Edward J Curtin

ED CURTIN—It is hard, I know, to hear an unbearable possibility: But suppose it were a performance, not just in the sense that Trump and Vance set Zelensky up, but as a coordinated reality TV show in which all the principal actors were performing from a script whose goal was the opposite of all the subsequent interpretations. A script that allowed for some improvisation, as comedians like Zelensky and reality TV stars like Trump are adept at. 

ED CURTIN—Today, the Little Tramp, has been replaced by big Trump and his sidekick, Elon Musk, owners and operators of the new AI Digital factory Internet system, posing as saviors of the Little Tramp.

Just the other day, Musk, with an imagined twinkle in his eye and little boy grin, tweeted out on his bullhorn X (Twitter): “We are on the event horizon of the singularity.”

By the “Singularity” is meant the time when the machines – computers and artificial intelligence – exceed human control and dominate society. For technologists like Musk and his ilk in and out of government and in Silicon Valley, the idea of a machine run world is heaven on earth.

ED CURTIN—Then this proclivity of mine toward philosophical thought and dark humor flipped in my mind as the pictures of dead and weeping Palestinian children swept in and tortured me in dreams. I had seen the photos and videos of the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians and felt sick and outraged afterwards. I have written against it many times. Yet as I wrote about this issue of nostalgia, I felt like a speculator in abstractions, and thought of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s experience when on January 14, 1967 he was at an airport restaurant thumbing through a Ramparts magazine and saw an article by the journalist William Pepper, “The Children of Vietnam” that featured photos of Vietnamese mothers holding dead and napalmed children.