Who Will Preside Over America's 250th Birthday?

Guess whose essays Patrick Gunnels of Reading Epic Threads has been reading lately?

This is the latest one of my mine, which he read last night. I linked to the start at 17:04 in his thread. It lasts about 21 minutes. 

Like all his videos, he originally streamed it on his Youtube channel, but he deletes all his threads from Youtube immediately upon completion to avoid strikes against his channel, which would surely happen based on the content (including the essay of mine he reads here). He later posts them on Odysee.com, which is censorship free. It is an interesting time. So many creators getting banned. It truly feels like war. I feel honored that Gunnels has been reading me alongside the other brilliant people he reads.

It is humbling to have him read this. Lately I barely feel as if I can say anything intelligent at times. 

Here's the text that Patrick reads:

Dear Epic Threads,

Like all of you, I want Trump back in the White House as soon as possible. I want to find out that he has been in charge all along, by devolution or some other means. I want the Deep State and the Swamp destroyed and for the entire world to see it. I want everything fixed that has been wrong for so long.

Like many of you, I ALSO want Trump to somehow get another full uninterrupted term after the 2024 Presidential Election.  The WORST case scenario at the moment seems to be that we would have to wait until January 2025 to see him sitting in the Oval Office again.

I have another particular reason I want to see him get that second full term in 2024, and be in the White House through 2029. Namely, that would mean Trump would be President on July 4, 2026---the U.S. Semiquincentennial, the 250th birthday of the United States.

Hardly anyone has been talking about this upcoming date. Of course the media will not touch it. They barely mention the 4th of July anymore, except as a day to mourn our past. We have "Juneteenth National Independence Day" as its replacement. Our real national birthday was 1619, we are told.

But I have been obsessed with the semiquincentennial for several years now.  I not only remember what happened half a century ago during the Bicentennial of the U.S. in 1976, but I hold it in my memory as my favorite mini-era of American history in my lifetime.

Even many people who lived through that time (1974 to 1976) seem to have forgotten how big a deal it was. After all, it was only a commemoration.

But what a big deal it was. Those of you too young to remember it or born afterwards have no idea of the scope of the magnificent national party we held for two years running, a celebration of our founding spirit smack in the midst of some of the worst crises we had ever faced as a nation.

It was more than a big long Fourth of July celebration. It was, in so many ways, a national comeback.

By 1974 the United States was at an all time low of morale. Everyone felt it. We had come out of the chaos and upheavals of the Sixties---the shock assassinations, the violent riots, the leftwing bombings, the sexual revolution, the angry overthrow of traditions, and the apparently pointless carnage of war.

The Sixties were not just the feel good revolution people think of now. At the time they were felt as a national trauma. If you want to understand the dark side of the Sixties, and how disorienting they were, listen to the lyrics of the best song written about it---American Pie by Don McClean. It captures the feeling that we had afterwards, of being lost and unmoored in a new world where nothing was the same, and of wanting to go back to the simpler era when things made sense.

In the Seventies things just spiraled further out of control.  The humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam left people almost unanimous in feeling the U.S. was no longer the powerful nation it was. We had the Oil Crisis, which was probably even worse for the morale of the country. It left us feeling as if we were no longer a land of plenty. We were to be a lean nation of constraints. We had to start thinking small, not big. 

Then we had rampant inflation, which destroyed the purchasing power of our money. You felt it every time you bought groceries. We had unemployment and layoffs as factories closed. We saw our cities emptying out and eroding into crime and decay.  Abortion became the law of the land. Our Vice President resigned in disgrace over corruption.  We had skyjackings by terrorists who wanted to destroy us. Communism seemed to be gaining a foothold across the globe. The Russians overtook us in the Olympics. Our brilliant space program was dismantled. 

There were no more heroes, we were told. They had been blown away by assassins or left in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Flying the U.S. flag went out of fashion. We were told this was the new normal. 

America was on the ropes, seemingly one good punch from hitting the canvas. Our Pop Culture reflected this. My girlfriend who was born in 1974, and who grew up in a decaying Ohio watching very little television but PBS, was shocked when we watched a spate of 1970s reruns a couple years ago when we had only antenna television. 

"Everything was so MELANCHOLIC," she said, after watching her first episodes of Welcome Back Kotter, Good Times, and Alice. The characters were so unlike the ones on Seinfeld or Friends.

I told her: "In the Seventies the television characters had real-life problems. People had pain. They needed to commiserate."

There was amazing racial solidarity in this. Everyone knew that both black and white folk were suffering. We knew that we had to find a way to come together, but we didn't know what we were supposed to do to stop the avalanche hitting us.

One of the only upbeat t.v. shows from that era was Happy Days, which debuted at the start of 1974 and was an instant sensation. Every kid in school watched it, and we learned that we kids in the Seventies would never have as much fun as people did two decades before in the Fifties. 

By then we were already in the midst of Watergate, which would provide the coup de grace against our confidence in our political system. That summer we wound up with a new President, Gerald Ford, who had never been elected to any national office. At the start of that Presidential term he had been a House Representative from Michigan.

Then by the sheer coincidence of historical dates, a miracle started to unfold--- the nation started to find its founding soul.

It began slowly, almost imperceptibly. In the summer of '74, just a month before Nixon would resign, CBS began airing a nightly two minute spot after the first half hour of prime time. It was called "a Bicentennial Minute". Each night a different person---a politician, public figure, actor, or other notable person---would introduce the spot with the words that would become familiar to everyone across the country: 

"Two Hundred Years Ago today..." 

Then the narrator would describe a historical event, even a small one, that had occurred on that earlier date, accompanied by graphical illustrations.

As insignificant as it seemed, it helped launch the upcoming Bicentennial into a national craze. People wanted that. They craved a reason to change the national mood.

Over the next two years, the preparations for the 1976 event erupted everywhere. The famous Bicentennial star emblem, designed by Bruce Blackburn, and so quintessentially Seventies, was painted and displayed everywhere---on walls of buildings, on products sold in stores, on school projects of elementary school kids. It was accompanied by a mania for Americana items. People went overboard decorating their houses with early American decor to the point of kitsch. The Betsy Ross flag was common on front porches. We got educated on what Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams had done. School choirs sang songs about them. Crowds lined up in every major city to see the exhibits on the Freedom Train as it toured the country. We were supposed to be patriots and to honor the legacy of our founders. 

We knew the shameful history of slavery, and yet we still celebrated the story of America. Alex Haley's Roots was published in 1976. The airing of the mini-series adaptation would smash viewership records. Rather than reducing our patriotism, it augmented it. We thought of Roots as showing how far we had come. As a class project, my all-white sixth grade class in Iowa simulated being stacked like slaves on a slave ship as we had seen in the miniseries. It could have been right out of critical race theory exercises today. Yet we didn't think of it that way. We all shared in the arc of the story of Chicken George, the ex-slave in Roots who led his family to a future of land ownership and freedom. It was part of our national triumph. It was something we could all be proud of.

It was as if America had not only gotten up off the canvas, but had put up its fist again to fight, confident in its history and its unique role in the world. For the first time since 1969, rays of light were breaking through the darkness, even as some of the worst challenges of the Seventies were yet to come.

In many ways, the Bicentennial gave us the Presidencies of both Carter and Reagan, both of whom were healing in their own way.  For all his faults, Carter solidified our moral compass of national compassion--the best part of Bobby Kennedy---and most importantly, he re-established Christianity as the foundation of our culture. The late Phyllis Schlafly said as much. Reagan gave us back our swagger and confidence, and let us stand proud on the world stage again. He even got us back our oil. It was as if to come together to solve our problems we needed both sides of the political spectrum.  

Spectrum. An interesting word.

Of course the Deep State was already arranging its counterattack, but that would not start happening fully until after Reagan. 

Not surprisingly the Bicentennial mini-era of the mid Seventies was the time when an obscure New York real estate developer from Queens started to carve out his niche as a public figure. Thomas Wictor has theorized that Trump's current activities may be a fruit of his planning from that early epoch.

I get emotional writing about that era. Just remembering how awesome it was to experience it as a boy almost brings me to tears. A few years before that it would have seemed so improbable.  I got wistful remembering how during the Clinton Administration, they finally painted over the Bicentennial emblem on the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA. 

As far as I know there is only one Hollywood movie made during that era that puts the Bicentennial as central to its story. No one in Hollywood anticipated how big a deal it would be, and by the time they did, it was too late to make movies about it. 

No one saw it, that is, except for an obscure actor from the decayed streets of South Philly who wrote a screenplay about a boxer that leveraged America's giant birthday to provide its thematic background. He shopped it around to producers, getting rejected dozens of times until they agreed to make it on his terms, with himself in the starring role. The budget was so low that its creator had to tap members of his own family for supporting roles. I have read that during its production, the director and crew thought the movie would flop.

But it didn't flop, Like America, the hero of the movie starts out as down-and-out as he could possibly be. He is the flotsam of the wreckage of the broken American dream, reduced from being a prizefighter to breaking fingers for a loan shark while apologizing to his victims for what he has to do to them. All around him he sees nothing but despair and corruption. The people around him seem stuck in failure, in retreat from the world, getting by in their lowest register of character by assuming that life is a win-lose game.

Then, by some miracle of fate, the boxer gets a shot at redemption in the form of a prize fight with the world champion, who himself wants to make a marketing statement about the promise of America on its great birthday, albeit in a cynical and self-promoting way.

Like America, the down and out boxer grabs his shot. As the story unfolds, he not only gains back his own self-respect, but more importantly, he pulls every other character in the movie upward in his wake. His arc is the arc of all the other characters. His impeccability changes them, so much that even at the end, his powerful cynical opponent, who came into the arena taunting him while dressed like George Washington and Uncle Sam, tries to hold him up as a co-champion in triumph, all but insisting that the challenger actually won.

If you haven't seen Rocky in a while, it is worth re-seeing. It is NOT the movie people think it is from its sequels. For most of the story, it is a much quieter movie than you might remember. It seems to drift slowly through its first two acts, and builds up to its ferocious climax only in the final scenes, which are set, as it happens, in a place called the SPECTRUM.

Brilliantly, we hear the famous and inspiring fanfare by Bill Conti only for a few tantalizing bars at the beginning of the movie, a mere overture followed by a boxing bell in the dark, as if we ourselves are being thrust into the dark ring to face down an unknown opponent who is about to take a swing at us.

Then we hear that theme not at all until the midpoint of the story, in the famous training montage. Rocky starts his lonely shuffle through Philadelphia's back alleys, barely staggering to the top of museum steps in his first outing, but as the music builds we see his transition, until at last he is boldly sprinting while leading a squadron of kids behind him, racing up the steps to raise his fists in celebration as the music reaches its crescendo, witnessed by the sentinel ghosts of American history around him. 

Gonna Fly Now. Ultimately he doesn't need to win the championship match. By then he had already won.

Rocky is the Bicentennial in one person. He is the legacy of Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson, and Fredrick Douglas and Martin Luther King, sprouting up through the cracks of our broken, decayed national pavement like the irrepressible life force, rejuvenating the American promise by acting through honor, humility, and persistence of will. Even black people in the audience rooted for Rocky against Apollo Creed (whose name practically shouts paganism, while also mocking the Moon landings). And unlike Obama or Kamala, the great Carl Weathers---who might easily have won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for that performance---was truly Black. 

I don't have to tell you that right now in 2021 we are facing much deeper crises than we were even in the early Seventies. Somehow back then we had enough of the older generations who lived through the Depression and the War to prevent us from falling completely into national ruin. We had spiritual strength. We were down and out but we never got to the precipice itself, as we did in November 2016, when we almost lost it all.  

We now need that Bicentennial revival energy many times over. We need multiple miracles, to annihilate the evil forces that would tell us to surrender to the collectivist tides of history, that would have us say that America was a rotten project from the beginning.

And maybe we have gotten that shot. Maybe like in the movie Rocky, we are finding our miracle turnaround embodied in one man, the most improbable of characters, an impeccable man of honor masquerading as a sloppy buffoon to deceive his adversaries, granted to us by the prayers that every American has prayed throughout its history, on their knees begging God Almighty, for the sake of the world and for unborn generations, to have mercy on us and to sustain us in our darkest hours.

As in Rocky, our salvation seems to have depended on the instigation of one mortal man, behind whom we are now sprinting and climbing those steps, anticipating that moment of liberation, even perhaps a Biblical-scale Jubilee.

So I ask you, when the quarter millennial birthday of America arrives on July 4, 2026, who would you like to see presiding over that big party? That's what a President does after all. He (or she) presides. 

Yet I would trade that spectacle for Trump to emerge out of the shadows tomorrow and strut into the White House in triumph, the Swamp broken and drained in ways that we can barely imagine. If so, I'd gladly take a Noem or a DeSantis or someone else on our side, to launch those 250th birthday fireworks. 

But wouldn't it be the grandest thing ever if we could have Trump NOW and ALSO in July 2026?

How the school children of today might talk about that celebration many decades from now, when most of us are long gone. Some of them will get emotional in their recollections, realizing what we suffered through as a nation, and especially the ones among us who gave their lives, and the ones who never lost faith.

Through the night

With the light

Up above

Yours in the Holy Spirit,

Matt

Rain in the State of Maricopa

 We got some rain this morning. Last night the wind had come up at evening. Hearing it I went out to the porch to retrieve my rice paper screen, which now has two punctures from having been blow over by sudden bursts in the last few months. The punctures are such that it still functions well as a screen from the sun in the morning as it rises over the neighboring building.

But today no screen is necessary. We weren't sure if the sky last night was from the smoke of fires nearby or from an approaching front. It turned out to be the latter. We just got good twenty minute soaking. It was the first time I had heard solid rain in many months.

I write this while listening to Youtube videos about the on-going audit that is happening in Veteran's Memorial Coliseum, the old basketball arena. Everyone calls it the "Maricopa Audit," because it is happening only for this country, which happens to dwarf all other counties in the state, as it encompasses not only Phoenix but all of its suburbs and beyond. It is practically a state unto itself. It probably should be one---the State of Maricopa. People in the Youtube videos speak about it as if it were one.

The rain has now stopped and the clouds are breaking up. We hope it returns. We badly need it, as much to put out the fires as anything else.

On Verne

 I finally finished The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne a couple weeks back. I very much enjoyed it throughout most of the book until the end. I thought the end was a big disappointment. Among other things, I was mistaken that this book is a prequel to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. It's a sequel. But the time lime of events between the two books makes no sense historically. Chronologically they are in reverse order from the story events. 

It turns out this is a well-known knock against Verne. But turned me off at the end was the portrayal of Captain Nemo. It felt very anticlimactic. I suppose it was difficult to wrap up a story back then, when it was serialized. It was different that writing a book and publishing it all at once.

I went on after this to read Journey to the Center of the Earth by Verne, because we have been spending so much time watching the Icelandic volcanos on Youtube (it is playing right now on our Chromecast). This is one of the most harrowing books I have ever read. It made me uncomfortable through the whole story. The ending was rather impossible. I'm glad I read it. Would be hard pressed to recommend it to most people. At times it felt like a cross between Dante's Inferno and the part of Tolkien where they go underground in the mines. 

Right now I'm attempting Twenty Thousand Leagues. I'm about a third of the way through it. All of Verne's stories have this in common--he puts his characters in impossible situations of life-and-death and somehow has them survive. Lots of stress. There is an "all is lost" episode near the beginning and then one again at the one. 

I wonder when I'm done if would have the guts to read From the Earth to the Moon. That doesn't sound stressful at all, right?

In Tribute of William C. Schieve, Co-Founder of the International Association of Relativistic Dynamics

 Last year in June 2020 I had the privilege of attending the biennial IARD conference as a participant and to give talk. Because of the world situation, the talk was a virtual one over Zoom, as was all of our talks. I think it can be said accurately that we were able to capture the spirit of the organization online, at least for this one time. Yet there is no substitute for personal meetings in the long term to foster the joyful interchange of scientific ideas and knowledge.

As I have done much active physics work in years, certainly nothing worthy of a real conference talk, I decided to devote my talk to the organization itself, and the history of our conferences. As such I got the pleasure of telling many people who have been attending for years, but who knew little of the origins of our conference, about the first one back in 1998, held in the suburbs of Houston, in a modest motel next to a miniature golf course. The motel had a small conference room into which we gathered and gave our talks. In the evenings we walked to nearby restaurants along the suburban road.  

The best part about telling these origin stories was mentioning the men involved in this, who brought us all together that first time and started us on our trajectory. They included our hometown organizer John Fanchi, Tepper Gill, and Larry Horwitz, as well as his graduate student, Martin Land, who serves as our current organizational president. 

I came there as a postdoc fellow of my advisor, William C. Schieve of the University of Texas at Austin. Along with Larry, he was perhaps one of the two twin pillars around which the organization was founded, as means to present papers and share ideas on the relativistic theory they had developed together over several decades. 

 When I gave this talk last year, highlighting some of the work I had done with Bill many years ago, some of which I had presented at that conference, Bill had already been retired form physics for many years. I had last seen him at his retirement banquet in Austin 2012.  I knew it would not be possible for him to have attended our conference in 2012. It was delight to share my memories of my beloved advisor with people who had never met him.

As it happened I was particularly glad to have given this talk when I did, as it was only three months later that I heard that Bill had passed away at age 91 at his home out in the Hill Country of Texas, which he loved so much.

I don't intend to give you a full biography of Bill's life, even of his scientific career. For such a summary, I would defer to you the one compiled by his UT colleague Mel Oakes which he has submitted to the Physical Review.

Instead I wish to add to my conference talk from last year by telling you a little about this remarkable man in a personal sense, and how that has to do very much with our organization and its unique conferences that we have come to cherish. 

By the time I met Bill in 1989, as one of my graduate professors teaching my quantum mechanics course, he had been at the UT Physics Department for 25 years, which was as long as I had been alive.  By then he had completed his transformation from the clean-cut young physicist of the 1960s, the one I see in pictures from his early career, into the quirky, loose and offbeat man who shuffled into the classroom wearing a Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and sandals and begin filling the chalk board with a sporadic Jackson Pollack-like tapestry of equations of bras and kets, creation and annihilation operators. and perturbation expansions. 

Looking at him, and listening to him as he narrated his lectures, one might be forgiven for thinking he was the quintessential absent-minded professor, loose in his thoughts and disconnected in this ideas. In this one could not be further from the truth.

One quickly learned that this man who seemed at times so deep into thought as to be into his own world of amazement at a theory was not detached from his surroundings but keenly embedded into everything that was happening. Instead of scatterbrained, he possessed a rock solid and accurate recollection of the deepest nooks and crannies of every bit of theory he had explored and every experimental fact he had encountered.  

One learned that despite his Professor Slacker appearance in the classroom, his colleagues in the department, including the ones who neatly ironed shirts, and even the ones who wore three-piece suits, treated him a respect that would have puzzled the casual observer.

Bill might listen to you talk, his head half cocked as if perhaps in his own world, and at the end he could utter one sentence, draw up reference a paper he had read years ago but which was filed into his meticulous system of recollects, and upon tracing down the reference, one would learn that remark was exactly correct and on point.

From Bill I learned that physics is a contact sport, and he taught me how it is played. By that I mean that for physics to stay what it is, physicists must mercilessly challenge each other's ideas, without prejudice or personal feelings. It must be so, or else it will be overwhelmed by the torrent of falsehoods that would be indulged by any bending of the rules of truth.

In some ways, Bill's appearance and demeanor were a disguise that hid his keen mind that would leap from one idea to another nimbly, and correct errant falsehoods in the next breath.

Yet despite the Hawaiian shirts, he was at once to me the epitome of the old school, even Old World, physicist. He loved being called Herr Doktor Schieve. He was a living link to the European and American physics of the post war decades. His secretary, for many years the able Annie Harding, prepared his telephone calls for him. Long into the 1990s, he referred to email by its old name bitnet long after the name had disappeared, as if it were a still innovation that he didn't need for his work. He left such type sof communication for his graduate students. But he knew exactly how to turn the crank of publishing, and get journal articles in print in the practical way.

In retrospect, the Bill of that time seems like the epitome of the post-counterculture Austin that was about to make it the mecca of slackers, including misfit graduate students like me who had shown up looking to be creative and explore the fringes of intellectual achievement.

One hundred and thirteen degrees

 This is the hot part of the year here---June. Today our air conditioner stopped blowing cool air. I walked over to the office and told them about it. They put it a service request. Later it seemed to be working again so I walked back over and told them to cancel the work order. Around here such a work order is classified as an emergency.  The woman at the desk, who was in the midst of pitching the complex to a new prospective tenant, said "Great, I'll cancel the work orders for that part of the complex." Turns out we were just the first of many to complain. That's due to Ginger's hypersensitivity to heat. She noticed it almost immediately when it stopped blowing cold. Later we got an email from the staff saying there had been a power surge, which had responsible for the outage.

Among Many Ironwoods

 It has been an emotional month---full of many swings up and down as I cope with various personal situations.

Part of the salvation during this has been daily walks. The loss of my private spot in the undeveloped desert prompted me to begin exploring the many trails near where I live. This has involved hiking in the desert during the hot part of year.

My first walks were ones from my front door, on the trails in the ranch subdivision where I live. In one of my first walks, I found myself meandering up the bed of a very wide wash between two housing subdivisions. There I found many ironwoods in bloom for May, some of which provided shade for me, although none were quite as perfect as the one that is now off limits to me. Nevertheless it was a bit of joy amidst an otherwise stressful month.

Soon I began wandering up in to the trails that go up into the nearby preserve in the McDowell Mountains. I discovered how dry the desert becomes, when you leave the vicinity of any sort of vegetation. It was as if I could feel the moisture being pulled out of me.

Now I have graduated to driving to trailheads near me and wandering in the open desert far from houses. This morning I went about five miles on fairly flat ground.