A few months ago, the federal government announced it was appropriating 17.5 billion dollars to build ten new nuclear power plants by 2030, created solely for the purpose of generating enough additional electricity to power the rapidly burgeoning, and troublingly ubiquitous, data centers proposed for a host of small and medium cities across the United States.
This is troubling for so many reasons it’s difficult to know where to start. The data centers gobble up, not only power, but mega-gallons of water from their host communities. They hum, day and night, disturbing the sleep of those nearby. They cover acres of real estate in the hearts of the towns. And they feed the fortunes of those who, despite the fact they have money they can’t even dream of ways to spend, work, instead, to control our material lives, our elections, our policy makers and, I am certain, our dreams.
Additionally, despite decades of assuring us of the safety of nuclear power generation, we are still visited by nightmares of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima, not to mention our own Santa Susana, and the lingering illnesses still being discovered in neighborhoods near to that Ventura County area.
These choices reflect the kind of preferential decision-making that has characterized this country’s history for centuries.
Centuries. Lately, I have been struck by a theme I find recurring in more and more of our current American fiction. Authors seem fascinated with the possible memories of the land, itself, and the dirty secrets it has been forced to absorb, all the while suffering through its own poisoning and destruction.
In Land, a current best seller by Maggie O’Farrell, the author of Hamnet, map-making, the action by which humanity shapes and characterizes the land, is used by the British to erase and subjugate the Irish minority by stripping their land of its names and boundaries and simply reinventing identities and names to suit their own needs.
(Lake America anyone? By all means, let us wipe out the Iroquois word Ontario meaning “beautiful lake”, “great lake” or “lake of shining waters.” We eradicated, killed and forcibly removed the humans who spoke that language, now we must eradicate their legacy, their own names for the lands they protected and thought of as sacred. Of course, that would require renaming the state of Missouri, which I wouldn’t put past the big orange pretender in the white house, since he has actually mused about changing the name of the state of New Mexico to “New America”.)
By the end of O’Farrell’s novel, her protagonist is restless to rise up and tell the truth. Perhaps the land, itself, is feeling the same disrespect and anger. Which is the theme of the other novel I wanted to call to your attention.
In The Antidote, by Pulitzer finalist Karen Russell, the lands of Nebraska, which reflect a similar, and more violent, history of expropriation and massacre toward the Native Americans who were there, seem to be seeking retribution. The hordes of settlers came like the locusts, only they managed to also massacre and decimate jackrabbit, buffalo and indigenous human populations with impunity. They also, without thinking about it, plowed up all the vegetation which nature had used to hold the land together, turning it into dry dirt and making it easy for the violent wind to scoop it up and fling against them. Thus, the land, itself, deals out its great punishment, in the form of a massive, catastrophic, dust storm on April 14, 1935. The long, intentional, and casual amnesia of the populous about their multitude of crimes does not save them from death, starvation, loss of farmland and the mighty wrath of nature.
Is it possible that we are seeing our own natural world, our own lands, rising up in anger at our casual destruction of the environment, our pollution and poisoning of the air and the water and the very ground beneath our feet, our refusal to do anything to stop it because it might interfere with the ease with which we power our cars, our planes, and everything else we just can’t live without? Or, in the larger sense, our refusal to see that we have made up a third of what we tell as our story, hidden a third of it, and pasted it all together with the remaining third, mostly comprised of a carefully curated hodge-podge of self-serving facts.
We are being called now to pay the piper. Pay the piper? How many phrases have worked their way into our language as wise warnings from the past. “Pay the piper” is an aphorism based on the 13th century German legend of the Piper of Hamelin. The piper was hired by the mayor of the rat-infested town of Hamelin to play his pipe and lure the entire population of rats to their doom. Unfortunately, after the piper had successfully done so, the mayor refused his payment. Understandably angered, the piper then repaid the town which had cheated him by playing a tune to lure all of their children into a local cave, from which they did not return. Cruel, but effective, as are most of our tales of warning.
Perhaps the land wants us to wake up, these novels seem to be telling us, to face the truth and to turn our attention to caring for our world and its history, in the broadest sense of the word. To stop telling ourselves fanciful and half-constructed tales about being the greatest nation on earth and to honestly face the truth: this is America The Beautiful, yes, but it is also America The Forgetful, The Liar and the Ugly. We have used too much of our freedom, the books remind us, to limit and steal the freedom of others and their historic legacies. We had barely begun to face this in the 60s and 70s, which is why, no doubt, the current regime is hell-bent on getting us into history-erasing and selfish mode again.
We can do this, and the honest truth can, literally, set us free. We owe it to our land and all of its people to do no less.
Emoluments and Emollients
The Constitution of the United States has, within its first two Articles, two Clauses designed to prevent the president and other federal officers from benefitting personally from their federal positions. In Article One, Section Nine, Clause Eight, the Foreign Emoluments clause bars anyone holding an office of profit or trust under the United States from accepting any payment, profit, office or title from any King, Prince or foreign state without the consent of Congress.
The domestic emoluments clause, found in Article Two, Section One, Clause Seven, not only sets the president’s salary, but also bars the president from receiving any other payment or profit from the federal government or from any individual state.
These provisions are so rarely invoked, neither clause has been sufficiently litigated to provide any satisfactory or clear guidance. In the case of the current oval office invader, these clauses have been rendered all but useless by the fact that no president has ever so greedily and openly hugely profited from his office like this one.
From his first day in office, he made it clear that he was going to retain all of his investments in, and control of, a web of businesses, including cryptocurrency, (which, of course, has no real value except what people are foolish enough to pay for it), hotels, golf courses and more, many of them shared with foreign investors who are connected with foreign governments. In addition, he accepts gifts such as the “new and improved” Air Force One plane which, he has already announced, he would keep personally, after his regime has finally come to an end.
To add insult to injury, recognizing the growth and scope of the speculation markets, he has offered to sell early information as to what his next official decision might be, whether in the Middle East, the federal reserve, or tariffs, thus granting an early windfall in the speculation markets to anyone willing to pay six figures a year…to him.
His family is benefitting, as well. He and his sons, Don Jr. and Eric, along with the sons of Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy to the Middle East and Ukraine, launched World Liberty Financial as a digital coin and finance platform. The president also pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the founder and former CEO of the crypto firm, Binance, who had pled guilty to money-laundering crimes in 2023.
The president’s family marketed a novelty digital token shortly before his inauguration. Don Jr., in particular, netted more than 1.4 billion dollars just through these two types of partnerships. Eric Trump expanded the Trump organization’s real estate licensing business. The president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, received a presidential pardon for his crime of tax evasion, allowing him to retain the money owed to the government. The family Organization licensed its brand name for new developments tied to US foreign policy, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and India, and has extended its investments into foreign mining and rare mineral projects, in Kazakhstan, where Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s sons run the investment firm that worked on the deal. And on and on…
The founders were appropriately concerned about the influence of foreign and domestic bribes on decision making. The problem of a president growing rich while in office because he is in office didn’t seem to occur to them. Or to any president up to this one.
An emollient, though it sounds very similar, to the emoluments listed above, is a healing agent, such as a skin cream that softens and smooths. Just what we need now. A healing application to sweep this infection and his self dealing pimples out of office starting with a new congressional majority. I am starting to feel better, already.
