On the cusp
History was never a subject of interest for me. It didn’t matter whether it was Ancient, American, Swiss or Provolone. But this was different. The 2024 election came down to a choice between the price of eggs and “they’re eating the cats”, versus the future of our democracy. Everyone knew about the high cost of everything and (most) didn’t really believe that someone was eating the pets, although that sounded pretty nasty. The future of our democracy, especially considering the upcoming 250th anniversary, sounded serious but vague. But what did that really mean?
You can read the Declaration of Independence (or better yet, “The Greatest Sentence Ever Written” by Walter Issacson) or the Constitution and not see the word “democracy”. You can watch the news or Ken Burns documentaries. You can Google or ask Copilot, to explain what the Democrats meant when they said it over and over again, “this man is a threat to our democracy!”
We now have a much better idea of what that means. Masked police, grabbing people off the street. Restrictions of free speech and the press. Blatant disregard for court orders. Undermining the so called, co-equal branches of government. Election interference. Unbridled corruption. Unilateral exercise of military force. Cult-like adoration for a supreme leader who calmly asserts that, “my own morality, my own mind” are the only limits of his power.
Since I had no idea what words like “emoluments”, “habeus corpus”, or “subpoena” really meant or came from, and wondered about the practice of “pleading the Fifth”, and how gerrymandering and the filibuster had anything to do with the price of eggs or an open border … I decided to try to educate myself, and then share what I learned. That’s what this is about.
Note: much of the content on these pages was generated through the use of ChatGPT and Claude, and then scrubbed and organized on this site.
