Eternal Sunshine of the Fascist Mind

I’ve been thinking a lot about past and future, erasure and excavation, through the obvious political lens, but also for personal and book research reasons.

In February, I was in Barcelona with my family, and we visited the ruins of the Roman city of Barcino which have been uncovered below sections of the Barri Gotic. I spent many years taking Latin, and this is the kind of thing I love, and that I love to show my children. Look kids, Big Ben! (Sorry it’s an 80s reflex.)

Funeral monuments to city dignitaries, 1st century.

But truly: here we were in 2025 staring at streets and doorways built and through which humans passed thousands of years ago. Buildings where people bathed, dyed fabrics, fermented anchovies, made and stored wine. They have found games—tiny dice!—played by children in the 1st through 5th centuries, and discovered intricate mosaics that were the floors of people’s businesses and homes; you can see the trenches built into the town: one carried fresh water in and one carried waste water out, because the Romans understood this was part of how to protect against disease.

The mosaic floor of a Roman residence.

Then, as you wander through the ruins under the Museu d’Historia De Barcelona, archaeologists have taken care to show the layers: how, as Christianity spread through the 5th and 6th centuries, new settlers began to build ecclesiastical buildings over the declining Roman city. In place of the delicious ferments and colorful tiles were erected spare stone rooms that included, as the signs pointed out, “a bench where the bishop could sit,” or “a space where a synod could gather.” Sounds fun!

What struck me most in those mid-February weeks was that the Christians paved over the plumbing trenches. The mindset of a people who would willingly let sanitation systems crumble, would fail to maintain their access to fresh water and sewage removal and baths, felt particularly resonant in the days after the United States senate voted to confirm Robert Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services. All the news out of HHS and the federal government in the past two months has been a sped-up filmstrip of enforced scientific and medical regress: on the brink of so many breakthroughs in disease treatment, the government is gutting the NIH, not permitting doctors and researchers to travel or gather for conferences or run their labs or complete their clinical trials; this week HHS appears to have flagged studies that included mRNA vaccine research, work that has been enormously promising when it comes to the future treatment of everything from the flu to pancreatic cancer.

It’s not just the medical backsliding that recalls the building over of Barcino. Our government has jeopardized an unprecedented period of airline safety by gutting the FAA, walked back science that better enabled us to predict storms by defunding NOAA, imperiled workplace safety measures by threatening OSHA, is throwing away years of innovations around preservation by abandoning the federal upkeep of a massive collection of artworks. Unsatisfied simply by the rollback of Affirmative Action, Roe, the Voting Rights Act and labor protections, the administration wants to strip away all the (already insufficient) environmental protections put in place to stem climate change, erase desegregation policies and end birthright citizenship. They want to destroy universities, deprive a broader populace of the history and reading, science math and reasoning skills that would help them make their way through the world. They want to scratch out traces of America’s recent and diverse past: this week the Pentagon attempted to delete thousands of images of and references to Navajo code breakers, the Tuskegee airmen, the first women Marines, and Jackie Robinson’s military service (pushback was so intense that they have restored some of these).

The current right wing endeavor is mass civic, social, scientific and intellectual decline, enforced on a federal—if they had their way, global—scale. We understand why they’re doing it, at least in part: they are in hot pursuit of the fantasy that they can simply wipe our national memory, scrub the record of social progress, inclusion, of diverse and protected participation in dignified human life and society, build right over it with monuments that will make their authority and centrality appear to never to have been complicated or interrupted by unwelcome incursions. The dream is that they can sponge away any record of a time in which they, the straight cis white warfighters they fashion themselves to be, were not in power, constructing instead a series of spare rooms where bloated, ketamine fueled bishops can all-caps post and synods of dull white men can gather and retweet each other, LOLing at their power over the rest of us.

That this project is embarrassing for them should go without saying. That it conveys not strength but the saddest and most degraded kind of fragility is obvious. That it could work—at least for a time, as the obliteration of progress and the purposeful purging of knowledge and innovation has worked before—is awful.

But it’s not just an obliteration of the past, it is also the denial of future.

This is something that’s long perplexed me about the right’s position on climate change: sure, I get the disregard for poor and working people, the process of self-enrichment that entails the starvation of everyone else; I understand gutting labor protections and civil and women’s rights as a longterm goal for very rich and very mean people who know that their own resources will protect them and their families, allow they to obtain whatever goods, services or care they deny the vulnerable masses. That all checks out. But I have never understood why they don’t care about warming seas, rising oceans, raging fires, giant storms: aren’t these the people who own beach homes? Haven’t they clocked that their houses could burn or flood, that they, their offspring, will be imperiled, are already imperiled, by the hurricanes and draughts whose increasing severity is hastened with every drilling, fracking, clear-cutting contract they jam through?

Now this question extends well beyond the issue of climate change: Don’t these businessmen and lawmakers, no matter how wealthy and well-insulated, fly their private planes in airspace that their political representatives are making less safe? Don’t they work in buildings and get driven on highways that they hope won’t collapse on them? Do they believe that they will never contract a cancer or virus that might have been cured by one of the studies they are halting? This may be the dumbest sentence I’ll ever write but, submitted meekly: don’t they want their grandchildren to live in a world with beautiful paintings and sculptures? Or at the very least ensure that they can still get their prestigious degrees?

This administration is trying not simply to efface and distort a past, but to blot out a future, to put an end to innovation, knowledge, art, safety, things from which they too would surely benefit.

The joke here, I guess, is that they are embodying the bougie, woke-adjacent call of the urban elite: to live in the moment. For these guys, there is no history they don’t like, and no future in which they might not have control. There is only now, and their near-orgiastic awareness—mindfulness, if you will—of their own brutal dominion.

And I guess all of this is playing in the back of my mind as I do my own research. The book I’m working on is about a group of women who were deported as teens from Germany in the early 1940s. I’ve never done a project like this before: one in which every letter, every photo, every scrap or image or sound I can find that tells me about their lives, or the cities and homes they inhabited, or what their detainment looked and felt like, is a treasure. Since these women’s families and hometowns were wiped out, I did not expect to find much. But one of the revelations of my efforts so far is how much is out there, how much remains to be unearthed. It makes me think about how attempts to obliterate people, culture, hope and history may succeed in the short run, but often ultimately fail.

Because whatever efforts are made to constrain or contain a future, the truth is that someday, someone will come along and excavate, will go digging, will come across the records and ruins, the mosaic pieces of the society they thought they’d wiped out and covered over.

— To that end: this summer I am going on a research trip to Poland with my family. Does anyone have recommendations? None of us have ever been. We will definitely be in Krakow and Gdansk; the rest, at the moment, is a blurry question mark and I am open to all ideas.

— This week I have been reading Michael Podhorzer, who’s also thinking about past and future, progress and regress, reconstructions and redemptions.

— Please don’t miss Tressie McMillan Cottom eating Bret Stephens for breakfast in this Times conversation between columnists about the attacks on higher education.

— Also my friend Lynn Steger Strong, whose substack is so good on writing and reading and practicing, this week writes about Sonny’s Blues. She has a new novel called The Float Test that will publish in April; it’s about family and climate and vultures and raw meat and storytelling and Florida and it is very beautiful. The publisher made her promotional beer koozies (because Florida?) and I am doing a book event with her in May which means I get one.

This is the beer koozie for The Float Test.

Finally, below, a Roman funerary epitaph for L Pedan Narcissus, and his son, Narcissus. Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact. But maybe everything that dies, some day comes back.

(F