Round and Round

We have the Hebrews to thank, it has been said, for giving us the belief that history is linear and not circular. It was, however, a member of the tribe, Karl Marx, who claimed that history does repeat itself: appearing first as tragedy, and then as farce.

I was never a believer in the circularity of history, whether manifesting itself as reincarnation, the transmigration of souls, or Yeats’ “A Vision,”* most prominently displayed in his great poem “The Second Coming.” However, recently, I have found reason to share Marx’s view about historical repetition, although I’m not sure that his formulation is correct, or if the reverse is true—history appears first as farce and only later as tragedy.

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Since in the last few years I have had more spare time than I know what to do with it (yes, I know that I could engage in saving the whales or mining crypto), I have undertaken a kind of historical research by trawling the archives of The New Yorker magazine. I am on my second go-round; having begun this tour in 1940, I am now into the autumn of 1971. What has stood out most prominently this time around is that the state of the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s was uncannily like what we face today, a half-century on.

In this blog post I have gathered together many cartoons and comments from back then which I think you will plainly recognize as distant mirror images of our own time.

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Now on to the political.

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2022

Former President Donald Trump called for the US Department of Education's abolition during his Saturday speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas, Texas.

Trump told a crowd that prohibitions need to be brought in on teaching "inappropriate racial, sexual and political material" to American schoolchildren.

"If federal bureaucrats are going to push this radicalism, we should abolish the Department of Education," he continued.

https://news.yahoo.com/crowd-cheers-trump-calls-abolition-093209367.html

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Philip Hamburger visited Kent, Ohio in 1971, one year after Ohio National Guardsmen murdered four Kent State students who were protesting US actions in South East Asia. Here's what one local interviewee said:

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2022

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Saturday said “no one can convince” her that the rioters behind the Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol were not anti-fascist protesters 

https://news.yahoo.com/rep-marjorie-taylor-greene-no-193748469.html

"As another example, the sting they did involving Gretchen Whitmer was fake. Just like those who instigated January 6. It was a fake deal. Fake. It was a fake deal," Trump said. . . . 

Trump also alluded to conspiracy theories about the Capitol riot being orchestrated by FBI agents, propagated by his allies, including Ted Cruz and Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson.

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-jan-6-riot-gretchen-whitmer-kidnap-plot-fake-cpac-2022-8

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l. E. Sissman 

Review of Joe McGinniss, The Selling of the President 1968

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And Finally:

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*  “All things are subject to a cycle of changes, which can be regarded as bi-polar, passing from a state of objectivity to one of subjectivity before returning to objectivity again. This can be seen as a form of oscillation, or a circuit around a wheel, and divides experience into the two halves of objectivity and subjectivity.”

(Got that?)

https://www.yeatsvision.com/Overview.html#AV