure, not the personality, is the disease.
The personality just made it visible.
Thank you for this,
Johan
⚖️ The Lantern's Light on the Roster
The source code was open, the secret is out,
A roster of names we should worry about.
The Dialog network was built out of sight,
But hackers have brought all the shadows to light. 🔦
With Peter Thiel funding the secretive plan,
And Auren Hoffman to gather the clan.
They carefully curated a billionaire crew,
To privately alter the world that we knew. 🌐
The leak shows the leaders who govern the land,
With Scott Bessent holding the Treasury's hand.
And Dan Driscoll leading the Army's great might,
All mingling with oligarchs, hidden from sight. 🏛️
We see Cory Booker and also Ted Cruz,
With powerful governors sharing the news.
Both Wes Moore and Polis were found on the sheet,
Invited to join this exclusive retreat. 📜
The titans of money and tech took a chair,
With Elon and Schmidt breathing rarefied air.
With Kushner and Lonsdale, they gather around,
Where rules for the public are nowhere to be found. 💻
With Brockman from AI and Zilis right there,
And Larry and Robert with Treasury flair.
The crypto elites like a Silbert are seen,
All feeding the gears of the power machine. ⚙️
But look at the name that should give us a chill,
The man who has molded the courts to his will.
Yes, Leonard Leo is there in the room,
Designing a future that feels like a tomb. ⚖️
When men of great wealth meet completely unseen,
They threaten the health of our voting routine.
So keep the light steady and watch what they do,
To protect equal justice for me and for you. 🗽
We are the Pro-Democracy Comment-Chain Crew, using our comments to boost pro-democracy leaders and indie media so the truth can grow! ✨🇺🇸🗳️⚖️🕯️
Wow! This is excellent. Thank you for the deep dive and sharing it! May our superpowers kick in, unite and save us all.
👏👏👏👏👏 hear hear!
Johan,
I always appreciate how, at every moment, you remind readers that this current horror show is structural, systematic and embedded in the dna of the usa —a nation “exceptional,” decidedly NOT because of its citizenry, but only because of its power and the grotesque corruption of it (throughout its history).
I think the violence is in the DNA. Westward Ho (never mind American Indians). Enslavement. We've just traded that for today's ICE. Immigrants are the slaves of today. That's who we want to vent our cruelty on, in the name of righteousness. Just look at the rhetoric of the ugliest Americans on "open borders." And so ironic, given that the most dangerous period of open borders was under Reagan and Bush. At the fall of the Soviet Union they allow, practically invited, the Russian mafia into our borders, and their control of Trump (and God knows who else!) is the danger they've been projecting on animals invading us. Everybody's against gangs, homegrown or snuck across Texas. That's not a license for the cruelty of ICE. And the language that they're "straining our resources" is only more genteel, not ethical. The amount of wealth being trickled up belies that argument.
The Trump regime regime virtually guaranteed a strategic loss when Trump (the world's worst stategist) surrounded himself with yesmen and sycophants; fired the knowledgeable stategists; fired the experienced State Department negotiators; came to believe his own propaganda about the US military and expected Iran to collapse like a house of cards. This is a "senseless" strategic defeat of epic proportions!
as usual, Tim Snyder is right and eloquent. There used to be a maxim about having to choose between knaves and fools. With Trump and his enablers, most egregiously in Congress and the courts, we have a devastating package-deal. Maybe the only good thing to come out of the Iran debacle is that the deal will begin to unravel
Disagreeing with Joe Hill's recommendation-dont mourn, organize--i have been arguing that a period of mourning for the country many of us thought we had is exactly what to do. Grief doesn't sap resistance, it grounds and fuels it. In a more compassionate, clear-eyed way. We need that.
Yes! I've been thinking this exact thing since COVID “ended.” When we “don’t mourn,” we allow it to fester and grow toxic. The collective trauma of disability, death, and loss of income went completely unaddressed, and then just segued into the current debacle. Everyone is carrying a big load of grief and unresolved trauma. Some religious entities are holding gatherings focused on “lament and looking ahead.”
Thanks for articulating my vague thoughts about this, Hank!
Appreciate this, Susan. Agree re COVID. As a psychologist, I distinguish between grief and trauma, related as they often are. But the big point is the same. A part of us has "grown accustomed" to mass death, some version of "sucking it up" (and in), and "moving on." In the midst of atrocity--I've been a Holocaust and genocide scholar most of my life--grief is impossible for most people. What we call "resilience" depends on a degree of emotional numbness. But when the after comes, it matters. I've been "hanging out" with survivors since the 1970s.
Interested in what you write about the groups you mention. I assume not appropriate to include contact stuff here, but my email is easy to find online. Would be glad to learn more particulars. Thanks, H
". . . allow it to fester and grow toxic," Susan, is also called normalization.
Thanks, Hank. We have had our period of mourning . If people aren’t grounded and fueled for the November voting, that will be like no other, we’d better get that way and SOON!
I'm suggesting grief is a lot of what makes us ready, grounded, and fueled. As opposed to fist in air without feet on ground.
Well written and well stated. America needs a reconstruction of our Republic. Simple restoration is no longer feasible. First, we need to find a way to reunite our divided people. To respect our differences. And to recognize that we all are Americans and we all have a common interest in preserving democracy and the rule of just law.
Agree - reconstruction not restoration. The reconstruction requires fixing the weak and corrupt legal system by (1) enforcing the law against criminal insurrectionists who are Trump, members of his administration, Republicans in Congress and six justices on the Supreme Court and (2) solving the affordability of housing, food, energy, healthcare with totally new federal government programs with funding created by a wealth tax and much higher income taxes on the wealthy and corporations and (3) totally new legislature ending Citizens United, limitations on protecting voting rights and civil rights and ending qualified immunity for officials in state and local governments.
"...solving the affordability of housing, food, energy, healthcare with totally new federal government programs..."- yes! Things that all Americans want/need can bring us together.
Like your "need to find a way to reunite our divided people," Wayne.
Dems need to campaign in red state areas. Need to speak to the tens of millions of working-class Americans whose communities got devastated by our financial elite's offshoring of jobs.
Thanks to schools which dehumanized (by dark money and far-right design), I know Dems have no resources to draw on to see either the etiology of these damages or their human extent. So here's a short list of resources Dems could draw on (yes, I know there're many more, especially in the fields of film and song):
Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America”; Arlie Russell Hochschild’s “Stolen Pride,” Jane Mayer’s “Dark Money,” George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison's "The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism," George Packer’s “The Unwinding,” Diane Ravitch’s “The Language Police,” Sarah Smarsh’s “Bone of the Bone,” Matt Stoller’s “Goliath: The Hundred-year War between Monopoly Power and Democracy,” and Sheldon Whitehouse’s “The Scheme.”
Re reconstruction, I learn that not quite half of regimes that follow autocratic regimes are themselves not autocratic, and this is when change is by nonviolent means. For violent change, only about 5% are less autocratic. Clear enough what suggests....
You can lay a good part of this situation at the feet of the Federalist Society who manage to protect all things MAGA, at the feet of Citizens United ( but I repeat myself) that has enabled the purchase of politicians motivated solely by money and power, and by the GOP who, drunk on money and power, only want more.
Bush, Goldwater, Eisenhower are rolling in their graves.
I often wonder how the various members of the Federalist Society truly think about what they have wrought in the Trump Administration and its Court. It is one thing to feel aggrieved by liberality and by a society that changes and adjusts as it grows; it is quite another to embrace manifest ignorance, revenge, and the undermining of the promise and the contract--the very lynchpins of our way of life. I suppose this is what happens when resentment breeds policy.
You hit the nail on the head. To FEEL aggrieved, rather than to actually BE oppressed! Chinese philosophy WARNS about this state! It leads to misfortune, if you put any stock in Confucius, I Ching, long term political thinking that's foreign to us. Quarterly profits is the perfect metaphor for our GRASSHOPPER mentality. Trump is our GRASSHOPPER in Chief, with an ugly spectacle of a cage match on the White House lawn and a sophomoric insult, Michelle is a MAN, and steroid juiced Joe Rogan chuckling?
An aside: I've been reading and listening to various books and treatises hoping to come to understand the nature and meaning and power of Us vs.Them conflict that the far-right has so skillfully wielded to their political purpose. I recommend neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky's 2017 tome "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst." An eye opening experience. (btw, I suggest the audiobook as a starter.).
Also, Wolfsdread, as you seem to like perspectives from science:
Robert H. Lustig's "The Hacking of the American Mind: The Science Behind the Corporate Takeover of Our Bodies and Brains" (2017).
Well...I think they see this as a catharsis moment. You have to break things and move too rapidly for the rest of the country and then you can reassemble your Gilead at your leisure.
I assume that what they tell themselves; just wait until their dogs turn on them.
How they "truly think," Wolfsdread, depends on imaginative capacity to see human pain.
America still has the arts for all to see what our moneyed classes did to the country, but the first campaigns undertaken by the far-right foundations following the 1971 Powell memo rid the schools of humanities, precisely so Americans would be blind, anesthetized to the schemes thence unrolling to grow the rich their wealth gap.
I keep thinking of Shelley’s Ozymandias. To be sure, Ramses II was far more competent leader than Trump could ever have been, but one cannot avoid the similarities of all the names buildings, and statuary, nor the image of the lone and level sands stretching far away.
But I also recall Thomas Heggens’ little gem of a novel, Mister Roberts, a minor masterpiece about a US naval auxiliary supply ship plying the South Pacific during the latter days of WWII. (The movie, starring Henry Fonda was, of necessity, only a pale imitation of the real thing) At one point Heggen defines a true leader as one who never looks behind him to see who is following. He is a leader simply because he is going in the right direction and others see and understand that and try to follow as best they can. It is a concept of which Trump is wholly ignorant.
Trump is a terribly damaged and morally impoverished old man, elevated to the Presidency by the tens of millions of Americans who bought into his con, that he actually gave a damn about the country he continually claims to love and to understand or indeed about any of them. He is. like any demagogue, only a projection of their manifold gripes and grievances, their dissatisfaction with their lot in life.
So it is no surprise that as a war leader, he is utterly incompletely incompetent. The real problem is that in a war, incompetent leadership gets people needlessly injured or killed. It gets material structure destroyed. It invariably alters the trajectory of those involved without a compensatory upside. So here we are.
Love all you so well say here, James.
Except for near the end where you summarize the relationship between America's tens of millions of working-class souls and criminal Donald s "only a projection of their manifold gripes and grievances."
May well include here also the complicating factor of how Dems got so totally blind and anesthetized as to their need for him. When U.S. schools dehumanized (1970's, following the Powell memo), Dems lost touch with all the humanities that nevertheless did keep in touch with the vast human pain abroad the land.
Thank you for this. I hope that this catastrophe marks the beginning of the end of the reprobates who brought us to this most dismal point in the history of our nation.
Eloquent! Thank you, Timothy Snyder!!
This is a fabulous essay. It’s on par with “The American Abyss” which now seems written so long ago. It is a measure of how far the US has fallen through bad leadership and our own decisions. And it also offers a way out, if we choose it. And it will take time and be hard.
This piece really makes it clear to me. Thanks for the always-outstanding analyses of the latest evil and hapless blundering by the gang of useless thugs bumbling along in their own little billionaire world of greed and corruption and utter ignorance.
BTW Is the word meant to be "flouting" the laws?)
It seems to me that our entire world is Enabling this toxic incompetent man. WHY? In situations where only a few people are involved, the person doing harm is stopped. Why are we acting together to pretend this horror show is normal. Is there no way to act together to stop this dangerously unbalanced, vindictive, incompetent person, to restrain him to a place where he cannot continue to do immeasurable harm, at home and all over the world?
We seem to accept it is OK to drop deadly bombs on apartment buildings full of families who have done nothing wrong, and to shoot fishermen in their boats earning their living, and accidentally blow up hundreds of little kids in their schools. But our scruples appear to be much too exalted for us to STOP this menace of a lawless man who is flailing around destroying everything he touches. What is the ( !! ) matter with us?
What is the matter with us? We simply cannot bring ourselves to face the answer to that question.
Why? Because nobody wants to face the answer.
1) Return humanities to schools, Ed.
2) Essay writing so youth begin to learn to see others as individuals in their complicated contexts. Essay writing that may also cite humanities.
3) Get the standardized testers out of the schools.
Thanks for all these good ideas. Phil Balla.. I also think schools need to be re-thought. And public ("free") schools need to be greatly strengthened, and charter schools stopped or minimized greatly, and not be allowed to siphon off money from the education every kid can have equally. I think testing can distort learning a lot. Do you?
Terrific point. Next question: Do you see any way ahead that will be possible for decent people to enact?
Acquire the humane habits Michelle, Barack, and Zohran yesterday called on.
In comments here, Kate, in discussion anywhere, cite others more widely, both actual people (such as other commenters here) and those characters apt as they appear in novels, memoirs, histories, biographies, essay collections, films, and songs.
Good. Thinking about what you say here. Thanks
Thank you, Dr. Snyder. For what’s worth, I really enjoy reading your thinking. This is a strong piece…the framing is sharp; the rhythm works and your tight prose carries real emotional weight. You bring to light the abject incompetency of our current administration; it’s clean and hits hard. You nailed the losing atmosphere of the Iran war.
Well said!
⚖️ The Lantern's Light on the Roster
The source code was open, the secret is out,
A roster of names we should worry about.
The Dialog network was built out of sight,
But hackers have brought all the shadows to light. 🔦
With Peter Thiel funding the secretive plan,
And Auren Hoffman to gather the clan.
They carefully curated a billionaire crew,
To privately alter the world that we knew. 🌐
The leak shows the leaders who govern the land,
With Scott Bessent holding the Treasury's hand.
And Dan Driscoll leading the Army's great might,
All mingling with oligarchs, hidden from sight. 🏛️
We see Cory Booker and also Ted Cruz,
With powerful governors sharing the news.
Both Wes Moore and Polis were found on the sheet,
Invited to join this exclusive retreat. 📜
The titans of money and tech took a chair,
With Elon and Schmidt breathing rarefied air.
With Kushner and Lonsdale, they gather around,
Where rules for the public are nowhere to be found. 💻
With Brockman from AI and Zilis right there,
And Larry and Robert with Treasury flair.
The crypto elites like a Silbert are seen,
All feeding the gears of the power machine. ⚙️
But look at the name that should give us a chill,
The man who has molded the courts to his will.
Yes, Leonard Leo is there in the room,
Designing a future that feels like a tomb. ⚖️
When men of great wealth meet completely unseen,
They threaten the health of our voting routine.
So keep the light steady and watch what they do,
To protect equal justice for me and for you. 🗽
We are the Pro-Democracy Comment-Chain Crew, using our comments to boost pro-democracy leaders and indie media so the truth can grow! ✨🇺🇸🗳️⚖️🕯️
"Incompetent" is The Bloated Yam's middle name. At the ripe old age of 85, I have discovered that I'm a huge fan of algae and the panels of blue paint that have become unmoored in the Reflecting Pool. Iran and the Reflecting Pool drama = a calamitous 250th anniversary.
I remember back to the lead up to the Bicentennial in DC-how enthusiastic and happy everyone seemed to be about it. Quite a difference 50 years makes. The far Right has really piddled in the pool.
The biggest disaster in our history (Vietnam comes second) but perfectly predictable. I have been saying for years as a lawyer that he has no idea how to negotiate. It’s a myth. He gives away points needlessly, without getting in return. I blame that stupid book for creating this myth. In addition, to have those two fools negotiate with Iran (who are pros at this) is mind boggling. They may be good at real estate but this ain’t real estate. They’re deal makers, not negotiators. The saying by PT Barnum comes to mind with these fools.
Vietnam was a great and bloody mess. It was a great disaster.
This current mess is simply the humiliating culmination of our nation's collective folly in allowing laws and norms to be so corrupted by lust for power that we elected a criminal and gave him free rein to destroy every institutional limit erected as safeguard against tyranny.
Fuck Trump and the herds of sycophantic Republican politicians, Supreme Court Justices and the rest of the awful crowd of moralizing morons who put him in power.
God save the Republic.
They’re not even good at real estate, Kushner had to be bailed out from his expensive unpopular deal by Saudi bribes.
Wow, really great and incisive stuff as usual! In the part of about the concentration of different types of power leading up to the war perhaps we might add the concentration of power in the control of energy. Renewables, as well as the often overlooked energy sources- conservation- tend by their nature to much more decentralized and democratic than the fossil fuel based energy forms that are making our planet increasingly less livable. These posts are truly a great resource.
New growth will follow this devastation and it will reflect the dominant value system. Apologies for mixing metaphors but, if we don’t start feeding the other wolf, I fear that life in our nation will become the matrix’s blue pill.
⚖️ The Lantern's Light on the Roster
The source code was open, the secret is out,
A roster of names we should worry about.
The Dialog network was built out of sight,
But hackers have brought all the shadows to light. 🔦
With Peter Thiel funding the secretive plan,
And Auren Hoffman to gather the clan.
They carefully curated a billionaire crew,
To privately alter the world that we knew. 🌐
The leak shows the leaders who govern the land,
With Scott Bessent holding the Treasury's hand.
And Dan Driscoll leading the Army's great might,
All mingling with oligarchs, hidden from sight. 🏛️
We see Cory Booker and also Ted Cruz,
With powerful governors sharing the news.
Both Wes Moore and Polis were found on the sheet,
Invited to join this exclusive retreat. 📜
The titans of money and tech took a chair,
With Elon and Schmidt breathing rarefied air.
With Kushner and Lonsdale, they gather around,
Where rules for the public are nowhere to be found. 💻
With Brockman from AI and Zilis right there,
And Larry and Robert with Treasury flair.
The crypto elites like a Silbert are seen,
All feeding the gears of the power machine. ⚙️
But look at the name that should give us a chill,
The man who has molded the courts to his will.
Yes, Leonard Leo is there in the room,
Designing a future that feels like a tomb. ⚖️
When men of great wealth meet completely unseen,
They threaten the health of our voting routine.
So keep the light steady and watch what they do,
To protect equal justice for me and for you. 🗽
We are the Pro-Democracy Comment-Chain Crew, using our comments to boost pro-democracy leaders and indie media so the truth can grow! ✨🇺🇸🗳️⚖️🕯️