When up can be down, and down can be up

I collect old Life magazines that lay out the story of 20th century America with some of them going back to the very beginning.

Opening them is a revelation.

They are time capsules — perfectly preserved moments of history — where the reader can process the desperation of the news and the consumerism of the culture, and know how everything turned out — not just next year, but for 80 long years afterwards.

There is an edition of Life from 1946 that shows a Palestinian man on a camel on the cover:

Inside the magazine is an astonishing spread of dead Nazis, which is billed as a last look at some of the greatest criminals in history facing justice at Nuremberg.

Among them was Hermann Goering.

Access journalism is not a new phenomenon.

Each edition is a perfectly preserved reflection of American life, culture, anxiety and hope.

They are testament to our bigotries, and the Americans who are invisible inside the magazines have a story told as well.

Their story is shaped by omissions until the moment when their basic dignity is presented for the first time.

These are the moments where something cracked.

It is good to know what was happening right before and right after the first Black Americans lost their cloak of invisibility:

Dorothy Dandridge, the first Black woman to appear on the cover of Life, November 1, 1954

Look at this cover when mainstream white America began to face Jim Crow. There is a strength that comes from understanding the connection of this cover with what happens next and next.

Nine years after it, Dr. King announced his dream.

Eleven years after it, John Lewis was beaten, and his skull was cracked on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Also 11 years later, the Voting Rights Act was signed, and 54 years after that, Barack Obama was inaugurated president of the United States.

The magazines help keep things in perspective.

They make clear that great crises exist next to joy, wonder, art, culture and entertainment. They demonstrate the full depth of American life, even at our most challenging moments.

They refute the premise fully that it is even remotely possible that American life can ever be about one man and his rantings — no matter if he is president or not.

The United States is the most complex society in world history with over 10,000 elected governments and courts of law filled with federal judges appointed by presidents not named Trump.

Aesthetically, the magazines are masterpieces.

They are also warnings.

They forecast what is going to happen next, and portend the conflagrations to come.

What they teach is that there is a momentum of events that builds and what comes next is always rooted in what just happened.

We are climbing a staircase to a destination that is unknown but obvious.

Catastrophe is what lies ahead.

I’d like to explain something about this American moment through the prism of an old Life magazine from November 1938.

Here is the cover:

What do you see?

How do you interpret it?

Information is power, and I urge you to armor yourself with the power of knowledge so that you may see what is made invisible by sleight of media hand and an editor’s conscious neglect.

Can you see through the fog of omissions and denialism that are presented to you from dawn to dusk and deep into the dark by giant corporations that proclaim they are…

…CNN — “The Most Trusted Name in News?” CNN’s viewership hit a historic low in July 2025. Nielsen data reveals that CNN’s primetime lineup (8–11 p.m.) averaged a mere 497,000 total viewers, a catastrophic 42% drop from July 2024.

…ABC — “America’s Network?” Donald Trump secured a $15 million dollar settlement with the network.

…CBS, which settled a lawsuit with Donald Trump with a $16 million payoff, is now hiring an ombudsman to call out bias in the network’s news content.

…The Washington Post — from“Democracy Dies in Darkness” to “Riveting Storytelling for All of America.”

Politico has published a list of at least 100 journalists who have left the newspaper since November 2024.

You get the point.

My friends, you must read.

The truth is out there.

Find it.

The sum of all human knowledge can fit in the palm of your hand, yet the wisdom to manage it all seems to be rapidly declining.

It is being eaten away by a cancerous idiocy and malice spreading via a hemorrhagic fever of cynicism and anger stoked by Donald Trump. He is cunning enough to know fragmentation is good for him.

The tech oligarchs have sold the world a false bill of goods. They said that they would connect the world and make it bigger. They made it smaller.

Much smaller.

They lowered the horizons and conformed the free spirits and thinkers with strategies aimed at numbing wisdom and inflaming passions one click at a time.

The algorithms have become an invisible fence that strip an individual of their capacity for independence of thought and action.

No person should choose to be Zuckerberg’s and Elon’s pet monkey with a shock collar ready to sting them at an invisible fence line.

The media business created Trump, and the news business is his essential life blood.
Understanding media is essential.

Even in 1938 the great titans of the industry understood the world to be about themselves first and foremost.

The news has always been about the media that packages the “news” until the “news” overwhelms the packaging, and becomes a fire that consumes everything. No amount of bullshittery can hide what is happening or coming next.

During November of 1938 there was nothing in the world more important, according to Life magazine, than the celebration of the magazine’s second birthday.

The magazine’s growth was booming, supply could not meet demand, and everything was good in America, most especially at Life magazine.

Inside the magazine there was news and advertisements.

Both were packaged for the American public.

The news inside the Life magazine showed two sets of images.

The first photos showing the violence that was unleashed by the Nazi state after the assassination of a Nazi diplomat in Paris by a Jewish refugee appear in this edition.

Here are some of the photos:

The rampage stoked by Goebbels and his Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment burned hundreds of synagogues, and made clear that time that was running out for Germany’s Jews.

In the moment, it revolted Americans, but it was not yet clear what was coming.

They were the first pictures published of the pogrom unleashed across Germany on November 9-10, 1938.

The next story is a function of, unfortunately, immaculate timing.

They show Adolf Hitler and Herman Goering working the church crowd at the christening of Goering’s niece. They look happy and are presented benignly:

It reminds the American people to take it easy.

I hope this helps you understand a bit about how to watch the news.

Are the ICE men heroes? Patriots? The best of the best?

Was the government statistician who told the American people the truth about the softening economy really an enemy of the state?

Is Ghislaine Maxwell, the evil child sex trafficker and criminal, really a victim?

Does it make sense to take away meals from hungry kids and build a $200 million ballroom at the White House?

When up can be down, and down can be up, and the political leader decides what is true and what is a fact by whim and force what do his sycophants imagine happens next?

Soon the imagining will yield to a new reality.

What will America look like three years from now?

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