Meanwhile, between Biden stepping aside and Harris standing up… Also, the fire is still burning

This won’t be the most in-depth diary – mostly a reaction to how the events of the past few days have shaken things up. That, and one change in particular.

It’s not the worst problem to have. There are reports that the donor floodgates are wide open — and not just the Big Money sugar daddies. History is being made in so many ways. As Josh Marshall and others have said, anyone who claims to know what’s going to happen knows nothing.

But…

I can’t keep up with the flood of texts and emails urging me to donate. It was bad enough, but the texts exploded after this weekend. I have to filter them out periodically throughout the day. The ones with desperate messages are the worst. (I think it’s my own fault that I ended up on all those lists.) They used to say that money was the breast milk of politics; now it’s more like oxycodone.

I accuse Citizens united to make a bad situation worse. Money has always talked, but one dollar — one vote is not the way to go when we have oligarchs like Musk running wild. If we are going to do anything about this, we really need to reconsider the tax status of open advocacy organizations like the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, various churches, etc., and definitely see to it that a wealth tax is implemented.

Everything happens so fast these days, the story keeps changing.

It seems like we have a Race of the Red Queen. You have to run as fast as you can to stay in one place. Stephen Colbert recently joked that students studying American history need a textbook for all the events of July 2024.

Billy Joel wrote a song “We didn’t start the fire” in response to a comment from a 21-year-old who said, “everybody knows nothing happened in the 50s.” Joel had just turned 40 and he had a lot to say about that. The song is actually a series of events from the late 40s through the 80s. They appear in the song year by year in chronological order.

Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray
South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio
Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television
North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe

Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom
Brando, “The King and I” and “The Catcher in the Rye”
Eisenhower, Vaccine, England has a new queen
Marciano, Liberace, Santayana, goodbye

We didn’t light the fire
It always burned, because the world kept turning
We didn’t light the fire
No, we didn’t set it on fire, but we tried to fight it

Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev
Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc
Roy Cohn, Juan Perón, Toscanini, Dacron
Dien Bien Phu falls, “Rock Around the Clock”

Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn has a winning team
Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland
Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev
Princess Grace, Peyton Place, Trouble in the Suez Canal

(Chorus)

Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac
Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, “Bridge over the River Kwai”
Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball
Starkweather murder, thalidomide children

Buddy Holly, Ben Hur, space monkey, mafia
Hula hoops, Castro, Edsel are a no-go
U2, Syngman Rhee, Payola and Kennedy
Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in Congo

Hemingway, Eichmann, “Stranger in a Strange Land”
Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs Invasion
“Lawrence of Arabia”, British Beatlemania
Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson
Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex
JFK – overwhelmed, what more can I say?

Birth Control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon Back Again
Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock
Begin, Reagan, Palestine, Terror on the Airline
Ayatollahs in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan

“Wheel of Fortune”, Sally Ride, heavy metal suicide
Foreign debt, homeless veterans, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz
Injections on the coast, China under martial law
Rock and roller, coke wars, I can’t take it anymore

We didn’t light the fire
It always burned, because the world kept turning
We didn’t light the fire
But when we’re gone
It’ll still burn, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on

Fall Out Boy has made an updated cover version of the song, which chronicles events following the period Billy Joel described, through 2023. It’s received some criticism for a few glaring omissions, but it’s no less compelling to watch them and be reminded that so much has happened.

The events of the past few days will be one of those turning points: “Where were you when you heard…” Maybe it’s time for a new edition of Future shock.

…The shortest definition for the term in the book is a personal perception of “too much change in too short a time”.

(See John Brunner’s “The Shockwave Rider“The future is not what it used to be, but Brunner came up with some extrapolations that look a little too realistic.)

Some discussions of the appeal of MAGA America culthood theorize that it’s a reaction from people who can’t deal with all the change coming their way, and the way the pace of change seems to be accelerating. They want to return to what they think was a simpler time. (See the lyrics above — there’s never been a simpler time to return to.)

Harris says, “We’re not going back!”

We are all moving forward into a future of some kind. The only choice is what we do to shape it.

Let’s see if America can choose wisely. Buckle up and keep your hands on the wheel.