November 22, 2024
Owl in America is a series of letters tracing the actions of the current U.S. administration from the perspective of an environmental lawyer. These notes follow how, in a time of rapid political and ecological change, governmental decisions are felt in the living world.
Hi all~
Today’s note will depart from the usual environmental focus, but I think it’s relevant to our struggle to live in a sane society, which is the only way we’re ever going to figure out how to exist properly on this planet.
This tangent was sparked (as is often the case) by Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter of November 21, 2024. Overall, her piece examines how the pattern of appointees to top Trump leadership positions is enacting what On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder calls a “decapitation strike.” According to Richardson and Snyder, we need to look at this raft of incompetents and criminals not individually, but as a first wave in the oligarchs’ push to render the U.S. government ineffectual so they can dismantle it.
Richardson quotes Snyder:
“Imagine that you are a foreign leader who wishes to destroy the United States,” Snyder writes. “How could you do so? The easiest way would be to get Americans to do the work themselves, to somehow induce Americans to undo their own health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence. From this perspective,” he explains, “Trump's proposed appointments—Kennedy, Jr.; Gaetz; Musk; Ramaswamy; Hegseth; Gabbard—are perfect instruments. They combine narcissism, incompetence, corruption, sexual incontinence, personal vulnerability, dangerous convictions, and foreign influence as no group before them has done.” (Letters from an American)
While alarmed at the implications, I’m not exactly surprised. Lawyers tend to be Cassandras, always hoping the possibilities we foresee will never come to pass. It’s part of our job to prepare clients for the worst, even though they sometimes don’t want to hear it, or believe us.
But I don’t claim any overarching wisdom on the direction of the American project; for that, I rely on writers like Richardson, Snyder, and Cassandra-in-Chief, Sarah Kendzior. She’s been telling us what we had coming for years. Her books Hiding in Plain Sight and They Knew are essential reading for those with the sense that it’s rotten from the top down, no matter the political party in power. They trace how international networks of the wealthy and powerful have been working a long con for decades, in Kendzior’s words, “stripping down the United States and selling it for parts and trying to convince ordinary Americans that it was their own idea.”
The last paragraph of Richardson’s November 21 piece reminded me of something I’d read a few months ago from Kendzior, a piece about the loss of the actual internet data that comprises the current historical record of our culture. Richardson mentions an effort to get Americans to keep their own economic records: of the costs of goods and services, starting now, and how they change in years to come, plus noting where new businesses are thriving, how the employment numbers look in their areas, and so forth. She writes, “Keeping track would help preserve those projects in the face of threatened Republican cuts and at the same time prevent Trump from being able to claim more credit for his administration than it has earned.”
These kinds of citizen records (which is part of what I am trying to do with this series) would also prevent this knowledge from being memory-holed in the future. Already, records of interactions on Twitter have been deleted, not only by Musk, but also by users departing the platform (deleting your post history upon leaving Twitter/X is something Kendzior cautions against). For her part, Kendzior writes about going offline for ten days on vacation, only to find upon her return:
The website for MTV, which housed over two decades of music journalism and clips, was erased, even from the internet archive. The archives of Comedy Central followed, including the shows that had informed my generation about the Iraq War and Bush administration corruption: The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.They were gone, and their real-time documentation of war crimes was gone too. (Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter)
I went to see for myself what she’s referring to. I can’t find any archives at all on Comedy Central, as she notes, as it’s apparently now just a streaming service for recent shows. I did find Amazon Prime listings for The Daily Show as far back as 2000. Funny: the first one I clicked on was recorded on the day of Al Gore’s concession to George W. Bush on December 13, 2000; but like all the rest up until 2023, it was unavailable to purchase or stream.
And it’s not just video archives disappearing. Sometimes one news source gets absorbed into another and part of the absorbed archive disappears. I was fairly shocked to discover from writer Lloyd Alter at the publication Carbon Upfrontthat when Treehugger acquired Mother Nature News, most of his archive of work at MNN was deleted. (Luckily, Alter had saved most of it and has republished some of it on Substack.)
On a smaller scale, when a certain news conglomerate purchased my local paper, they laid off the opinion editor, stopped accepting and printing letters to the editor, and cancelled my monthly column on forest defense, along with every other regular opinion column. A month or so later, they deleted the opinion section from the site, including all the columns the paper had published plus decades of residents’ letters. These bits of less-formal writing can give later readers real insights into what regular people were dealing with, worried about, or fighting against in their time; added up, they reflect the history of a town or region.
In a Q&A published several months before the election, Kendzior shared her worries about where this erasure of our shared history and culture might lead:
Before I started writing extensively about the United States, I studied the former Soviet Union, and one of the things I focused on was a massacre [committed] by the government of Uzbekistan against the people of Uzbekistan that the government then lied about, and said “That never happened. We never did that. You’re making it up.” But there was all this documentation, and it’s because citizens bothered to write down their recollections, share their photos. [Uzbeks] posting things online [is] one of the reasons there’s a historical record of that event at all. The government tried so hard to erase it, and they couldn’t. So I’ve always thought there’s value in citizens archiving their own memories of a particular historic time. It contributes to a broader goal even if, in that moment, we might not realize how important it is. It means something for the future. (Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter)
I vaguely recalled an Atlantic piece from that far-distant past dark age called The Pandemic, about the way the internet’s architecture has led to “holes in humanity’s knowledge.” After a bit of searching, I dug it up. It’s called “The Internet Is Rotting,” and I’d recommend it to those who might be interested in how the natural tendency of internet data to decay, when combined with the intent to obfuscate that Kendzior worries about, presages a real crisis in our ability to maintain a history of our times through the coming years of turmoil.
It’s in this mode of thought that I decided to share how I am doing my bit to preserve one small part of the history of these next few years.
- I am writing here as frequently as I can, about things I think we’d like a record of in years to come, and I will save all these posts on my personal computer and on an independent cloud server.
- I am maintaining a copy of every source I refer to: every newspaper and webpage I cite is saved in non-editable PDF form, again, on my computer and on a cloud drive.
- I’ll also save copies of relevant lawsuits, court filings, and administrative records as I come across them in my research.
One last thing: a recommended podcast for your listening pleasure. I enjoyed this episode of 90 Miles from Needles in which host Chris Clarke interviews botanist Dr. Naomi Fraga about two rare desert plants and the challenges facing them, including renewable energy development. It touches on many of the themes we discuss here.
From Chris’s intro to what he’ll be focusing on in the months and years ahead:
“We will be covering what we expect the desert to be facing under a Trump administration, and it should be complicated. We’re going to have a president who said he wants to completely gut all federal agencies and replace people who’ve devoted their lives to serving the public with their expertise, even if we often disagree with them, and replacing those people with ideological allies who may or may not have a single qualification in the area that they're being hired for. It's going to be a wild ride for the next four years.
Now we are working to put together a public event, remote attendance kind of thing, Zoom conference on the topic of what do we do now, and we will let you know about that right here as soon as we have it set up. In the meantime, life goes on. The sun rises and sets still. The desert is beautiful still. The desert is still under threat.”
[90 Miles from Needles Podcast, S3E33: Dr. Naomi Fraga on the Frontlines of Botanical Conservation]
Have a good weekend, and talk to you next week,
Owl
Sources:
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-21-2024
https://snyder.substack.com/p/decapitation-strike
https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/the-great-unconformity
https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/power-lies-the-america-that-made
https://web.archive.org/web/20210703023650/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/06/the-internet-is-a-collective-hallucination/619320/
https://lloydalter.substack.com/p/is-nostalgia-stealing-our-kids-future
*Inspired by historian Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from an American
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