She uses a photo of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Tesla’s Elon Musk at Donald Trump's second presidential inauguration for her illustration. She uses them to represent the tall ships.
She begins:
According to the theory, natives literally couldn’t “see” the ships, because they had no experiential familiarity with them. Quoting from What the Bleep do we know?, a paradigm-shifting take on human perception, native people ignored the huge ships because “their highly filtered perceptions couldn't register what was happening, and they literally failed to see them.” When Captain Cook/Columbus/Magellan sent their men ashore in smaller longboats loaded with guns, the natives registered what they saw and began their futile resistance.
She concludes:
I have wondered all my adult life how the Germans let Hitler happen. And now, like the man who couldn’t live without knowing how his wife died until he met her same fate in The Vanishing, I know. People didn’t react because most couldn’t see what was happening. Those who could see Hitler--Germany’s tall ships--didn’t believe what they saw. And those who both saw and believed their own eyes thought there would be a sane stopping point. There wasn’t then, and there won’t be now.
I used to live a couple of towns over from Plymouth, Mass. and often we went to the harbor where the replica of the Mayflower is moored. We visited Plimoth Patuxet (previously called Plimoth Plantation). I decided to use a painting of the Mayflower, the colonists, and members of the Wampanoag tribe from a Britannica article as my illustration.
Read her Substack.
Then read my slightly edited comment below:
Holy Fucken Shit, Sabrina!!!!!!
You nailed it in one analogy, one I haven't heard before. Then you segued into a comparison we all have used.
The Native Americans couldn't see the tall ships. Even if they were bristling with 50 cal. machine guns, had cruise missile launchers, and the colonists had Marines with M-16 assault rifles, they would have been invisible.
I also grew up wondering about how everyday Germans could let Hitler happen. This may have because of being Jewish or just because my father served on a hospital ship in the war.
The playbook for what is happening here, now, and may very well happen in a short period of time isn't Mein Kampf or Project 2025. It is in the history books but we don't need to look at them. It is common sense.
Trump, his minions, and his enablers have already begun their blitzkrieg to turn us into some yet precisely undetermined kind of combination of a cruel dictatorship, a police state, and an oligarchy.
Even Trump doesn't know exactly what it will be except that whatever it turns out to be he intends to be the absolute ruler for as long as he lives.
Those of us who understand his psychopathology aren't surprised by anything he does. Speaking of tall ships (and those container ships are tall), the latest order to have the military submit a plan for invading Panama, fits with his need to be a saber rattling ruler who strikes fear into everyone he aims his wrath at. Putin invaded Ukraine, Trump wants to invade Greenland and Panama. He's ready to declare war on NATO.
Democracy loving Americans protesting won't stop him. He wants to find an excuse to declare martial law to stop them. Court rulings won't stop him. He wants to defy the court proving they are impotent.
Outraged Democrats in Congress and the outrage of media critics feed his cruel narcissistic hunger.
Another Kent State Massacre won't stop him. He's a sadist. Bloodshed in the streets won't stop him.
All this adds up to only one hope - aside from his death - to stop this.
It is for the military to initiate a coup. Last week I thought it could be a what is referred to as "a soft coup." (From Wikipedia) "This is also known as a silent coup, an illegal overthrow of a government. Unlike a classical coup d'état, it is achieved without the use of force or violence."
Now I am leaning towards a classical coup.
This would entail, among other actions, tanks around the White House and the 82nd Airborne landing troops on the lawn. A general would be the acting president. The new administration would hold free and fair elections when the county was stabilized.
Additional thought:
Our tall ship moment is a combination of two groups of powerful people. One are the oligarchs who we knew had incredible control over our politics, but we did not know how malevolent they were. The other group are Trump, Musk, & Co. We knew they were malevolent, but weren’t sure they were all that malevolent. From what I can tell the oligarchs, with the possible exception of Musk, don’t call many of the shots.
The shots may literally become real bullet shots since Trump controls the people with guns. It is still metaphorical, but when Trump and Musk say “shoot here” the oligarchs put on their noise suppressors and pretend nobody is getting hurt.
