Looking Back For Fun

I always resist autumn at first. Our summers are not to be missed, but sometimes I miss them. Sometimes we get a cool summer, or a cloudy one—it’s not the rule and it’s rare, but it’ll happen. Sometimes I’m just not in the mood to enjoy the 75 degrees and blue skies that go on forever.

And sometimes I’m busy. I wouldn’t trade this past summer for any number of lovely days, obviously. But in these years, when my summers are super busy (as 10 years ago, when I drove cross-country with my daughter, and then came back for her wedding the next month), fall tends to snap my head back.

The skies are darker, and the weather has returned. Sunlight that used to linger at the edges of our days is hitting the sack a lot earlier now. I wake up in the mornings confused by the light, uncertain. Autumn is a wake-up call and I usually want to stay in bed for a while.

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My trip to the movies last week, and my little journey down Wikipedia to look at all the movies I went to 40 years ago, prompted me to do one of my favorite things. I wrote a column about how we got here.

I love to indulge this, and it may be exactly that, an indulgent act by a self-involved obscure writer. It’s my life, though, the only one I’ll have, and sometimes I like to take it out and look it over, just to see what’s happened.

It also helps that I’ve been reading world history for the past few months, trying to shore up my shaky awareness of the Bulgars and Vandals. It’s easy to grasp patterns or cycles, watching empires rise and fall as humanity lurched toward civilization.

It’s also fairly simple to recognize that much of our future was hanging around in the past, where it always is.

This is what I wrote about, then. About how Thomas Wedgwood coated a piece of paper with light-sensitive chemicals and made a shadow picture in 1800, the world’s first photograph. How creative humans dreamed of moving pictures long before the technology arrived. How the advent of the telegraph inspired dreamers to imagine sending moving images over wires centuries before television, which was working and practical 100 years ago.

Videotape was introduced in 1951, and 25 years later personal VCRs were marketed to the affluent home buyer who wanted to record favorite shows to watch later.

And on to today, I no longer go out to the movies once a week because who needs that? Once in a while, it’s fun to see some nice effects spread out over significant real estate, but for the rest there’s Netflix.

I enjoy this, putting the pieces together, learning new things, sharing them. This has always been the appeal of history, anyway. Figuring out how we got here. Figuring out what’s next.

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My mood has dimmed a little, what with the clouds and the rain, just the annual transition into routine Northwest weather.

So I’m trying to keep personal stuff out of this, not really wanting to color my sentences with angst (that’s too much, but in the neighborhood). I can be objective, or try.

I’ve been writing a weekly newspaper column in this region for 18 years. I’ve branched out occasionally into bigger venues, but I rarely made a splash much longer than it takes to put the newspaper in the recycling bin. I appear and disappear in the greater zeitgeist, eventually returning to my little corner of my neighborhood.

It’s a much bigger neighborhood than when I started, big enough that I have no idea who’s reading, or where. I get emails from bizarre places, often Seattle (I’m 20 miles away), and then the regular folks from Edmonds and Mukilteo and Mill Valley and Everett and Mountlake Terrace and Kenmore and Renton (my people!).

I share the pages with local people, usually not paid writers, just citizens who have something to say that reaches beyond city council politics and parking spaces. I’m glad to be in their company, and I read them regularly. A couple are generally excellent, and others more homey, reflections on grandkids and weekends at Lake Chelan.

I’m different, and everybody knows it by now. I can’t really pinpoint the difference. My style is predictable, I wander occasionally into incoherence, and sometimes I focus on trivia that I suspect it less than appealing.

Still, editors and publishers and family members are perplexed by my tendency to limit my thoughts to the benign variety, only occasionally wandering into current events and always trying to paint a complete picture. I bend too much in the direction of fairness, although fairness still feels like a good goal, but mostly I just write about the world through the prism of a wordy guy who likes jokes.

On the other hand, I’ve been immersed in history as a hobby for decades. I know the history of American presidents very, very well, which gives me easy access to the history they were part of.

You study James Monroe’s remarkable presidency (he won reelection in 1820 with no opponent—it was the heyday of The Era of Good Feelings and a one-party country). Few bothered to vote, and most were content to let the good times roll. But you can’t examine this peaceful period without noting the Missouri Compromise of 1820, upsetting the even distribution of slave and free states, holding the union together for another 30 years but still a stopgap compromise about evil.

This was Jacksonian democracy. It was Jackson who instituted the spoils system, a system of civil service jobs that relied on their personal loyalty to the president. It would persist until the early 1880s, when the assassination of James Garfield by a mentally-ill officer seeker provoked a revamp of the civil service, began by Chester A. Arthur and continued by Grover Cleveland when he took office in 1885, making it a merit system and establishing the civil service we have today.

Forty-four* men have ascended to the presidency, and their stories are fascinating and complicated. I’ve always managed to find compelling qualities in most of these men, as the job is far more complicated that we imagine, and hasn’t become simpler.

FDR threw everything but the kitchen sink at the Great Depression, giving hope to millions but also unable to stretch the economy back into decent shape before the onset of war spurred defense jobs.

Sen. Harry Truman took on war profiteers during World War II, and became an accidental president who sucked it up, tossed into a world-ending scenario and determined to make decisions that may be hard. He buried his deep-set racism in order to integrate the arms services, another sea change that can’t be undone. He screamed about the need for universal health coverage, thwarted by the AMA.

They all had serious flaws. Reagan had a questionable nostalgic look on American’s past, wishing to create a sense of national pride. George H.W. Bush sent troops into Panama and Kuwait/Iraq, a master at diplomatic outreach and a successful removal of Saddam Hussain’s incursion into a sovereign state, but dead bodies piled up.

And then, when scandal erupted as it tends to do, a CIA asset was exposed because her husband was raising foreign policy questions.

Clinton had all sorts of roadblocks, but he grew into the job and did some good. His economic plan lifted us out of dept and we ended up with a zero deficit by the end of his presidency.

George W. came in and the debt skyrocketed, but then it had Afghanistan and Al-Qaeda to complicate them. He’s responsible for the deaths of millions of Iraqis, a country only minimally involved in 9-11. I can disagree with his choices and still understand the rationale. It’s a hard job, and Bush seemed to frolic in becoming a war president (previously it had been called a war-time president, an odd construction that seems to seep out from testosterone-fueled adventurism.

Bill Clinton showed his own adventurism in the Balkans, and a serious desire to place American treasure and military force in order to force concessions and establish peace, with some bombing and death for emphasis.

And then his demons showed, an impromptu serious flirt by a 20-something woman. Monica Lewinsky was brazen and also, eventually, in love with Clinton, and that became casual flirting and a few sexual acts that tarnished his office and reputation. I would have preferred he resign but he completed his term, if still very popular, and as interesting as he still is it’s hard to take him seriously.

Obama came in during what seriously teetered on the edge of another Great Depression. He was limited by Congress and a bit of ill-advised overreach on his part, but it was obvious that he felt he could create a bipartisan coalition to deal with the school shootings and upgrading our infrastructure, and just a general goal of more fairness.

Andrew Johnson, John Tyler, Jackson, and William Harding demonstrated the Peter Principle, where their impressive elections to the highest office led to the Peter Principle and reaching their level of incompetence.

At any rate, I know this, love it, study it. I have no real answers.

And now we have Trump. I’m tempted, definitely. I understand drumming up opposition to a man completely unqualified. I’ve been watching Trump for over 30 years (Bernie Sanders too); I’m not surprised.

And now we have the Good Citizen Brigade, the columnists and journalists who cleverly and concisely documented the dumping of norms and the lies he routine delivers to the world. “The failing NY Times” is doing very well. He screams “fake news” when the next day he admits that it’s true.

I won’t even get into what appears to be mental illness, serious mental illness. He can barely speak, even with a teleprompter. He wanders, he digs up non sequitors like it’s a squirrel he just spotted.

He’s an awful human being, and I can sense a nihilistic attitude that bothers me quite a bit. I do believe he’s surrounded by people who know him now, sideswipe when he gets particularly crazy, and sometimes rejoice in how he owns the libs.

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I don’t know what to do about this, and I refrain. I’m appreciative of my niche, simple stories of about ordinary life. Like writing children’s books, I know where I stand.

But my friends who write Trump screeds once a week are valuable; take them out of the equation and we lose the opposition. I’m not sure this is my job.

But I do have perspective. I do have an interest.

I do have family, and a grandson. We still seem safe, mostly because of the incompetence of this administration. I wouldn’t doubt that there’s a sign on somebody’s white house wall that says. “It’s the bigotry, stupid.”

I have a forum. I write and read constantly about current events; I’m missing the point about screaming into the political abyss, obviously doomed to dark corners where no one will see, and the ones who do are nasty, trolls, Russian players in the American experiment.

I’d never have enough space in the newspaper. It would have to be here, or other long-form journalism sites. There are plenty of anti-Trump pieces screaming and listing transgressions. Not sure I can add to this, as important as they are.

It’s important that this aberration leaves power as soon as possible. Start impeachment hearings, get testimony and information on this horrible man and his team, provide that to the public and see what they do.

Just not sure I should be doing it. It’s on my mind today, though. The president of the United States is a criminal, most likely pleased with that attitude. We’ve all known these means-justifying types. Maybe we were due. Maybe we can look backwards and find similar situations.

But I don’t know that want to write about, if only that I’m unsure of the benefit.

That said, I can’t wait for much longer. I’m constantly surprised by the right-wing trolls on Twitter, most of them Russian bots, who hassle and insult and threaten, and these are mostly toward celebrities who have the temerity of an opinion. Dave235 in Missouri tweets relentlessly, telling celebrities (for example) to just shut up and make movies.

Dave235, with his 16 followers, seems confident that his opinion is fine, based on his fulltime job at Burger King, but that a professional in another field is completely inappropriate to speak of anything but cast calls.

But this too long, and not ready yet. I may have to screed myself. If only it can be insightful or original, though. I appreciate the ones who write about this all the time. I’m compelled to join them. I may need to read some more history first, which is hard because it’s happening now. I lips are closed, and they’re getting antsy.

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*There have been 44 presidencies, if 45 Presidents. Cleveland won in 1884, lost in 1888, and won again in 1992, thus officially two presidents. One guy with an illegitimate child and a moustache.