Memorial Day, 2026

 Today we honor the valiant service members throughout our history who believed that the supreme sacrifice of their lives was a price worth paying to bring about a better world.

The world is indeed becoming a better place. Progress is slow and uneven. It is halted by ethnocentrism, greed, and ego in some places, while surging forward in others. Overall the ideals of human rights remain a beacon.

The United States as currently led has declined to take part in this better world. Our current leadership might as well be pissing on the graves of fallen heroes rather than laying wreaths. They view the military as expendable labor, a cost of doing business. And they're poor, wasteful  businessmen.

If we let the trend continue, every person who died from the Revolutionary War onward wasted their death. We don't honor the equality defined in the Declaration of Independence. We don't have a secular government allowing free expression, latitude for all faiths, and a free and inquisitive press. Current leadership seeks to rescind constitutional amendments that don't fit their view of the hierarchy that favors them. 

The massive casualties of the Civil War occupy acres and acres that could be turned into golf resorts for all that their courage matters now. Because the civil rights movement continued to press the issues of the Civil War against the tactics that replaced outright slavery, their casualties deserve to be remembered alongside the official war dead. And the current policies at the federal and state level continue the theme of erasing their gains.

Every war is supposed to push us closer to a time when we no longer need to send people out to give up everything else that they might ever have been and done. Every war fails us in that regard, because too many of us focus on the heroism and fighting skill, and not enough on what those people were fighting for: not to have to do this again.

Humans are a deeply flawed species. Various leaders will continue to rise and believe that they can conquer the world, or at least a good chunk of it. We will always have a need for heroes who will hold their ground and say no. Remember this: all that is required for good to triumph is for evil people to do nothing. You pick a side every day, multiple times a day. Which side are you on?

The technology of mechanized slaughter becomes ever more impersonal and heinous. There was never much glory in the mass murder contests we've conducted though the millennia, but there's ever less in the ways in which we can obliterate whole swaths of each other without even looking closely. And once a year we grow briefly solemn and say a few words before going to our various barbecues, weather permitting.

Paint a big target on the USA

 The Trump regime is putting the United States in more danger than it has faced since it was a fledgling nation forged from a set of rebellious colonies. Certainly once we  achieved global power status as the 20th century dawned, an opposing nation might seek our capitulation, but not our obliteration. That held true until the Cold War. At that point, the line between victory and murder-suicide disappeared into mutually assured destruction. But that was unlikely because it was mutual.

The vestiges of mutually assured destruction will probably protect the United States from a direct assault. More likely, the nations we threaten with our psychotic aggression will try to keep a safe distance until the country collapses from within. On the other hand, the current dictatorial regime will strike as brutally as possible against its own dissidents while lashing out at external enemies in ways that might lead to strikes on our soil. The extent and speed of the global destruction depend on the insanity of the dictatorship and the loyalty of the military. In any case, things could start blowing up within our borders within the year.

If Iran faces obliteration, they have nothing to lose. While it is bad public relations to unleash a wave of terrorism through sleeper cells and sympathetic non-state actors, it is also emotionally satisfying. I would guess that a majority of other nations right now believe that the United States should be taken down a peg.

The global aggression displayed by the current US regime makes a better screenplay than a foreign policy enacted by well educated adults. Pop culture and mob psychology got them into power. Unlike previous Republican administrations, that used the rhetoric and imagery to excite their most loyal supporters and then governed with more maturity and cunning, the current crew really believes their bullshit. They're not playing chess. They're not playing checkers. They vary between shit-flinging simians and ten-year-old boys playing army.

The US military has followed the orders of their commander in chief, to put our whole nation at risk of years of retaliation. By turning us into a global menace, the regime has undone all of the good (such as it was) that the nation has done since World War II. Maybe they figure that most countries secretly or overtly hate us anyway, so why not stomp around and seize a bunch of assets? The orders were "lawful." They were also awful. That doesn't matter. Advisers can advise, but orders are orders. When an order is "lawful," refusal to comply is mutiny. The consequences are more severe. 

Following tradition, the law, and regulations, military leadership puts the ponderous might of the most powerful military forces on the globe at the service of  a regime displaying multiple delusions. The most dangerous one is that the United States is so powerful that it can take on the whole rest of the world and whup ass. By attempting to strongarm the rest of the world, we have invited anyone out there to take their best shot at the things we don't excel at, like unconventional warfare, and dispersed resistance techniques. The chaos will not take place in the background or at a distance anymore. It will proliferate to make daily routines unpredictably dangerous. None of this was ever necessary. Or was it?

A persistent myth seems to be that we once existed in some perfect form in this country. If you're a racist piece of shit, that perfect form might be slavery, or post-Reconstruction apartheid. But if you're a fully formed human being with a conscience and a broader imagination, you know that the perfect form, if any, lies in the future. A more perfect union is never perfected. As a fluid form, it must be channeled and maintained. Every generation chooses how it wants to be, based on the information available to it. That process now faces a turbulent future as the regime chosen by a slim majority of voters in 2024 makes the rest of the world seriously question whether they should just preemptively take us out. All that prevents them is the sure knowledge that we would incinerate the planet in our final frenzy. Isn't that a lovely way to be viewed in the world?

United States unleashes the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

 Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death. The United States has become the harbinger of death, the agent of suffering and evil across the globe. Trump voters must be so proud.

We invite disease back into our own country through anti-vaccine bullshit. We facilitate its spread in the world by cutting funding for AIDS treatment and withdrawing funding from medical research.

We allow our Defense Department to strut and pose, and drop expensive bombs on regions already volatile, where the detonations will not quell the anger that dwells there. Tough guy rhetoric from the television host who was hired to portray the Secretary of Defense reinforces the bombast from the reality television character portraying the President.

The cruel tyrant, aided by greedy billionaires, cut foreign aid, throwing millions of people, including children, into deeper poverty and the certainty of famine.

This regime is centered on death. Its supporters pride themselves on their cruelty toward the people they deem inferior, in their own eyes and in the eyes of their god.  They detain and deport children with cancer, cutting them off from their treatment Everything they do is geared toward the destruction of millions, billions of people, so that the survivors can have lebensraum. They don't have allies. They have enemies and subordinates. They don't have a vision of shared humanity, they have a dream of monoculture enforced by conquest.

Would-be conquerors have had thousands of years to try to make it work. Their efforts have always ended in a tide line of dried blood where they crested and fell back, or simply dried up in place. The story of empire is ultimately one tragic failure after another. From the mid 20th Century, super power has only been held through the threat of murder suicide. It's a global abusive relationship.

The United States had a chance to be something different. There was a lot wrong in our past, but some of us were trying to make it right as best we could. Instead, the current party in power wants to return to the wrong and intensify it. Choose your world.

War is expensive

 The current regime courted voters by claiming that they would bring down prices for ordinary citizens who felt overly burdened by price and availability problems with some items. They also characterized the party they ran against as warmongers likely to plunge us into World war III.

We've been on the verge of World War III for my entire life. The sense of doom hung over us before I was born and persists today. It takes its place beside the fear of Hell and the fear of public embarrassment as leverage that social leaders use on the masses. It's a good one, too.

The regime started a trade war immediately, billing it as a good economic move. It's not, of course. Tariff costs are passed directly to the consumers, whether the company they're dealing with is directly affected or not. Prices rising anywhere is an invitation to prices rising everywhere. Also, everything really is connected, so what seems unaffected can't really remain untouched. This is especially true with the new tariffs announced on aluminum and steel. These basic structural metals are in everything, more or less.

As costs rise here, civilians are paying the costs of leadership's insistence on hostilities. Meanwhile, civilians in targeted foreign countries are paying the costs of their leadership's retaliatory tariffs. It's always the common people who pay the highest price for any form of war. And if your politics are based in anger, you will have war.

Americans get nostalgic for World War II because all of the major destruction took place somewhere else. This country was the ultimate home front. Popular music continued to evolve and advance. Sure, there was rationing, and people lost loved ones, but the economy hummed along with war production. Everyone had a sense of shared purpose. They could ignore peripheral costs to the planet and the future, like the prodigious amounts of petroleum dumped into the oceans as warring forces sank ships full of oil, and chemical fires raged in bombed industrial and urban centers in Europe. Gotta get through this awful war. The citizens went without things. Their freedom of movement was restricted at least by fuel rationing, if not by little inconveniences like being thrown into an internment camp for the duration.

By the end of the war, the dawning Atomic Age pointed a charred, bony finger toward the threat of what a future conflict would bring. The Atomic Age melted into the Nuclear Age within a few years, raising the temperature of the fireball even higher. You want this? Do you? Bitch about the Boomers all you want, but that generation was raised with unprecedented levels of indulgence alongside the assurance that the grownups were going to start something any day to incinerate it.

Here we are today, in a trade war that shows no signs of slackening. Inflation is climbing when we were assured that it would snap off like a light switch. At the same time, the executive branch is yanking us out of alliances that were forged in that glorious shared struggle of World War II and its aftermath, and declaring its intention to destabilize the Middle East, annex the territory of allies, and do it all with a military force composed exclusively of white, straight men, apparently. 

It would take a lot to get nations chucking nukes at each other, but maybe not as much as you think. People with their finger on the trigger came close to making the mistake numerous times during the Cold War. Would the US have dropped its cute little atomic bombs on Japan if any belligerent country had the potential to retaliate? However, a hostile stance leads to skirmishes that can lead to battles that can lead to ground wars that can be used to pit Oceania against Eurasia or Eastasia in a perpetual struggle that might not even really exist except for the poor conscripted idiots sent off to provide the verification of their mutilated or dead bodies.

Cynics would say that we have had that for years. If true in any way, it has only been in its infant stages. The desire to control territory and expand regional influence is real. In the full 1984 version, the wars are more of an endless stalemate welcomed by the authorities controlling each entity. Maybe one day a single power might prevail, but in the meantime the stalemate served the top tier quite well.

If you finished the book, though, the spokesperson for the top tier of Oceania, O'Brien, admits that even the top tier has to live with less than the best that a person could have, for the sake of loyalty to The Party that keeps them on top. Orwell doesn't go into a lot about tax policy, but the diminished returns that the leaders of the party accept is a tax of sorts.

Anyway, here, today, we're closer to that than ever, but still not doomed. Unfortunately, the Republican Party has been so completely intoxicated by fringe legal theories and completely unconstitutional fantasies of a better government run by crazy rich people that their congressional delegation is doing absolutely nothing to exert their powers to check the executive branch. Between the ones who see benefit to themselves and the ones who never understood their constitutional responsibilities in the first place, power is in the hands of a slim but potent majority utterly unqualified to hold it.

That's the thing about representative democracy: if one party wanted to put up a sewer rat as a candidate and could convince enough voters to put that rat in office, we would have a sewer rat in office. The founders of this country anticipated incompetents and scoundrels, but never in such overwhelming force. So now we have to convince the party that grew its power by appealing to greed, lack of civic education, paranoia, and exclusionary religiosity to "do the right thing" and save the constitution from this onslaught.

The judicial branch is trying, only to provoke public statements from high ranking Republicans challenging their authority to do so. It's in that constitution that you people like to put on stickers in the back window of your enormous pickup trucks. The judicial branch can rule, but it can't enforce. Congress has to agree and refuse to cooperate further with the destruction.

Most Americans don't really understand what they could lose. American to them means white American, and white Americans have never lost anything. Sure, the South suffered a little reorganization in the Civil War, but they bounced back. Aggrieved citizens of a paler hue can claim that they were passed over for plum jobs because of various quotas, but in general we're used to having things our way. Almost none of us have put it together that the reason things aren't going as well as they might for us emanates from corporate boardrooms and the financial sector. The corruption of the government is just a byproduct of that abandonment of the middle class by the private sector. The top tier of wealth has reasoned -- rightly or wrongly -- that they don't need a thriving middle class and upward mobility in this country. They're sick of paying for it. They quit chipping in a while ago. They've had us fighting each other for decades.

There's a slim chance that the voters who put Republicans into congressional seats can bury them in phone calls, emails, letters, and social media posts to convince them that their political future lies not in cooperating with this regime but in asserting their power to stop it. There's a slimmer chance that mass public protests will do much more than cost their participants the money and time it took to participate. Those costs could be pretty steep in some cases. Remember the phrase "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor" as you choose your side and take action. No one gives a shit about honor anymore, but lives and fortunes carry plenty of weight. It's our lives and piddly fortunes versus theirs. They have massively greater fortunes, but only a few lives.

Doesn't just voting seem a lot easier than plunging into the physical conflict or submission to dictatorship that will proceed unchecked? Support the government employees who are resisting DOGE. Pressure congress to support the judges who are supporting the Constitution. Refuse to comply.

Trump is not the problem

 While the 45th occupant of the Oval Office has dominated the news since he announced his candidacy for the 2016 presidential primaries in 2015, we lost the chance to make him a one-person problem when we failed to vote against him in sufficient numbers in November, 2016. As soon as he reached the most powerful leadership position in the world, he embodied all of the hopes of the voters and the business interests that put him there. Those hopes already existed before he placed them on the throne, and they will exist long after he is gone. If you strike him down, he will become more powerful than you can imagine.

When Hitler destroyed Germany with his manic obsessions, it was blatantly obvious. All of Europe was devastated by years of war. World War I failed as the "war to end all wars," but World War II succeeded as the War to Make War Inadvisable. I know it's not as snappy a title, but economic analysis bores most people to sleep. Germany reinvented itself as a bastion of tolerance because the country got to experience the ruinous consequences of bigotry run amok. If Hitler had the sense to keep his hatred within his own borders, the camps would probably still be running, in defiance of world disapproval, but global unwillingness to undermine German sovereignty. Look at how the Soviet Union behaved during its time, and how the "free world" built up arms, muttered threateningly, and stayed carefully on its own side of the line. Nukes made the stakes too high.

Global war became obsolete in the 20th Century. Warfare remains constant all over the globe, but no one with even a bachelor's degree in business wants a no-holds-barred total war for world domination. Small wars are profitable, although they have to be well managed. Big countries can pick on smaller ones, although the United States got its ass handed to it by the Vietnamese. Live and learn. Cough cough -- Afghanistan -- cough cough! Maybe not so much. But in any case the damage to a nation, its morale, its spirit, its compassion, drastic as they may be, don't damage production capacity and drain the resources of the top tier of wealth, for whom the country is run.

In 1984, George Orwell drew a broad, crayon sketch of how real global domination works. While much of the book is oversimplified, as all fiction has to be, many basic principles apply. Most notably, the common people, the most numerous, can be controlled by the information they are fed, and the necessities of life that are dribbled out in just enough of a flow to keep the strivers struggling to get their little bit, believing that their lives will get better, or at least no worse, if they just keep working for as long as they can.

Donald Trump is not the problem. Donald Trump is the visible pustule above a deep, systemic infection. You know that squeezing a zit can actually cause sepsis. Popping Trump might release a gratifying shower of pus and a momentary sense of relief, but the underlying infection would grow more entrenched. Indeed, pustule Trump was a shocking but predictable symptom of the poisoning that had been injected in steadily increasing doses since 1980. And, as we are constantly reminded, the real infection dates back to 1619, and further back, to contemptuous colonialism. The heirs to the country's worst aspects hold all of the power right now, because the numerous masses are controlled by the information they are fed, and the glorification of life-devouring work schedules that never seem to lead to that better world we were told must result from greater productivity. "Nobody wants to work anymore." Well, no shit: what has it gotten us?

Because the corrupt Supreme Court has placed Donald Trump out of reach of the law, we won't have the satisfaction of seeing the justice system work the way we were always lied to that it does: bringing any criminal before a jury of their peers, to be tried on the basis of the evidence, in accordance with the law. Until July 1, 2024, we at least could hold out the slim hope that the legal system could be used on anyone who broke the law, even though we saw it applied unequally as a matter of routine. No legal authority had officially codified any aspect of that inequality until now. With that seal broken, the tiers of the justice system may each in turn receive official sanction. The Constitution is only as good as the people who interpret it.

Real change starts from the bottom up. That's why the authoritarians shifted their focus to control at the state level at the same time that they worked diligently to eliminate federal authority. Smaller jurisdictions are easier to manage, because local voters actually have a harder time getting complete information. Sure, you can go to public hearings on upcoming issues, but who has time? Are the meetings during your work day, when you can't leave the job you desperately need for your meager income? Are they at night, when you work your second or third job, or are taking care of your family, or just resting up for the next day's toil? By removing federal oversight on behalf of ordinary citizens, the authoritarian movement guarantees that local bullies reign supreme. Your success at the local level depends on how strong local political machines are, and how dirty they can get without penalties. Like murdering civil rights activists and letting the murderers go free for decades. Authoritarian politics and organized crime are indistinguishable.

An unstoppable wave of suffering and death

 The current crisis in Ukraine not only puts us on the verge -- if not an inescapable path -- to nuclear destruction, it also forces humanity to ignore the environmental collapse that's been brewing since the beginning of the 20th Century.

World-wide, authoritarian governments push back against democracy, while democratic countries and confederations have to satisfy voters in order to get anything done. While individual voters may value their freedom, and access to government, large groups of them act from narrow interests to the detriment not only of their nation but of the world as a whole. We've had decades to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels, for instance, but instead have only looked for cheaper prices for the poison.

This fossil fuel dependency plays strongly into the doom set in motion as Russia warms up the missile launchers in eager anticipation of the showdown with the West. China might hope to play the moderator, but no one can put the brakes on Putin's aggression except Putin himself. And the war crimes of his soldiers show that he has no shortage of depraved followers enjoying the sadistic task of terrorizing their way to a dominant role strictly by virtue of their willingness to take us all to hell with them in a fireball. As long as democratic governments are rightly afraid to ask their citizens to sacrifice for the war effort by dealing with high prices and shortages in a wartime economy, Russia will continue to act with justifiable confidence.

As Russia and China play Bad Cop/Slightly Less Bad Cop with the rest of the world, the cult of the strongman leader seems to offer a path to safety for anyone willing to knuckle under and kiss up. The depraved and sadistic see career opportunities in such regimes. None of them seem to give much thought to how short a run they'll have. One side or the other will probably blink in the nuclear confrontation, but by then we'll have lost too much time on the environmental collapse and we're probably going to end up in a society where you'd best not depart visibly from a narrow set of norms.

The odds favor a pretty miserable future. I challenge you to prove me wrong.

I owe my life to two world wars

 On this Armistice Day, I think about the military service of my grandfather, whom I barely met, and of his only son, my father.

Although both of them were American, my father's parents met in France. I know even less of his mother than I do of his father, because of the way that circumstances broke up their family years later, so I don't know why she was in France, but Grandpère, as we knew him, went there with the American military forces. I don't even know how they met, because the endgame of their family was so difficult for my father that we let him tell us what he wanted, when he wanted. Whether he was dealing well with the trauma or not, he had plastered over it heavily to hide the cracks. He could not let it bother him, because his profession depended on strength and invulnerability.

After the Great War, my father's parents lived in Paris, where Grandpère attempted to continue his operatic singing career. He'd been emerging as a new talent in the Chicago area before the US entry into the conflict in Europe pulled him away. I have no idea whether he was further hampered by any carnage he might have seen or perpetrated, but the operatic career did not take off. Still, the couple were living a comfortable life as my father recalls it, until the 1929 stock market crash sent its economic waves through the wider world. At least that's what the young child was told was the cause of the family's rapid decline in fortunes and living spaces. But they were starting to rebuild by the late 1930s, only to be displaced again by a troublesome German. They left France in 1939 as World War II broke out across Europe. They landed in New York.

The family situation deteriorated, with his mother hospitalized and his father going off in search of work and -- I'm guessing -- a measure of solace, based on what little I know of the events. My father was left to live at a friend's house while he finished his last year at a pretty fancy prep school, where he was a scholarship student, not a rich kid riding daddy's money to educational credentials appropriate to the business he would inherit. One of his classmates inherited the New York Times. Meanwhile, Dad ended up fending for himself, working for a boat yard on City Island, for a bike shop, and in the offices of the Boy Scouts of America. He'd been a scout since his childhood in France, and was an Eagle Scout in every respect.

By this time, America was in the war. My father had gone to college, entering MIT, but all of the stresses on him hurt him academically. His only achievement was on the water, kicking ass in sailboat races for the school team. The coach at the Coast Guard Academy suggested that he enlist, and then apply to take the academy entrance exam. The Coast Guard Academy took applicants solely on merit, without congressional appointments. This my father did. He expected to get sent off to drive landing craft onto beaches, but instead ended up in a construction detail in Florida, and other odd bits, before entering the academy in 1945.

Meanwhile, my mother was growing up in central New Jersey, and chose Connecticut College as her next step after high school. Adjacent to the academy, the all-women's school provided a convenient dating pool for the all-male inmates across the road. Thus the streams of life eventually converged.

During the years of the Korean Conflict, my father had been on ice breaker duty in the Arctic, and on Baffin Island, building and manning a LORAN station. The fight against global communism had many fronts. His later trips to Europe to discuss search and rescue agreements with friendly governments also included navigational enhancements that would aid in the guidance of doomsday weapons against the USSR, back when those had to be more personally delivered.

Over the course of his career, the Coast Guard evolved from a very military organization shaped by its wartime and Cold War activities, to an "agency," under the Department of Transportation. The ships still had guns, but fewer, and smaller. At that, they'd never bristled with the armament sported by naval vessels. Even so, the world I was born into had short hair and attempts at household discipline commensurate with a family in service to its country. But the 1960s were coming.

My father attended the US Naval War College in Newport, RI, in the school year 1964-'65. Thus, my older brother and I attended a local school our parents chose. It was my first experience as a "new kid," but in a navy town with not only the War College but a regular base, transient students were common. I was only in third grade, but I understood that my father believed that our adventure in Vietnam was a bad idea. His conviction was built on practical considerations, risk-benefit analysis, and the difficulties of counterinsurgency for the conventional military forces, it wasn't bleeding-heart hippie bullshit. Nevertheless, his position didn't help him in the more gung-ho climate that developed around the domestic politics of the war.

Through various ups and downs, triumphs and setbacks, he stuck it out, achieving, among other things, the first two seasons of all-year navigation through the Great Lakes in the mid 1970s. Wherever he served, he solved many more problems than he left for others to solve.

My father remained in the Coast Guard until 1979, retiring as a captain. He had been passed over on his first flag board, where existing admirals review aspiring admirals, and everything they know about each other gets weighed in the decision. It's not uncommon to need a couple of shots to make it, if at all, but after about 35 years he was ready to try life on the outside.

A few years ago, well after his retirement, our family was sitting around considering alternate courses our lives could have taken. My father said that he had wished that his family had stayed in France during the Nazi occupation. They could have done it, others did. I felt myself disappear. If he had stayed there, none of his children would be here, though he might have had other children. The specific entities created by his union with my mother would not have happened. If the war had not displaced him, he would have stayed, they would have stayed. My parents would not have met.

This doesn't make me grateful to Hitler or happy that things worked out the way they did. If I never existed I would never know it. But it was startling to consider how tremendous world upheavals led to families like mine, completely unrelated to the historical issues of the conflicts, but entirely the product of the movements of the little people caught up therein. There must be millions of us who are war children without ever being near a war.