Editor’s Note: Point Loma chimes in with an appreciation of the weekend madness. I have lived 1968 once already. It is a pity we seem to be doing it again. As I recall, it wasn’t that good the first time.
– Vic

Washington DC, Burning

I don’t know about you, but this feels so…1968.
Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain supposedly said “…history never repeats itself but it often rhymes.” While attribution to Twain has never been verified since his death in 1910, other people attribute it’s popularization in today’s culture to Canadian Artist John Robert Colombo who used it in the first four lines of an innovative poem written in 1970 with a format based on quotations to wit:
A SAID POEM [1]
(for Ronald and Beatrice Gross)

“I have seen the future and it doesn’t work,” said Robert Fulford.
“If there weren’t any Poland, there wouldn’t be any Poles,” said Alfred Jarry.
“We aren’t making the film they contracted for,” said Robert Flaherty.
“History never repeats itself but it rhymes,” said Mark Twain.

Think about it – we just watched a historic space launch yesterday, rioting in cities across the country, all while are still embroiled in what seems to be never-ending war against shiftily relentless enemies in lands far, far away. The Russians and Chinese are our enemies, and the economy has gone into the shitter. The National Guard and most likely the Army has been called out to enforce order in major cities around the country, and after watching all of this bullshit on cable last night I turned off the trigger lock on my S&W. A sitting President is besieged on all fronts, even the White House is being assailed and most likely contemplating his re-election prospects. Could a Kent State incident be next, when the good guys trying to protect us against the rioters and looters, say “enough!” and open fire. That pretty much stopped the campus riots. Maybe we are actually going to find out why DHS stocked up on all those armored vehicles and millions of rounds of ammunition a few years ago.
Where is Dick Nixon when we need him, much less Ronald Reagan?

Spacex-NASA Crew Dragon Flying Wing on the ISS, 31 May 2020

Against this searing backdrop was the successful launch of the Spacex Crew Dragon yesterday on the Demo-2 Mission. It should have been a feel-good moment in an era that doesn’t even bring into account the quarantine and human carnage being wrought by COVID-19. That is new, or at least something that hasn’t been seen in over a century since the Spanish Flu.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve had about enough of living in interesting times, and re-living some of the worst of them, all at once. If you go to the web site I footnoted above, there are a lot of more interesting propositions for the origin of the Mark Twain quote. I found another spookier one that is worthy of Marlow – this from the October 1845 publication of Volume 10 of “The Christian Remembrancer” as what they called a thematic precursor:[2]

“The vision recurs; the eastern sun has a second rise; history repeats her tale unconsciously, and goes off into a mystic rhyme; ages are prototypes of other ages, and the winding course of time brings us round to the same spot again.”
Crew Dragon just docked at the ISS, time to get on with building a brighter, more lucrative, and disease-free future…
I remain your faithful servant.

[1]Source: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/
[2]Ibid.

Copyright 2020 Point Loma
http://www.vicsocotra.com