The only thing that’s saving Trump’s attack on Tehran from more apt comparisons to Pearl Harbor is the observation that the Khamenei regime was an order of magnitude more odious than his own. The fact remains that Trump likes taking things that don’t belong to him or to the United States, including the lives of innocents. He needs to go.
We’d be talking about multiple applications of the 25th to work our way through JD Vance and S Miller at minimum, right?
Agree Trump needs to go and I’m all for convening a process (Nuremberg style) to nail each of the possible successors as they stuck their head over the parapet but I wonder if we could accomplish that before we could just vote him out.
On the other hand I do wonder what will be left to salvage in 3 (or so) years…. assuming we can actually convince him to leave.
Melania Trump to preside over a UN Security Council meeting on Monday? My spidey-sense asks me if Trump isn’t tipping up his wife to succeed him a la Don’t Cry For Me Evita? And, wouldn’t that be just too much.
Your guess about all of this is as good as mine. All I’m willing to say with any confidence is that we’ll be lucky to avoid Nietzsche’s Umwertung aller Werte, a crude misunderstanding of which was the engine that drove the Nazis’ brutal vision of human destiny and, perhaps more unfortunately in the long run, that of the misbegotten authors of Project 2025 as well.
As a veteran visitor to Dogtown, you know as well as anyone that a) I think humanism has reached the end of its influence over the American and European cultural imagination, and b) I regret that more than I have said, or can say, as it’s long been the foundation of my own intellectual identity.
I’d like to live long enough to see what comes next, but even though that’s an actuarial impossibility, I can still imagine that the outlook for a coming post-humanist society which honors its humanist predecessors isn’t completely bleak. Something like Brautigan’s Machines of Loving Grace may yet come to pass, however unlikely that seems at the moment.
Ah, William, I don’t know. I want to point to those citizen patrols in Minneapolis as an indicator that humanism (broadly expressed) was on display against the ICE patrols, and from what I understand persists in the present moment. Surely, that is some resilience for the belief that humanism has value.
I guess that does not mean that yours isn’t the better assessment over the longer term. Maybe it’s like vaccines (stay with me for a moment). Those of us old enough to remember Polio have carried our value for vaccines forward, that valuing persists in the present moment – at least among many of us – but as we take our institutional memory to the grave, those who value less may come to predominate. In that case the picture is bleak indeed.
As for those machines of loving grace; not if Elon, Mark, Peter, Sam and Jeff have anything to say about it, I’m sure.
I don’t know either, but that doesn’t stop me from having my suspicions. Comes, I suspect, from a childhood spent with my nose in too many books I wasn’t supposed to read till I was older….