Panicked after the inauguration, I read and wrote in my journal for many hours of the tropical nights at my son’s house on a small island in the South China Sea. So peaceful. My mind and soul were not at all peaceful though: picking up news of what began happening the minute Donald Trump took office and reading histories of France, UK, Germany, Japan, and US in the 1930s as catastrophe approached. I was not at peace; I was in a state of shock…I had not quite believed it would come to this.

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Now, as one of the frogs in that huge pot where the water’s getting pretty warm, I’m surprisingly calm; my life pleasant-enough. I tried pulling away from the news for awhile after the initial panic, but that doesn’t work for me. So, now I’m studying—as though for a test: world history, geography, politics, philosophy. Perhaps relearning what I thought I knew would/will offer new perspectives and this sense of confusion and dread will let up.  

It’s odd though what has actually resulted from this first round of reading about the leadup to the 1940s catastrophe: World War II. For the first time in my life, I’m experiencing a deep and abiding curiosity about the historical details and timeline of the wide world of that war, rather than the war as part of bigger and smaller literary narratives. Here is what is astonishing to me: I am finding my focused reading satisfying and even calming. “Well, it doesn’t feel like very much can be done to slow the advent of another earth-shattering calamity, but for me, at least I can know and understand how disaster births and grows and explodes,” I say to myself. If only I can focus simultaneously and as easily on AI, drones, and the contemporary reincarnation of the same old bad actors, I will be one of the most laid-back folks around as we humans, and perhaps the planet, take our death lap.

So, The New York Times Complete World War II: 1939 – 1945… phew… I’m only to January 1941. Up in Koochiching County, Minnesota, I would be two-years-old in three months. My dad and two or three friends had built for us a three-room stucco house (no plumbing or electricity) on eighty acres of woods, swamp, and fields about 60 miles straight south of the Canadian border. My dad was a lumberjack, my mom a farmer. We were poor. In my mom’s diary, kept from 1938 until 1941, the war is never mentioned. Doesn’t that seem strange? They had a radio; maybe it just wasn’t the kind of thing about which one wrote in a farm diary, especially if you had a new baby. Come to think of it, most entries were about me. 

A German lived just down the road, about the distance of two blocks from us. He would later shoot my mom (not fatally), but that’s another story.

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Back to the war and my reading. And fodder for the dark chuckle of the day.  There must be at least two sides for every fight, right? In WWII that would be the Allies/good guys/liberal democracies (usually) and the Axis/bad guys/fascists.

Back in the Day (1939 – 1945 to be exact)

On the good side, the mostly liberal-democratic governments of:

UK/US/Soviet Union (not exactly a liberal democracy, but in a war, who’s counting)/France (until occupied)/China (fighting for its life against Japan/a mixed bag of ideologies at the time)

On the bad side, the fascist governments of:

Germany/Italy/Japan/Five other nations willingly (?) joined the Axis during the war: Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Croatia.

That was then, this is now. It is clear that the world is dividing up along those good guy/bad guy lines again. How different could the sides be, one might think; only 80 years since the end of WWII. I found it gloomily interesting to list those differences as we theoretically approach another ‘falling out.’

Since I access a number of reliable news sources on a regular basis, and did a quick and dirty scroll around the good old worldwide web for additional tidbits, I believe what I’m listing below is pretty accurate.

NOW 2025 (Today to be exact)

On the good side, the liberal-democratic governments of:

Germany/Japan/France/UK/Canada/Australia

On the bad side, the leaning-or full-on fascist governments of:

US/Russia/Israel/India/China (communist, not fascist, but certainly a major example of authoritarianism)/El Salvador/Argentina/A number of countries in Europe have strong hard-right, fascist-leaning parties (in fact, Poland’s just won an election) and Asia is not without its share, Myanmar comes to mind and Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos are not exactly democracies…but everything’s relative in politics and government, right? I won’t even dip into Africa where all is never well…but South Africa, while far from pure, is a democracy, fighting hard to stay that way. Yay, South Africa (my maybe-favorite country in the world).

This post is not intended to be a scholarly take on the situation, but after reviewing it several times, it feels accurate enough to stand behind. But, what it shows is absolutely shockingly unbelievable at some level…or would have been up until a few months ago. I guess I would just say…Believe it!

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In line with my ongoing amazement of how our days are divided between flashes or even whole storm clouds of fear, and then happy examples of the good life… here’s a pretty cake I baked a few days ago for my son’s birthday. It turned out to be too dry under its surface beauty—isn’t that often the way—so my new goal in life is to continue to search for and find the perfect pineapple upside down cake recipe for my ageing kid, who needs to know his only relatively-older mother is still concerned about his well-being.