Where Is The Next Stop For This Crazy Train?

We've traveled so far off the map since 2016 that it's difficult to determine where we are, what is likely to happen and what is not. It hardly seems possible that we've reached the mid-point marker for the President's first/only term. As once was said about living in New York City, every day is a battle fought in an ongoing war. Yes to that.

The common themes to our post-2016 experience thus far have been the unpredictability of events, the disruption of norms, and the degradation of institutions. The Administration advances these themes through a firehose blast of shock and falsehoods. It overwhelms and numbs the public. It is also designed to create apathy and discouragement. If you've followed along reading past Kibitz posts, you'll know that this all adheres to time-honored techniques mastered by Soviet/Russian intelligence services. It's not an accident we're spinning around while our President and his allies spout contradictory statements, move perceptual "goalposts" and gaslight the nation.

Who can we depend upon for getting the straight story? Well, there are always your amigos here at the Daily Kibitz. (Stay tuned for our take on where the Mueller investigation is going, and how Trump is probably no longer the only primary target.) Well, you might say, where do you turn to, O Daily Kibitz?

Glad you asked. Here are some of the reliable sources we follow, and you should, too!

Marcy Wheeler is an influential, independent journalist specializing in National Security and Justice topics. Her probing and trenchant analysis of complicated topics like the lead-up to the Iraq War and the Valerie Plame - Scooter Libby debacle put her on the map. She is a Major Badass. Follow her on twitter for the very latest. For deeper dives into thoughtful and very fair essays/analysis, check out her website:

https://www.emptywheel.net

She is the best, The Goods. She doesn't suffer fools. And she strives to be objective, but won't back off of what she knows to be true. She has deeply placed sources. Other journalists look to her because she is a front-runner with her well-researched articles and reasoned opinions.

Another Go-To person for breaking news and analysis is Natasha Bertrand of The Atlantic magazine, formerly of Business Insider. You may recognize her from cable news appearances. I won't hold that against her. She has been a top-tier investigator for all things Russia-Trump. If she's not breaking news, she is retweeting/sharing pertinent news stories on her twitter feed:

https://twitter.com/NatashaBertrand

For a federal law enforcement perspective, I favor Asha Rangappa. Talk about an over-achiever: Princeton, Fulbright Scholar, Yale Law degree, FBI Special Agent, now Associate Dean of Yale Law. Sheesh. Rangappa has a much-followed Twitter account:

https://twitter.com/AshaRangappa_

Like Bertrand, Rangappa sometimes appears on cable news shows. It's a living, I guess (I hate cable news). But she also regularly writes articles on What's Going Down and comments prolifically on the news of the day. She, too, is a Major Badass.

Moving on out to the fringe, to the very outer limits of investigative journalism, there is our favorite loon, Louise Mensch. Except, gol' dang it, for as much abuse that has been heaped on her for really provocative, bewildering, false and yet-unproven articles, many of them appear to be blossoming into Truth.

She's a firebrand former Member of Parliament conservative who is obsessed with honoring The Law. It appears she has contacts within British intelligence. She is ardent and no-nonsense. And she takes no prisoners. But when reading Mensch, it's wise to bring along a 5lb. bag of salt. It's fun to be swept along by her claims. Some of them are even true. She is reliable, in her own way. Caveat emptor.

https://twitter.com/LouiseMensch

Finally, let's lighten up while doubling down. Molly Jong-Fast is a writer for Forward magazine and other publications. She is decidedly Hard-Left, not that there's anything wrong with that. Her political views are unyielding. She is also Very Funny. Her super snarky quips are perfect for the format of her Twitter feed:

https://twitter.com/MollyJongFast

The more you read her, the better she becomes. So, there you have a few of the Daily Kibitz sources. Oh, we have more... but we can't reveal them. Sorry.

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One source of inspiration left our world this week - former Poet Laureate Mary Oliver. She was a real People's Poet, even though she had achieved a shelf full of prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and The National Book Award. Her aim was simplicity and accessibility. She had no truck with poetry that made its way out of the Academic Torture Chamber.

She discovered her muse in the forest, in Nature. It was where she went to escape.  Her early life was not a happy one. But in her solitude, she found her voice in the vales and glades. Take a moment to read one of her poems:

The Ponds

Every year

the lilies

are so perfect

I can hardly believe

their lapped light crowding

the black,

mid-summer ponds.

Nobody could count all of them -

the muskrats swimming

among the pads and the grasses

can reach out

their muscular arms and touch

only too many, they are that

rife and wild.

But what in this world

is perfect?

I bend closer and see

how this one is clearly lopsided -

and that one wears an orange blight -

and this one is a glossy cheek

half nibbled away -

and that one is a slumped purse

full of its own

unstoppable decay.

Still, what I want in my life

is to be willing

to be dazzled -

to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even

to float a little

above this difficult world.

I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.

I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing -

that the light is everything - that it is more than the sum

of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

2019 or 1969?

Imagine that you have access to a time machine, a Tardis or some H.G. Wells-ian device. And you were given a one-way ticket choice: continue to live your life onwards from January, 1969 or January, 2019. Which year would you choose?

It's the known past versus the unknowable future. We know what went down in 1969. But it's kinda intriguing to think of what one's choice would be if you were presented this choice in January, 1969: continue in '69, or jump to 2019 for future frivolous lifestyle pursuits. We'd all be traveling by rocket-jetpack by now, surely!

The present day is always bogged down with the baggage of the past. It frames our perception of reality. But the future appears as open-ended. And unless one is a fan of dystopian films or literature, the future is seen as an escape from the problems of the current age. It's "what if" versus "what it is".

We all know the quandries and dangers of our time. Runaway climate change that threatens our future existence. An ongoing autocratic assault on democratic institutions that will take, at best, years to repair. A ruthless, unregulated and unsustainable capitalism that will teeter and crash down all around us. Out loud racism and misogyny that passes for acceptable dialogue. Bad pop music and the dismal Chicago White Sox. Pick your poison. It's all enough to pine for a different time.

And if we were living in the now of January, 1969... well, it was not a happy time as I recall.

We had survived 1968, so there was that. The murders of Dr. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy seemed to have damned the country to some sort of long-term karmic retribution. Cities were burning. Civil rights appeared to have stalled out in the hatred. The Peace Movement staggered into the violence of Chicago, resulting in Richard Nixon being elected by 500,000 votes.

The awful war in Vietnam raged on, with over 1500 soldiers killed just in 1/69, or 375 a week! Also, the wounded: nearly 2300 hospitalized in that January. Nearly 17,000 had died in 1968. Meanwhile, there were 550,000 servicemen stationed in that country.

The Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969. A major oil spill fouled the environment all along Santa Barbara. Air and water pollution poured forth across the nation, unabated. The natural world seemed hopelessly vulnerable.

It was The Cold War, too, with thousands of Soviet nuclear warheads aimed at us, poised to launch. Between the Hot War of Vietnam and the Cold War, the sense of unrelenting doom was heavy, every day. Does anyone else have memories of nuclear nightmares?

Richard Nixon began his tumultuous reign, following a tempestous and self-defeating Johnson era. He went on television to make a nationwide address seeking support for his policies, coining the term "the silent majority" for that portion of the public that quietly accepted his positions in our torn-apart nation. (Nixon's "silent majority" and Trump's base have a strong Venn-diagram crossover.)

Nixon's Vice President, Spiro Agnew, launched his attacks against the press. "The nattering nabobs of negativism" and "an effete corps of impudent snobs" are phrases that galvanized Nixon's base. Whenever the press coverage turned bad for Nixon, Agnew would be called on to charge forth with new insults that resonated with the party. He even popularized "generation gap".

Tensions with North Korea continued to escalate. The USS Pueblo, a spy ship with 83 crewmen, had been captured by the North Koreans in 1968 and was still detained. The propaganda war really heated up again when the North Koreans shot down a US spy plane, an EC-121, killing 31 on board.

There were skyjackers! And lots of airplane crashes! Rupert Murdoch began his march towards world domination! Later in the year there was Woodstock! And Altamont! And the Manson Family murders! The Cubs collapsed and the Mets won it all! We even made it to the moon!

That was the year that was, 1969, in a ridiculously brief synopsis.

So... if you were given the choice in January, 1969 to continue life then or to hop up to 2019, it would be completely understandable to bite the bait for the future. Things didn't look good, but a 50 year jump-ahead could be enough time to heal those late-60's wounds.

But if you took that ticket, what would you find?

The Vietnam War hit its apex in January, 1969. It took far too long, but from that point on the war declined. Now you have the forever War on Terror. Military casualties are much reduced, but civilian totals are awful and so is the worldwide stress caused by hundreds of thousands of refugees. We're still dealing with effects of the Iraq War foreign policy debacle, far greater than that of the Vietnam mess (Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and - waiting in the wings - Iran).

Our society remains in major turmoil, but widespread rioting and destruction is absent. Yay! Civil rights that had advanced since 1969 are being challenged, blocked and scaled back. Ugh.

The environmental crisis of 1969 found a solution that same year with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the passage in the next years of the landmark Clean Air and Water Acts and subsequent regulations. Today, though, we are scrapping that progress and are the only nation not a part of the Paris Climate Accord. Climate scientists' ugly prognosis for the planet is back to Full Crisis Mode.

North Korea returned the Pueblo and its crew. Since then, it has fortified its defenses, created a nuclear arms program, and continues to play games with our presidents.

The Cold War ended peacefully. The loser, Russia, is now a major player in the governance of our country.

You avoided the crash and burn of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, and now will witness the crash and burn of Donald Trump and Mike Pence.

The bad pop music of 1969 has been replaced by the bad pop music of 2019. Air travel is much, much safer. Skyjacking went away for decades; however, made an unfortunate resurgence in September, 2001. The Chicago White Sox remain bad. Bad. Just bad.

So, if you're offered a one-way trip into the future, maybe you should hold off. The issues that drive you into the unknown may change quickly, dramatically, and for the better. Also, there are constants with humankind, therefore expect new but similar problems awaiting your arrival.

We can't escape the past. The present holds us forever in its Now. And the future, though unknowable, is nothing more than a collection of remixes in new packages. Except... except...

Well, listen to the #1 single from mid-January, 1969 versus the #1 single from mid-January, 2019. Marvin Gaye, "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" and Halsey, "Without Me". Different tastes, different times, different styles... but one easily surpasses the other.