I have a number of thoughts about the state of the nation, and just want to give my 5 bullet points on my thoughts this week. Whether or not I send them to Elon Musk to justify my blog...
- Back when I was young, before perestroika, I recall the way the US would poke at Russia for their news coverage, and how Russian TV was just "The Russian Farm Report" and some exercise programs featuring bulky, bullish Russian women. The idea there was that this bland TV news coverage failed to really educate the Russian people about what was going on in their country, and to gloss over the bread lines and extreme poverty of the average Russian citizen.
Today I am watching news with very little about what's actually going on in the country. There is little or no coverage of the many protests, we have little idea what offices Elon Musk and his young brownshirts are sticking their noses and fingers in, and we don't seem to notice our networks becoming whiter and less representative of the US population.
I wonder if Russia is now poking fun at us, the same way we did back then. - My very favorite of Robert Heinlein's books is Friday. I think the pacing of the story is pretty poor, and I really never felt invested in Friday herself. I also thought there were some weird flexes with the Boss, but the social/political environment of the story is interesting. One thing that starts off the story, and the sense that there is something terribly wrong going on in the world beyond the general "spy stuff" , is the crash of a "semi-ballistic" ... a commuter transport launched for rapid transit between continents.
At the end of the character introduction and placement, once she is well established in the reader's mind, there is an offhand mention of "corporate states", which is the underplayed foundation for all that happens afterwards.
One of the interesting things about the story is the point that in war, corporations exist without borders, so obliteration of the enemy can't come with bombs and physical destruction. That while striking nations is crippling, the only way corporations can fight each other is the elimination of their higher offices. - Back in the 80s, I had a HUGE library with literally a couple thousand books. My 4 bedroom colonial featured rooms with bookcases lining almost every wall (except the kitchen and a couple walls in the kids rooms). I had them shelved by topic and author for fiction, and topic for non-fiction. It felt like living in a library, and except for the dusting, it was pretty marvelous.
This week Amazon has made it clear that we do not own the digital books we buy. We can no longer download these books onto our PCs and tablets, leaving them in Kindle devices that Amazon has access to, or on Amazon, only downloaded to our Kindles when we are ready to read them. I have hundreds of Kindle books-- correction, I THOUGHT I had hundreds of books-- but I am increasingly aware that since Amazon still claims ownership over them, that they can be removed by Amazon at any time.
There are two issues that come into play for me with this: First, that I wonder if Amazon will remove books in response to increasing book bans in the US, and second, I am less willing right now to support Amazon in any way by buying more e-books from them after they bent the knee on Jan 20, 2025.
I am very much enjoying my local public library right now, which has an amazing e-book catalog, which I previously read through Kindle, but now read through Libby. With my library card, I have access to a huge number of books that are free and accessible on any device. As for books I want to own: I can get them other places, including local book stores. I recently picked up some of the titles I've been looking for at my local library's Friends of the Library Book Sale, something that happens here every quarter.
Hard copy is the way to go once again. - Back in my high school American History class, we were expected to know this.
Gettysburg Address, Delivered at Gettysburg, Pa. Nov. 19th 1863:
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. “But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. 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.”
Can a nation, founded on the promise of freedom and equality, long endure? I'm watching young trans women being barred from sports, LGBTQ+ people losing their jobs and having their identities denied. I've read accounts of people being "deported". Some of those people were dumped in nations they had no connection to, no knowledge of the language, and no way to navigate or leave. This week I saw "liberal" MSNBC fire 6 showrunners and news anchors who had high ratings, but the "wrong" ethnicity, in dismantling Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (the very FOUNDATION of the nation, according to Lincoln!).
Can we long endure as a nation, when half of the nation seeks to dismantle that foundation? - "Let them eat cake". ("Qu'ils mangent de la brioche"). Was famously (and only supposedly) stated by Marie Antoinette when told that the "peasants" had no bread and were protesting, shortly before she met her end at the guillotine at the hands of those same peasants.
The wealth gap in France leading to the revolution was less than the wealth gap in America today.
Trump has used the song Do You Hear the People Sing in his campaign, imagining that the people, the peasants of the US, are able to "eat cake", that they have the resources to have something different, something better, never considering the fact that if an individual cannot afford bread, they cannot afford cake.
Recently the Army choir performed the song while marching into the Governor's Ball (hosted by the Trumps). I'm sure that Trump continues to totally miss the point, in the same way Marie Antoinette did.
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