LINK MADNESS

Eric Tegethoff
Aug 24, 2017 · 4 min read
Artist artist Carlos Colombino’s “restructuring” of a statue of Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner (1954–89).

A few dead men control our fate. That’s what it seems like. I wonder how much agita the Founding Fathers felt when they imagined the world five, ten years into the future. I’ve been struck by the blanks I draw when trying to imagine our future even by 2020, the year of perfect vision. Will memorial holograms of former Uber-CEO-turned-Trump-Morality-advisor Travis Kalanick even still exist? Will white male college acceptance rates return to their historical peak of 100%? Will families be equipped with trademark Trump life rings in the event that the climate change hoax tries to drown us from shore to shore? Well, three years from now, chances are losers like that guy who was 3 million votes short but still gets to occupy the White House and the Sons and Daughters of Confederate Amnesia will still be framing history for us. But I have faith that one day, inside our crumbling elementary schools, we’ll tear the history books from their hands and remove the gloss they’ve put on everything that doesn’t ring of American exceptionalism. Somewhere long down that road.

The President reminded us last week that it wasn’t just the Confederates who cruelly enslaved people. Some of our Founding Fathers did too. Annette Gordon-Reed is a Thomas Jefferson historian. In the New York Review of Books, she wrote about her reaction to the protests in Charlottesville. “I knew instantly why the men holding tiki torches felt the need to make their case for white supremacy by walking toward the statue of Jefferson that stands in front of the Rotunda he designed for the university he dreamed about and then founded. I also knew instantly that there was a reason the much less remarked upon ‘counterprotesters’ surrounded Jefferson’s statue to keep the tiki torchers from reaching it, staking a defiant claim, in the face of superior numbers, to ideas about human equality and progress that they correctly perceived were under siege that night.”

There’s also Mr. Founder himself, George Washington, the man who never looks happy to see us even though he is all over our money. One of Washington’s heirs writes about our first president and slavery, said to have haunted him, although that would have been little consolation to the enslaved.

Although I wanted so for the president to call the killing of a woman in Charlottesville an act of terrorism, it doesn’t do much good. From In These Times: “This is also not a moment to claim the term ‘terrorism,’ which was crafted by the U.S. state after September 11, 2001 to justify militarized cities at home and permanent war abroad.” Tactics for resisting this administration after this click.

A picture of baby owls to break this post up.

Only Hulu carries the hour-long episodes of season 4 of The Twilight Zone. And so, it’s only there (unless you have them on DVD, or on VHS and you also own a functioning VCR) that you can find an episode starring a young Dennis Hopper as a pathetic Nazi wannabe in ’60s America. Hopper is bad at being a Nazi. (Sound familiar?) But he begins to get advice from a mysterious and — literally — shadowy figure with a whiny voice and probably Charlie Chaplin-esque facial hair. Hopper as the incompetent Nazi is, of course, fantastic in it. And it couldn’t be more relevant.

Rod Serling’s opening narration: “Portrait of a bush-league Führer named Peter Vollmer, a sparse little man who feeds off his self-delusions and finds himself perpetually hungry for want of greatness in his diet.”

A few weeks ago, I shared a profile of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, a man with sparse merits who talks about being the next Teddy Roosevelt. He is by no means the most incompetent member of the Trump team. Other than the president himself, Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon with no previous government experience now in charge of Housing and Urban Development, is certainly in the running. And for HUD employees, his ineptitude is no laughing matter. Alec MacGillis with New York Magazine writes about Caron’s many debacles during his short tenure at HUD, including his description of slaves as “immigrants who came here at the bottom of ships” during his first day of work at HUD. “The assembled employees stifled their reaction to this jarringly upbeat characterization of chattel slavery. But in HUD’s Baltimore satellite, where many in the heavily African-American office were watching the speech on an online feed at their desks, the gasps were audible.”

Last, a story in The Atlantic about how smartphones might be changing the next generation of Americans, enticingly titled “Have Smart Phones Destroyed a Generation?” There is some really compelling research here. Definitely a must-read.

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