When I crack the newspaper on some future morning to find that Donald Trump has signed an executive order which offends the very fabric of time, I will be ready. I will put it in the pile with all the others and begin the work of undoing the damage. I will deploy my coping skills to maximum effect. My daughter is teaching me how. (Photo: Pixabay)
Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.
— Zadie Smith
My Achilles heel in this gig has always been events which lack historical context. When something unbelievable happens, I almost always get to tell myself, “Yeah, but something a lot like that also happened in 1922,” and I feel grounded, and that’s good. I’m a lawyer’s kid; precedent is king. Most events have a sister somewhere in history; even the astonishment of September 11 has Pearl Harbor, right down to the LIHOP (Let It Happen On Purpose) conspiracy theories. If you want to be a true original in this world, you best eat your Wheaties.
Rogue wave events, however, have a way of roaring over the gunwhale and swamping my ship. A good example came when Dick Cheney declared the Vice President’s office was not part of the Executive Branch because he didn’t want to hand over his papers to the National Archive as required by three different laws. Yeah, that happened, and I was a good two days talking to the cat afterward. Once upon a time, such unsettling events were a relative rarity. That, as they say, was then.
Suddenly, as if we all lost some cosmic bet, events seemingly without historical context have been flying in the window like those damned monkeys from The Wizard of Oz. In virtually every way imaginable, Trump & Co. have been borrowing pages from every tin-pot dictator and wannabe fascist that has ever scarred the skin of the planet. It would be boringly repetitive if it wasn’t so flatly terrifying: overwhelm with bombast, charge from all sides, be deliberately unpredictable. The absence of context…