Back to the Fuehrer?

A recurring theme in time travel movies and stories, is to go back in history and alter its course. Stephen King’s novel, “11/22/63”, dealt with an attempt to prevent the assignation of President Kennedy. The entire Terminator series is based on trying to alter the takeover of humans by AI. There was an episode of the Twilight Zone on 2002, called “Cradle of Darkness”, where a government agent goes back to kill the baby Adolf Hitler. If asked, many would answer the question of, “If you could go back in time what would you change?”, with “I would kill Hitler”.

The January 15th edition of the New Yorker has a cartoon caricature of he who shall not be named, dressed as a dictator, marching Nazi style, including the salute, across the United States into 2024. While comical, it is also frightening.

By his own admission, the orange buffoon would like nothing more than to be a dictator reigning over America. From quoting Hitler in his speeches, fondly cuddling up to existing dictators, to stating he would only be a dictator for a day, he could not make it more obvious. Sadly, there are many who would fall in line behind him and let our democracy fall.

At first, this is terrifying. The thought of armed nutcases stepping in line to follow a con-artist in an effort to overthrow our government is bone chilling. Two things give me a bit of hope that might derail this scenario. One, the con-artist is a coward and would run the first time he is confronted, and second, after reading Rachel Maddow’s book, “Prequel”, this has been tried before and was squashed. The parallels to what happened in the 30’s and what is happening today are astonishing to say the least.

2024 will be a challenging year and probably one of the major tests as to just what kind of a nation we will become. My hope is that sanity will prevail.

If not then thirty or so years from now movies and stories may be written about time travelers trying to come back and remove he who shall not be named.