Patriot Realm

While most Americans were calling this past April 18 “Tax Day,” there were a few people who remembered that that day was also the 247th anniversary of Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride.

The British Royal Governor of Massachusetts received intelligence that the American Colonial Militia was stock-piling weapons in Concord, Massachusetts, and he dispatched the newly arrived British Army to confiscate these weapons in order to preemptively stop any rebellion before it started.

It was 1971 and a cold winter's day in New Zealand's central volcanic plateau. An area with abundant lakes and it was a yachtie's paradise. My parents owned a house on Lake Tarawera - a most forbidding yet beautiful lake. But was renowned for treacherously mischievous winds that could change direction, change speed and taunt even the most seasoned of sailors. 

My brother and I were keen yachties and, even at 15 years of age, I fancied myself as a bit of a seasoned veteran. ( As you do when you are young and impervious to fear.) My older brother, then about 19 years old, had joined me for a quick afternoon sail before heading home to a warm fire and the comfort of our parent's lakeside home. 

When Benjamin Disraeli said “I must follow the people. Am I not their leader? “ he was on the money.  Leaders do not seek to create a new world of their vision, but to preserve or improve the vision that the people already have and hold dear. Or they may seek to create the vision that the people have.

Either way, it is not THEIR vision; it is the vision of the People.

Trump got this. He understood that his role was not to ask his People to follow him but rather to allow the American People to get on with their lives, make money, make babies and make memories of which they could be proud.

His role? To Follow His People.

On Earth Day, a 50-year-old environmentalist and photographer from Colorado named Wynn Alan Bruce lit himself on fire outside the US Supreme Court.

Friends of Bruce, who subsequently died, said he was worried about climate change.

In his classic dystopian novel 1984, George Orwell famously wrote, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.” This striking image served as a potent symbol for totalitarianism in the 20th Century. But as Caylan Ford recently observed, with the advent of digital health passports in the emerging biomedical security state, the new symbol of totalitarian repression is “not a boot, but an algorithm in the cloud: emotionless, impervious to appeal, silently shaping the biomass.” The new forms of repression will be no less real for being virtual rather than physical.