Month: July 2025

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

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In a very real sense, the world that anyone of us who’s over fifty grew up in no longer exists except as a memory and a reference point by which to reckon the current acceleration of change.  Things like newspapers, television advertising, most brick-and-mortar stores and even paper money effectively don’t exist anymore.  The whole of life in the most prosperous nation on the planet has been upended in such a way that it has disrupted every facet of life.  Young people aren’t getting well-paying jobs in the numbers needed to sustain institutions like marriage, parenthood and homeownership.

The truth is the tech revolution threatens to destroy the way of life in this country by eliminating the need for a good chunk of the jobs formerly filled by the American middle-class.  This is a crisis that is orders of magnitude greater than when the industrial revolution introduced mechanical power to replace horses, typewriters replaced scribes and oil displaced wood and coal as fuels.  There are millions of people who grew up in middle-class families who live in their parents’ basements, and can’t make enough money to move out, and have no prospects of having families of their own.  Think about that.

Donald Trump wants to make America great again.  The only way that can happen is to figure out how to provide gainful employment for the majority of Americans.  This country only became powerful because the majority of its citizens existed above the poverty line.  If that ceases to be the case we will see a revolution here.

Trump’s solution is to reshore manufacturing jobs that had been sent to Asia.  There are a lot of questions associated with that idea.  How quickly can it be done?  How many jobs will there be.  How well will they pay?  Of course I don’t claim to have all the answers.  In fact, no one does.  But I have the sense that he’s on the right track.  Manufacturing has been an enormous engine for bringing places like China, Vietnam and India out of the depths of poverty and into at least the “second world.”  All that is really necessary is for U.S. industrial policy to include sufficient positive and negative incentives for American companies (and German and Japanese and Taiwanese and Korean) to move their manufacturing operations back here.

In a real sense this is an inflection point for this country.  We won’t stay where we currently are.  The old economy and those who worked in it are going away.  Either we replace what’s here with a restored industrial landscape or we allow the future to be stolen from our children and grandchildren and watch America turn into a feudal state with haves and have-nots sharply separated into a small aristocracy and a large but shrinking underclass of underemployed surplus human beings.

I’m betting Trump can do it.  He’s broken the hold on things that the Deep State previously had and he’s getting things done.  If he can avoid being assassinated in the next three and a half years, he has the potential to save this wonderful place.

Why the Delay?

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Congress passed the 2025 Rescission Bill last Friday.  And that was on the final day allowed under the special rules for a rescission bill.  What isn’t as well publicized is that President Trump has not yet signed the bill into law

The Apocalypse of Legacy Media

“All government funding for PBS and NPR, including their local affiliates, has been eliminated by recent Congressional votes. Trump has not yet signed the rescissions package into law, but it has been sent to his desk for signature after final passage by Congress. This will lead to a significant reduction in local programming; however, it is believed that national programming will survive due to other revenue streams.”

Now I find this very annoying.  I’ve been waiting on this sign-off for the better part of four days.  Maybe Trump plans a special signing ceremony and some kind of celebratory gesture; possibly slaughtering an ostrich made up to look like Big Bird and then roasting it on a spit over a coal fired stove.

Well, let’s hope this delay is over soon.

Echoes of a Summer Night

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Only a single week of July left.  One last draught of fiery perfection.  Drink deep the heat and light and dark of real summer.  The lightning bugs flash from the grass and trees and trigger memories of a young boy collecting those living phosphors and watching them far into the night.  Where do those memories reside in my old brain?  What other memories do they trigger?  People who have been gone from this world for decades.  But I can still hear their voices and see their expressions.  Kind and cruel, smart and slow, funny and humorless, warm and cold, sane and mad.  And all these traits mixed in many combinations and proportions.  All those summer nights, all those years ago.

All those parties and occasions where we talked about the future and all the things we wanted to do and all we hoped to achieve.  And some of it we did.  And some of it worked out as we hoped.  But so many things fell by the wayside and some spectacularly so.  But those of us left must keep moving forward because there is no other way.  We just keep time to the beat of the days and seasons ticking by cycle after cycle trying to keep up with the pace and maintain a relevance with the waves of younger and livelier participants in the dance.

I was talking to my young granddaughter about her vacation in Maine.  I asked her what she liked best and she said she loved it all; the sand, the water, the sun, the amusement park rides, the carnival foods, the ice cream shop.  So, I told her the story of how we came to pick that beach; how an old friend, an old engineering friend who was more than thirty years older than me answered a question.  I asked him where I could find a nice long beach with white sand that wasn’t horribly crowded, expensive and pretentious like all the New England beaches I had tried.  And once we gave his recommendation a try, our kids went there for years while they were growing up and now her mom was doing the same for her.

As I was telling her I could see she didn’t think it was that amazing a story.  But I wondered if in twenty or thirty years she might be reminded of this story while she was talking to one of her descendants.  Maybe she’d tell her kids about their crazy old great grandfather who told stories about even more ancient people and events and always made sure there was some extra rich ice cream available for dessert and always had time to push a kid on a swing, pick berries or provide a butterfly net for catching lightning bugs.

Yep, summer is reaching its crescendo.  A few more parties and outings and then fall and the great seasonal ritual of death.  The fall equinox and Halloween and battening down the hatches.  I see that Guillermo del Toro has a Frankenstein movie coming out in November.  Maybe I’ll give that a try.

Civic Nationalism 2025

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In the second quarter of the twenty first century in America, nationalism is the dominant ideology that we hear about.  Sometimes it’s equated with populism.  Sometimes it’s broken down into identity nationalism (white nationalism, black nationalism, La Raza, etc.), there’s even religious nationalism out there.

But where does that leave us civic nationalists?  And is it just one thing?  Or are there multiple definitions and multiple groups using the term differently?  Well, there probably are.  And I’ve never done a deep dive of exactly what I believe the definition of an American is.  And that’s probably because other than finding it by accident and naming it after one of us, Italians aren’t really the primary architects of Americanism.

The Brits started this show.  They came over at Jamestown and Plymouth Rock and they fought the Indians and fought the French and finally fought the British to make it America.  And they fought some more Brits and the Spanish and the Mexicans and even the Canadians(!) to make this a world power.

Eventually they brought in the Irish and the Germans and the Scandinavians to work in the steel works and the coal mines and build the railroads.  And to fight the Civil War.  And since they look closely enough like Brits no one cared after a couple of generations.

But when the Italians and the other Southern and Eastern Europeans showed up, they were different enough that everyone could spot them and grumble about “those durn foreigners.”  So, it took them four generations to be accepted in the club.  Well, what can you do?  People are suspicious of what they don’t recognize as their own.

Well, okay, so now I guess, I’m kind of, part of, the club (sorta kinda).  Maybe not to everybody’s liking but at this late state in the American Empire most of the people who have been here for only a couple of generations would think I’m as American as the Fourth of July.  And I am.  The descendants of the Brits in New England don’t believe in this thing called nationalism.  They’re globalists.  They think loading up America with people who don’t speak English and don’t want to be American is okay.  In fact, better than okay.  They want to eliminate the idea of America because they’re ashamed of their history and want to destroy the country they live in.  So here I am a fifth generation Italian American stuck with trying to wave the flag for the people who still believe in this project.

Of course, I’m also hemmed in on the other side by the real descendants of the Brits who haven’t turned globalist.  The good old boys consider anyone whose people haven’t been here for three hundred plus years to be Johnny-come-latelies.  And maybe they’re right.  But honestly, I don’t imagine it makes any difference.  Unsorting the ethnic grab bag that this country has become doesn’t seem to be a realistic project.

But what then is civic nationalism to me?  Well, part of it is having an identity tied to the American project as it has emerged over the long history of this country.  That means embracing Jamestown and Plymouth Rock.  It also means embracing the expansion westward with all the cruelty and pain that meant for the settlers and the Indians.  It means embracing all those people who built the country and fought its wars and allowing for their descendants to have a claim to being called Americans as long as they agree to become Americans.  They have to stand up during the Star-Spangled Banner at baseball games and put their hands over their hearts and sing the song.  They have to have cookouts on the Fourth of July and watch the fireworks.  And they can’t ally themselves with the globalists who bad-mouth George Washington and Thomas Jefferson (and especially not Christopher Columbus!) and say that America is a racist country and all that other jazz that the leftists are always spouting.  And it means respecting the laws and especially the laws we have for coming here.  Specifically, we have to abolish the notion that just being a human being gives anyone the automatic right to come to America and be an American.  We get to invite or not invite who we want or don’t want.  It’s an exclusive club and it should be thought of as a great honor to be allowed in.

So that’s my idea of civic nationalism.  Americans respect their heritage and respect the laws and customs of this land and don’t trample on the rights of other Americans.  And we give our allegiance to this country and not the places that our ancestors came from.  That’s it.