Via Kottke, we are invited to bookend this tumultuous year in geopolitics by taking a look back and a look forward to those who saw all this coming but were dismissed and maligned as scare-mongers by a growing movement of anti-alarmists through the lens of Greek myth appropriate for this tragedy befallen illiberal democracy. Writing for The New Republic, Toby Buckle addresses our collective infuriation by asking the reader to imagine being transported back in time to July of 2015, just after Trump announced his candidacy against Clinton. With the gift of hindsight but the curse of Cassandra—footnotes to Homer, you cannot prove you are from the future and are at a loss to convince anyone to take your warnings seriously. 
Were you to disclose the horror of the next decade, Trump’s election, the botched job handling the pandemic, the January Sixth insurrection, Trump’s reelection, the MAGA takeover of the Republican party, DOGE, soldiers on the streets, realignment of the world order, mass deportations, deflection, overturning civil and reproductive rights, etc, etc, etc and arriving at the Epstein files and at full-on fascism after eleven months, you would be rightly dismissed as hysterical, delusional to past people and regarded like the prophetess of Troy, given the ability to foresee events by Apollo but condemned never to be believed for not requiting the deity’s advances. Cassandras of course are not all women or the marginalised (though there is a certain element of pathologising misogyny with its anti-alarmist corollary being seen as masculine and reasonable) but comprise a majority of individuals of all sorts of backgrounds, but it’s a pejorative term used to shut down insight—and dialogue—and when used by the press as a scold is essentially a concession to meet the Nazis half-way. Though her story is the more familiar and sadly repeated to no effect one, Cassandra did have one lesser known compatriot, partisan in believing the Trojan horse was bad news in high priest Laocöon (see above), sharing Cassandra’s suspicions and begged his countrymen to light a fire under the horse to prove it’s not a trap. For his meddling, Laocöon was struck blind by Athena, whom was not on the Trojans’ side, and then he and his sons were strangled by a pair of sea-serpents for dramatic effect. The denizens rather took this divine punishment as proof that the priest was wrong to doubt the beneficence of Greeks bearing gifts. “Boy do I hate being always right…” more individual profiles in courage from Buckle at the link up top.
synchronoptica
one year ago: a year’s worth of data-driven observations (with synchronopticæ) plus more on effervescence
twelve years ago: Norwegian New Year’s greetings
thirteen years ago: New Year’s greetings
fourteen years ago: pyrotechnics plus a bleak economic assessment for the coming year
fifteen years ago: lucky charms
sixteen years ago: 2009 in review
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