To live between a rock
And a hard place
In between time —
Cruising in prime time —
Soaking up the cathode rays
– Rush, “Between the Wheels”
It’s 1877. The deal is made to withdraw troops from the South. Jim Crow is being invented. The Waite court is ascendent and the Fuller Court, that decided Plessy (“separate but equal”) and Lochner (“labor law is unconstitutional”) is on the way. In 1893, young historian Frederick Jackson Turner published his ringing endorsement of slavery, genocide, and ethnic cleansing, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”1. In 1890 McKinley Tariff was promulgated. The Spanish-American War of 1898 and the conquest and annexation of Hawaii in 1898. In 1889, there was a pandemic; it is now debated if it was flu or a coronavirus.2
And this, it seems to me, is the best historical parallel to the current US situation. And yet none of it seems to be relevant. Who imagined traitors taking over the Federal government? And then Musk comes in from left field and tries to steal the government? Who actually wants to spread disease? And everyone is high as a kite. Altman on his entheogens, Musk on probably ketamine and a witches brew of other drugs. Trump on Adderall. How many empires have gone down because their rulers blew out their minds on drugs?
What the fk is going on?
You know how that rabbit feels
Going under your speeding wheels
Bright images flashing by
Like windshields towards a fly
Frozen in the fatal climb —
But the wheels of time —
Just pass you by…
Frederick Jackson Turner. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” In Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin at Its Forty-First Annual Meeting. Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Chicago: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1893. https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/gilded/empire/text1/turner.pdf. “When American history comes to be rightly viewed it will be seen that the slavery question is an incident.” Sic transit gloria Civil War. ↩︎
Berche, Patrick. “The Enigma of the 1889 Russian Flu Pandemic: A Coronavirus?” Presse Medicale (Paris, France : 1983) 51, no. 3 (September 2022): 104111. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lpm.2022.104111. ↩︎
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