Greg Fallis brings us a little Japanese history:
On the 9th of July in the year 869 (or, to use the Nipponese calendar, the 26th day of 5th month, 11th year of Jōgan) a massive earthquake took place off the coast of Honshu, followed by a devastating tsunami. A history of Japan written about three decades later describes the event:
[A] large earthquake occurred in Mutsu province with some strange light in the sky. People shouted and cried, lay down and could not stand up. Some were killed by the collapsed houses, others by the landslides. Horses and cattle got surprised, madly rushed around and injured the others. Enormous buildings, warehouses, gates and walls were destroyed. Then the sea began roaring like a big thunderstorm. The sea surface suddenly rose up and the huge waves attacked the land. They raged like nightmares.
In the aftermath of the destruction, coastal communities began to erect ‘tsunami stones’ marking the furthest extent of the inundation. The stones served three purposes; they were historical markers, they were memorials to the dead, and they were a warning to future generations.
And then adds the Trump Administration.
Right, this is where we return to Trump and Twitter. I think we can view Comrade Trump’s tweets as a form of tsunami stone. They comprise a historical record of his thoughts and behavior. In the future I hope they’ll serve as a memorial to the social and environmental policies the Trump administration are in the process of destroying. And I hope they serve as a warning, both to us in the next election and to future generations of voters.
Source: A Trinity College (CT) course on the subject of Japanese disasters
I appreciate the thoughtfulness and importance of Greg’s remarks, but I fear Twitter, like the entire Internet, is too much of the mist to serve the purpose. Those Japanese stones … I’ll tell you what. Go read Greg’s full post, it’s good. But those stones, selected, carved, moved, and erected through great and collective effort, are tangible symbols of the worries and concerns of people who were genuinely concerned about the welfare of their collective descendants. They didn’t come up with family stories and pass them down in uncertain fashion until they petered away. They took big fucking rocks, invested the time and effort to chip messages into them, and then erected them for all to see.
And, see, I don’t think the United States really has that sense of community, in both space and time, any longer. The right has split away into raging madness, chipping off human beings through the RINO process, there’s reports of oddball evangelical cults trying to engender the End Times, and denialism, at least on the right, appears to be an accepted philosophical norm. Behind it all lurks a theocratic movement which, if successful, would fundamentally destroy the greatest democracy in the world in service to a supernatural creature for which there is no evidence. Meanwhile, the left is too busy being superior to have much of an impact on the opinions of everyone else, and is even spawning the anti-democratic antifa movement. Add to the mix divisive efforts to stir up racism (I’ll be addressing that later today), and its a depressing mix.
Even if something as brutal as the tsunami Greg cites were to be inflicted on the United States through the incompetence of the Trump Administration and the GOP members of Congress, and their fundamental desire to deny reality in service to an incongruent vision, would we be capable of learning and reform? And how would we pass that warning on to future generations in a form shocking and visible?
Carve it into Mount Rushmore? A vision of Trump being overwhelmed by a wave of water?
