A night shot of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.: Glynn Wilson

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. – How did the world get so fucked up?

Related question: How did humans become so stupid?

I hate to be the one to wax nostalgic about the great past. Resisting that sentimentality has defined my existence. Until now.

Not that I want to write cute little essays about playing in mud puddles barefoot on the farm and tying June bug legs to strings on an Alabama summer day. About catching fire flies in jars back when they were abundant. Or about picking horse apples from granddaddies tree and drinking the cold, spring water from a well in the country before the days of city water.

Now for sport we kill the dreaded lantern flies as they invade the forests of Maryland and devoir all the vegetation in site.

If heaven exists on Earth, it surely revealed itself over a cup of nice coffee with brown sugar and half and half before there was a Starbucks or an internet while reading the print edition of the Sunday New York Times by a park on the Southside of Birmingham. That was back when the Times had great columnists and a kick ass Science and Environment section.

(Just as I was writing this, I received an email notification that my digital subscription to the Times is going up in August to $23 a month. Do I keep it going? Or try to negotiate a better deal by threatening to unsubscribe?).

If there was a heyday in the internet era, it passed a long time ago, about the time Trump fooled enough voters to elect him president in 2016. Even though we got Doug Jones elected to the Senate in 2017 and Joe Biden elected president in 2020, the time of the promise of something free on the web contributing something toward a better future for humanity was passing. It’s all commercialized hoowee now, soon to be dominated by A.I. bots. Who still thinks this is going to be fun or enlightening?

There was a story in the Times the other day that I did not share at the time. I wanted to have more time to digest it. It’s about a trans woman now in jail in Maryland after becoming part of a cult of anti-Artificial Intelligence activists called the Rationalists. They believe A.I. will destroy humanity.

She Wanted to Save the World From A.I. Then the Killings Started.

I certainly know that it will put a lot of people out of work, rendering entire industries obsolete, including American journalism. And along with cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Food Stamps, it seems some of the people in charge in Washington are willing to go along with killing a lot of people to make way for running the government with bots.

The one thing that could have saved us was education and reading. Now people seem to have given up and stopped reading at all, content with a meme or a video of some amateur ranting and raving speculation about what this news story or that political development MIGHT mean.

What happened to news reporting and stellar writing by people who actually know what is happening and what it ACTUALLY means? Is it really more fun to speculate and guess, only to be proved wrong in a week, when by then, everyone forgets what the speculation was all about? Like the talking heads on cable TeeVee. They never go back and fix their mistakes or run corrections.

Such is life in Trump World, a world dominated by Google bots and Facebook memes and TikTok videos not worth the bandwidth to post them and watch them. A total waste of time and effort.

I was talking about this with a couple from Missouri I met recently in a campground. They were taking in the sites in Washington, all patriotic about the Fourth of July and the Revolutionary War that created this nation. Until they saw all the ugly fencing going up downtown and the security protocols in place just to watch the fireworks show.

They skipped it instead, and could not even watch the show on television. The mood had passed, and they seemed to feel about like I did, agreeing with Frederick Douglass.

Frederick Douglass and Me On the U.S. Fourth of July

Talking to them reminded me of where I was physically and emotionally last fall, camping in the Mark Twain National Forest in Western Arkansas and Missouri, when I consulted Twain’s archives and found a sentiment I could agree with.

“The 20th Century is a stranger to me,” Twain wrote once in his Notebook. To me, that’s how the 21st Century feels, like a stranger I do not recognize.

Ode to Mark Twain: The 21st Century Feels Like A Stranger to Me

The Jefferson Memorial on a spring night, 2024: Glynn Wilson

After a decade of exploring, photographing and writing about our great capital city, it holds no more allure for me. I can see the day when it will all be under water, when scuba divers will be the only ones to see the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, and wonder what happened to the promise of democracy in the 21st century.

The Parthenon in Athens, Greece: NAJ screen shot

If any humans survive in the 22nd century, a few might visit this place like some now visit the Parthenon at the Acropolis of Athens, Greece, or the Colosseum in Rome, Italy.

The Colosseum in Rome, Italy: NAJ screen shot

What a sad day that will be. It’s not all Trump’s fault. Blame Mark Zuckerberg at Meta and Facebook, Elon Musk at X (formerly known as Twitter), Jeff Bezos of Amazon and The Washington Post, and of course the Evil Empire itself, Google and YouTube.

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